Page 39

He caught both my wrists in one hand, and I immediately drove my knee upward. He turned his hip, taking the blow against his thigh, then slammed my wrists above my head.

“You girls never learn.”

His bleeding hand closed around my throat. I twisted, drove my heel down the front of his shin, and managed to break free long enough to throw myself towards the ground and reach for the knife. My fingers only just touched the handle when his boot came down on my wrist, and pain shot up my arm.

I gasped, and he grabbed the back of my coat, dragging me away from the blade toward a van waiting on the street. The fabric tightened across my throat. My boots scraped uselessly over the wet pavement while I kicked backward, catching his knee once and air the second time. A door opened somewhere behind us and I turned to look.

Sergei stood at the far end of the alley beneath the weak yellow security light.

“Release her,” he snarled.

The man tightened his hold on my coat and reached beneath his jacket for his weapon. Sergei crossed the distance before the man could get his gun free. He caught the man’s wrist, turned it sharply, and drove his elbow through the joint with a sickening crunch. The gun fell. Sergei caught it before it struck the ground, reversed it in his hand, and hit the man beneath the jaw with it. The Petrosyan soldier collapsed beside the van.

The engine roared. I looked up just as the driver threw the van into gear and tore away from the curb, tires spitting water across the pavement as he disappeared around the corner.

Sergei didn’t follow. He just looked down at the man on the ground long enough to confirm he was still breathing, then touched the earpiece beneath his collar.

“Send two men,” he said. “Take this one alive and find out what he knows. Put another team on the van.”

Then he turned toward me.

I’d seen him fight at Nocturne. I’d watched him drop a man in the stairwell with the same careful efficiency other people used to shut a cabinet door. This felt different. There was something frightening beneath the control now, something personal enough that his stillness looked less like calm and more like the final second before a bomb goes off.

“I can explain,” I tried, almost yelling.

Sergei bent, picked up my knife, folded it, and slipped it into his pocket. Then he lifted me into his arms.

“Put me down.”

He said nothing.

“I’m serious,” I added.

His silence followed us all the way back to the townhouse, which felt worse than being scolded or yelled at.

He carried me through the front door while two guards dragged the unconscious Petrosyan man toward a waiting vehicle. Sergei set me down only after the locks engaged behind us. He checked my pupils, my wrists, my throat, and the back of my head with hands that remained steady despite the violence I could feel vibrating through every inch of him. When I winced as his fingers passed over the bruise forming near my shoulder, his jaw flexed.

“Sergei—”

“Sit. Down.”

I almost argued. Then I saw his face and sat on the kitchen stool. For several seconds, neither of us spoke. Then he placed both hands flat against the counter and leaned toward me.

“You ran from me again, little pet.”

“You’re just furious because I got away.”

“I’m furious because you walked into an alley where a man was waiting to put you inside a van.”

“I was fighting him off.”

“You simply survived until I arrived.”

My face heated. “I don’t need you to make me feel helpless.”

“I’m not calling you helpless.” His voice remained quiet, but each word landed with terrible firmness. “You bought yourself time. You did well.”

The praise only made me angrier.