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“Interesting,” the man behind Nojus says, the man even shorter than he is. “So you think that, because the men you sent to kill her were killed by the person who took her, that’s her fault, not yours?”
Nojus freezes.
My eyes slide sideways to the man who terrifies the Lithuanian arms dealer. He’s not big. He doesn’t look very scary. It’s almost impossible to look scary when you’re wearing a simple button-down shirt and jeans, but the short man also has no tattoos, no special markings, and he’s not very muscular. “You think it’s not your fault that your enforcers were all killed—you’re blaming her for their deaths?”
As Nojus swallows, his Adam’s apple bobs.
“I’ve been here for days, and all I’ve heard are excuses. None of them help me clean up the mess you’ve made.” The short man looks sideways at the tall man next to him. “Is this the woman who owed him money for more than a year?”
The tall man nods tightly. “He kept offering to let her repay him in the bedroom.”
Apparently they’ve talked about me.
Nojus isn’t moving—when a tiger holds very, very still, that means there’s something even scarier in the room. I’m just not sure why this man’s it. Is he from the tax office or something?
“I’ve heard enough.” The short man pulls out a gun and shoots Nojus in the back of the head.
Blood spatters all over me as his entire face explodes. I can’t breathe, and I drop to my knees.
I’ve seen men killed before.
Heck, I saw twelve men burn to death at once, but they weren’t eighteen inches from me, holding money in a bag that was still warm from my hand. The unassuming man who just shot him sticks his gun into a holster on his back and rucks his shirt up over it. He steps over Nojus and walks past me, too. “Clean that up.”
Does he mean me? My brain rejects that order.
But my hands begin to twitch. If I don’t start cleaning, will he shoot me next? He looked so casual, so unaffected by it.
Before I can decide what to do, the tall man sets to work, wrapping a blanket from the sofa around Nojus’s head and dragging him out the front door in broad daylight.
The short man collapses onto one side of the small sofa between the kitchen and the family room. “Your name.” He isn’t asking. He isn’t even turned to face me. He’s just telling me that he wants my name, and expecting with absolute faith that I’ll give it.
“A-a-adriana,” I stammer.
“Adriana what?”
“Strelkova.”
“You killed a dozen of our best men?”
Our? Who is this? “I didn’t, sir. The man who captured me did, because they kept telling him to release me and threatening to attack him.”
He shakes his head. “What a waste of resources.” He turns to face me. “You know, most people think that there are predators and there are prey, but it’s much more complicated than that. In fact, if you study patterns in nature, predators are often eaten by other, larger predators. There are even instances of predator-prey reversal where the larvae of beetles have been known to eat the very amphibians who pursed them. As the species evolved, they would even draw those amphibians to them specifically so they could consume them. A one-time defense mechanism changed a creature’s essential makeup.”
What’s he talking about?
He shifts to the edge of the sofa and points at the chair opposite it. “Let’s chat. I’d like to know a little more about you and your predilections.”
I never heard Nojus use a single word as large as that one. Not ever.
Seeing as I don’t have a choice, I sit, but I also say, “That bag has all the money I owe Nojus.”
“It may contain what you owed him two weeks ago,” he says. “But you didn’t pay him two weeks ago.”
Nojus was a known quantity. He would’ve taken the money—I’m sure of it. I would’ve been square, finally. He knew the sum he demanded was already far, far above what I had borrowed. But as he just said, that was two weeks ago, and that was Nojus.
Who’s now dead.
“My brother was always the one people watched,” the man says. “He fought better than me. He intimidated and impressed other men much more effectively than I ever did. I was the nerdy, nose-in-a-book little brother. But my brother wasn’t ever very smart, God rest his soul.”
