Arms like steel wrap around me from behind, jerking me back so hard my feet leave the ground. A cry rips out of me but is muffled instantly by a hand slamming over my mouth. I thrash in the stranger’s grip, throwing my elbow back as hard as I can.
It lands with a sickening thud against something solid, but the man doesn’t so much as grunt. He only tightens his grip until I’m practically crushed.
“Let go!” I try to scream, but it’s lost beneath his palm.
The hand around my waist locks me to him as he drags me down a narrow alleyway between two buildings. The walls close in like jaws, my boots skid against the pavement, desperate to find traction. I claw at him, nails raking across any patch of exposed skin I can reach—a wrist, his fingers.
Nothing deters him.
My mind is white-hot with panic.
The next thing I know, I’m being shoved through the back door of a small building close by, a shop, maybe, straight into a dim storage room cluttered with shelves and crates filled with junk.
The second his grip loosens to shut the door behind us, I twist hard, throwing myself away from him and dropping to the floor. I scramble for the nearest shelf like it’s a lifeline, fingers reaching for anything I can use as a weapon as I pull myself up onto my feet again.
But he’s faster. His hand closes around my upper arm like a vise, yanking me back so hard I crash to my knees. The pain explodes up through my shoulder, sharp and sickeningly familiar.
A sound rips out of me, a half sob, half gasp, as a cold memory resurfaces from my childhood—the diving board accident in sixth grade, the way my arm snapped when I landed wrong on the solid tile below it from slipping. This is just like that, only worse because this time, the threat isn’t my clumsiness. It’s a strange man I don’t know or recognize.
I claw at his hand again, trying to dig my nails in deep enough to make him flinch, but he doesn’t. Not even a twitch in his face to give away that I’m inflicting any kind of pain.
A deep sense of fear shoots through me.
Instead, he looks down at me with the kind of expression you’d give to a pile of trash dumped at your front door. Stone-cold. Disdainful. His eyes are so dark, they look black.
“You,” he says, his voice low and accented, each word like a bullet shot through me, “are more trouble than you are worth.”
My throat works around the lump of fear and humiliation lodged there, and I whisper, “Please, let me go.”
It’s pathetic, I know. But begging is the only card I have left.
The worst part is, he doesn’t evenacknowledgethe plea, just keeps his grip locked like a man holding onto a wild animal as he reaches into his coat.
My stomach plummets then because I see it—a gun, strapped to his hip.
I freeze. Every muscle in my body locks up as cold dread pours over me. There’s no fight left in my limbs, just a flood of instinct screaming,don’t move, don’t breathe, don’t make it worsewhen his fingers brush over the side of it.
He pulls out a phone instead of unstrapping the weapon, but somehow, that feels worse. I watch, wide-eyed, as he taps the screen and lifts the phone to his ear and says a handful of low, clipped words that I don’t understand.
But I don’t need to. I hear the tone and recognize it for what it is.
He’s reporting in.
I’m being returned back to my owner.
The call ends in seconds. The man slides the phone back into his coat without ceremony, as if this whole thing is just business as usual.
It probably is.
I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to hold it together despite the tears burning at the corners of them. I made it less than two blocks and Maksim Antonov already has his claws back in me again.
Figures.
I don’t know how long we stay like that, but it feels like an eternity. When the door to the back of the shop finally openswith a horrendously loud creaking, my entire body flinches. When I turn, Maksim is there. He is a monolith in the doorway, broad-shouldered and brimming with a quiet fury so palpable, it steals the breath right from my lungs.
The room around me shrinks.
“Thank you, Lev,” he says without looking at the man still holding me by the arm. His voice is deceptively calm. “You may leave us.”
