If I’m not going to kill him, then I need to prepare for my own death. It’s the way things work in here, and I doubt Aleksandr wants to die.
Or maybe he does, maybe he’d prefer to die at my hands.
Maybe I’d prefer to die at his…
He stares at me for a moment, and then shakes his head.
“This is foolish,” he states. His shoulders rise and fall with his heavy breathes. I can see the faint marks of my hands around his throat starting to form already, and my stomach tenses with desire and need.
“They’ll be angry,” I tell him as I step even closer.
“Let them,” he insists.
I turn to the crowd, and my eyes find Tiger’s in the back of the room. He’s looking at us with an incredibly annoyed expression pulling at his brows and a scowl on his mouth.
“We’re done here!” I yell to the crowd, and to him.
Tiger parts the crowd with just his presence and comes up the side of the chain link. “You fight until one of you is dead,” he snarls at us. “What part of that don’t you fuckers understand?”
I turn to face him more directly, squaring my shoulders and ignoring the blood drying on my lips and chin.
“Either you let us go, or we stay in here all-night costing you precious money,” I tell him.
He looks at the both of us with an uncertain look, like he isn’t sure he believes us or not. Then walks around the arena and opens the door.
The guards step out of the way, and the crowd starts to boo.
“Get the fuck out of here, I don’t want to see either of you back here again, you got it?!” Tiger yells at us as we make our way out of the arena, shoving at my back and causing me to trip forwards a couple feet.
“Get your hands off him,” Aleksandr tells Tiger, his accent switching back to American.
“I’ll do whatever I want, this is my club,” Tiger sneers at him and looks him directly in the face.
Aleksandr doesn’t back down. “You had better hope I don’t see you on the street,” he says, his Russian accent peaking through.
Tiger huffs and brushes him off.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I tell Aleksandr as I grab him by the bicep.
He doesn’t pull away from me like I expect. Instead, he lets me lead him through the crowd that spits and curses at us the entire way, to the stairs and up.
I’m still trying to catch my breath when we get outside, the guard at the door not questioning us at all, and Aleksandr finally pulls away from my hold.
“What the fuck were you thinking in there?” he asks me once we’re outside in the alleyway all alone.
“You’re the one who decided to get in on my fight,” I remind him. “I was never supposed to fight you. What was that about?”
“You could’ve gotten yourself killed,” he continues. “If I hadn’t…”
I eye him from head to toe. “You did it to protect me? No fucking way…” I laugh softly. My lip and face are aching, but I don’t care.
Aleksandr takes a deep breath and steps closer to me. “So, what if I did?” he asks. “We’re supposed to be working together. I can’t just…let you die.”
“I think I saw more than that in there,” I tell him, my own body still hot and goosebumps on the backs of my arms and neck.
Aleksandr looks away from me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You’re really gonna tell me your cock isn’t hard from beating the shit of me in there?” I ask him, removing the distance between us. “You didn’t get some kind of twisted thrill from it too? Huh? What do you need to tell yourself that to get by?”
