Page 30 of Captured By the Pakhan

"Why did you stay?" he says behind me.

"You've asked me that."

"I asked you in a cabin, when you had reasons not to answer. I am asking you now."

I turn around.

"Because harming a child voids the operation. It was my op, my order, my team, and one of them fired that bullet. That weight is mine to carry." I shrug.

He just watches me.

"And because,” I continue. “He was so deep in that panic attack that he wasn't breathing. Those two things weren't in competition. I'd like to tell you the first one was the reason but it was the second one."

"You could be lying," he says. "About all of it. The file, the photographs, why you stayed."

"Sure."

"Some of it is checkable and some of it is not." He pushes off the desk. "Show me one thing that is not."

And he takes a knife out of his sleeve and puts it against my throat.

It's a good knife, sharp, lethal and he's fast, my back is to the window instantly and there's about three inches of daylight between his body and mine. The flat of the blade is cold under my jaw.

"You have six weeks in the file at Quantico," he says softly. "Show me."

Oh, you absolute idiot, I think, and it's not entirely clear which of us I mean.

Because he's got the knife in the wrong hand for a man who wants to keep it.

I go under and outside, strip the wrist, and it's textbook and it's over in about a second and a half — I've got his own knife in my hand and his arm turned up behind him and I put him into the desk hard enough to move it four inches on the rug.

"That," I say into his ear, "was insulting."

He laughs.

He laughs — low, genuinely delighted — and then he throws me.

Not cleanly. He gets a foot behind mine and drops his weight and we go down together off the desk and hit the rug, and it turns into something ugly and real: elbows, a knee, my forearm across his throat and his hand around my wrist, both of us fighting for the knife which has gone somewhere under a chair. He is enormously strong and about eighty pounds heavier than me and he does not fight like a boxer, he fights like a man who has been in rooms.

I win despite it.

I win because he telegraphs left when he's tired and because I've been waiting for it for forty seconds, and I roll him and get a knee in and come up sitting across his chest with both his wrists pinned under my hands and my hair hanging in his face. His breath is warm against my cheek, uneven from the effort.

And I stop.

Because he's stopped. He's not fighting. He's lying on his own office floor with a federal agent on his chest and he is looking up at me with an expression I have never had aimed at me in my life. Every part of my body has just now noticed. His wrists are hot beneath my palms, his chest hard pressed under the weight of my own body.

"Get up," I protest.

"You have my hands."

"That's not the⁠—"

"Raven."

That get’s my attention. Thats the first time he's used my name, and it goes through me like an electrical current.

"Let go of my hands," he says quietly, "or don't. But decide, because I am not going to move under you and then be told afterward that I misread the situation."