I check the magazine anyway.
Snap it back in.
“If he’s standing at my gate,” I say, “he better have brought me something worth staying alive for.”
I start for the door.
Cold air knifes across my face the second I step outside.
The yard lights throw hard white over the gravel drive and the black iron of the gate beyond. Two of my men flank Kaya as they walk him up the path, hands on his arms, another three spread out behind with guns visible and ready. He’s been searched already. I can tell by the way his jacket hangs open and wrong on him, shirt untucked, hair half untied by someone else’s rough hands.
He looks like shit.
Not scared. Not smug either.
Just tired. Hollow-eyed. Dirt on one sleeve. Mouth set like he knows exactly whose house he chose to walk into and did it anyway.
He’s bigger than me.
Taller by a few inches, broader through the shoulders, built like the kind of man who’s used to throwing his weight around and watching other people move first.
Doesn’t matter.
The second he hits the pool of light in front of my door, I move.
Vaska says my name once behind me, low, cautioning.
I ignore him.
Kaya only gets enough time to lift his head before I drive my fist straight into his face while my men still have him.
Cheap shot.
Don’t care.
His head snaps sideways. Blood spits from his mouth into the gravel and the guards let go at the force of it.
Good.
Now it’s fair.
Kaya straightens slowly, rolling his jaw once. He looks at the blood on the back of his hand when he wipes his mouth, then looks at me.
And laughs. Just one short, wrecked sound like I’ve confirmed exactly what he expected. That makes something hot flare in my chest.
I hit him again.
This time he sees it coming. Takes some of it on the shoulder, some on the jaw, and answers with a shove that knocks me back half a step in the gravel.
There he is. I go for him again.
We crash into each other hard and mean, boots grinding into stone, fists swinging too close for clean form. I catch him once in the mouth, once in the ribs. He drives an elbow into my side that would’ve folded a smaller man. All it does is make me meaner.
I slam him into the hood of the nearest car hard enough to dent the metal. He bounces off it, breathing harder now, blood at his mouth, but still not fully fighting me back.
That pisses me off more than the laugh.
“Fight back,” I snarl.
