The two on the main floor are ready to accost me.
The one on the left grabs my wrist before I can even raise the knife to slash at him. His fingers squeeze down on the delicate bone hard enough it’s instant agony. It’s beyond my free will to keep holding onto the knife.
It involuntarily drops from my fingers and clatters onto the floor. A cry of pain tears out of my throat as my wrist throbs and he yanks me toward him.
So I do the only thing I can think of and spit directly in his face.
His reaction is just as instantaneous and instinctual.
He slaps the fuck out of me—his massive hand comes crashing down back side first.
My head snaps to the side, and I’m sent staggering into a table, totally out of control of my own body.
He’s backhanded me so hard my glasses fly off somewhere into the darkness, though it doesn’t even matterin this moment.
Thousands of tiny dots float before my eyes.
Everything becomes a dark blur except for the tiny bright dots.
I’m so dizzy, blinded and in pain, trying to recover, I smash into a chair next to us and collapse to the floor.
The men laugh at me. Their thick grunts echo in my ears as I swim in darkness.
It’s not the first time. It sadly probably won’t be the last either.
I’m so fucking helpless it brings tears to my eyes—tears of frustration, tears ofrage.
My blood boils thinking about what they’ve put me and Eva through.
How they never stop; how their awful treatment just keeps going and going.
“Did you really think you could escape Fedorov?” one of them sneers, his accent thick and mocking. “He always comes to collect, little girl. Always.”
I try to push myself up, but my arms are shaking and my vision is swimming. Warm liquid trickles down my cheek. I can’t tell whether it’s blood or tears.
The man whose arm I slashed looms over me, his face a blur of indistinct features. “What do you have to say for yourself, you little bitch?”
I open my mouth to tell him exactly what he can do with himself—to tell him tofuck offlike I’ve done before—even if it means I’ll be severely punished for it.
I’m cut off before I can get the words out.
“I say you have some fucking balls,” comes a gritty fourth voice. “Why don’t you fight somebody your own size?”
All three men freeze, and even without my glasses I recognize the massive silhouette filling the doorway.
The brutish boxer and Irish mob enforcer I spent the night waiting on.
Killian Rourke has turned up in the nick of time; the last person I’d expect to show up to save me.
The three Russian men exchange looks as if befuddled by his sudden appearance. They were obviously expecting to take me without much of a struggle.
“I know you,” one of them grunts. “You’re the Callahan’s boneman.”
“Glad my reputation precedes me.” Killian steps further into the pub, his massive frame moving with a casual confidence that borders on arrogance. “Now that we’ve got introductions out of the way, how about you tell me what the fuck you’re doing inmypub?”
“This is Irish turf, yes,” the man concedes. “But she... she isours. We take her and go. No trouble for you.”
“That’s where we’ve got a problem.” Killian rolls his shoulders like he’s preparing for a sparring match at his boxing gym. “She stays. You go. Either walk out of here with your tails between your legs like the cowards you are, or face me and get thrown out on your asses once I beat your faces in. Your choice.”
