And starts moving.
Run.
My brain sends the message.
My legs receive it and do absolutely nothing with it.
The man across the street has straightened up.
The second far-end man is moving now too, cutting the angle, and I understand with horrible clarity that they have done this before, that this is a practiced geometry, that the positions they are in right now were chosen specifically to make running pointless.
“Lena! Run!”
Nadia’s voice through the phone cracks the paralysis open like a hammer through glass.
I run.
I make it half a block.
The one who’d been closest hits me from the side, not a tackle but a grab, fingers locking around my arm with a force that wrenches my shoulder, and I scream, twisting the way you twistwhen something has you and you have nothing to lose, dropping my weight suddenly so his grip slides.
I claw at his hand with my nails and get purchase on two of his fingers andbend, and he swears in Russian and his grip breaks for half a second.
Half a second is enough to get in one step but they close the gap in three.
The second man gets my other arm, the third is in front of me blocking the street, and I don’t stop.
I headbutt the one in front with everything I have, my forehead against his nose, and the crack and the howl he lets out sends something vicious and electric through my chest.
For approximately four seconds I am winning this in the way that someone who has never fought in their life can briefly win something by being completely unhinged about it.
Then the first man recovers and gets both arms around me from behind and lifts me entirely off the ground.
I go absolutely feral. I’m kicking and writhing and screaming, I bite down on the arm across my collarbone hard enough to taste fabric then skin, and he curses and squeezes tighter and I can’t breathe and the world is doing something strange at the edges?—
“Enough.”
One word.
The men around me go still so fast they might have been switched off.
I am still struggling, still trying to get free, but the arms holding me have locked into something immovable and the street has gone quiet.
I look up, gasping, chest heaving, the man’s blood on my lip.
There is a man standing in the mouth of the narrow street.
My brain registers things in the wrong order.Tall. The kind of build that doesn’t come from a gym, that comes from actual use.
Oh, I’m fucked! Is this where I’m dying?
Dark coat, dark hair, a face that belongs on something carved rather than born, all sharp angles and a jaw like a closed door and eyes that are—I don’t finish the thought because finishing the thought is insane right now, I ambeing kidnapped, but my brain is briefly short-circuiting on the fact that death apparently sends its very best-looking men.
He walks toward me with the pace of someone who has never once needed to hurry.
He reaches out.
Pushes the sleeve of his coat up at the wrist.
