Page 3 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

He isn’t bluffing. I know that at once. I reach into my coat pocket slowly, as if for my phone. His gaze drops. That’s enough. I rip my pepper spray free, fire it straight at his face, and run.

He curses and jerks back, one arm flying up. The other man lunges for me. I duck badly, slam into his shoulder, nearly go down, then drive my elbow back with everything I’ve got. It connects with something soft enough to make him grunt. I tear free and sprint for the gate, my boots slipping on painted concrete, my lungs already burning, and I get within three steps of it before someone catches a fistful of my hair and hauls me backward so hard my neck screams.

I go down hard.

My phone skids away. My bag spills open. Papers, pens, lip balm, keys.

A knee pins my thigh. A hand clamps over my mouth.

I bite.

The man swears viciously in Russian and slams my wrist into the ground until the spray drops from my fingers. The first man is blinking through a red, streaming face, furious now, and when he crouches beside me his control is gone. “I told you,” he says, breathing hard, “not to make this harder.”

I twist under the weight on top of me and manage to get my mouth free for one second. “Go to hell.”

“Later,” he says.

Then something sharp presses into the side of my neck. I instinctively know it’s a needle, and cold terror hits so fast my limbs go weak. “No,” I choke, bucking hard enough to make the man on top of me shift. “No, no, don’t you dare, don’t you dare.”

“Hold her.”

I thrash, kick, claw, catch fabric, skin, something. It doesn’t matter. The drug burns going in. My vision jerks, blurs, rights itself, then slips again at the edges. The strip lights above me smear into pale bars. The men around me keep talking.

I try to hold on to anger because it’s cleaner than panic. I think of my mother’s face, my apartment, of the hot pizza and garlic and Yulia stealing olives and how normal my life felt two hours ago. Then I think of my father, vanished into whatever filth he built, and I understand with sick clarity that this didn’t begin tonight but years ago.

The men drag me upright between them and half carry me toward the garage exit. Cold night air hits my face. Gravel crunches under heavy tires. The van doors open.

I fight again, weaker now, stupid with it, but I fight. One of them leans in close enough that I can smell smoke on his collar. “Save it,” he mutters. “You’re expected.”

Expected where, I want to ask, but my mouth won’t work right anymore.

They shove me into the van and the doors slam shut. Cold night air keeps hitting my face in bursts through the crack of the van door, then it’s gravel under tires, darkness beyond the glass, the sweep of high beams over iron gates, and the sick lurch in my stomach every time we turn deeper into the trees.

By the time the vehicle slows for good, my head feels too heavy for my neck, but I force my eyes open anyway. If I’m going into hell, I want to see it first.

An estate rises out of the dark in hard lines and old stone, and it immediately reminds me of the Gothic novels I love to read. Floodlights cut across the front drive. Men with rifles stand at fixed points like they were placed there with a ruler.

The van door opens, and cold cuts across my skin so cleanly it makes me shiver.

One of the men grabs my arm. “Careful.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I mumble, though it comes out blurred.

He doesn’t answer. They haul me down from the van, and my boots skid on gravel before I find enough balance to stay upright. My hair is half out of its clip and falling in my face, and I don’t know where my bag and phone are.

My coat hangs open. I hate that they’ve brought me here like this, drugged and handled and made weak before I even know whose ground I’m standing on.

The front door opens with a resounding creak and for a second, everything in the drive seems to shift around that.

A man steps out onto the stone landing and stops there, one hand at his side, the other sliding into the pocket of a dark overcoat he wears open over black clothes that fit him too well to be accidental. He’s tall enough that every man near him looks slightly diminished, broad through the shoulders, narrow at the waist, built like somebody who knows exactly what his body can do and has spent years proving it. There’s no rush in him. No wasted motion, no need to announce who he is.

The sight of him strikes me in a way I immediately resent.

He has a strong jaw, dark stubble, a straight nose, cheekbones that make the shadows on his face look sharper. When his eyes track to mine, my heart riots.

He’s tall and broad, suit jacket straining faintly over shoulders packed with muscle. Every subtle shift in his stance pulls fabric over a chest built to absorb recoil, muscle moving under expensive cloth with controlled force.

A vein pulses at his throat, and the dark peak of his clavicle rises when he breathes. His hands are large, veins raised across the backs, and when he rolls his wrists, his tendons ripple and flex.