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I held up my hand when she gestured with her chin to her own bruised wrists. I shook my head. I straightened the length of rope and held it in both hands, pointing to Yuri with a hard jab to try to let her know what my intentions were. She dropped her head, chuckling silently in amusement.
“Your funeral,” she mouthed, and I smirked.
I climbed up to my feet, padding softly through the room. I was wearing a pair of sneakers. They were really worn, but they at least protected my feet enough from the dirty metal floor. I snuck around, keeping a wide berth out of Yuri’s sight in case he happened to snore loud enough to wake himself up, but he didn’t. I made it all the way around him. I straightened the rope in my hands, holding it out taut. As slowly as possible, I lifted it up and over his head until it was scant inches from his throat.
I met the green-eyed girl’s gaze for just a moment. From her expression, she hadn’t thought I’d have the balls to do it.
She was wrong.
So very wrong.
All at once, I tightened my arms and threw myself backwards, using my entire body weight to strangle the much larger man. He sputtered for a second, not waking up particularly quickly and I took advantage of that. With all my strength, I pulled the rope as tight as I could.
He tried to get up a few times, but his heels slipped on the floor. Eventually though, he got enough traction to stand while his fingers tried to pry at the rope. My feet left the floor, and I used the rope as leverage to push my knees against his back.
I didn’t let go.
The door to the room slammed open. I started, not expecting the Russians to return or even really care about us up here. They hadn’t over the past few days at least.
It wasn’t the Russians though. It was someone else.
The streetlamp flashed once, illuminating the man enough to take my breath away. He was tall and dressed to the nines in a matte black tailored suit that screamed money. He was muscular, but not in the way the Russian enforcers were, but strong, nonetheless. With a heavy sigh, he cast his deep brown eyes over the room before they landed on me. His hair was a bit mussed, and his suit was covered in ash in places, like he’d just been in a fight. The light flickered again, and I could see the shadow of a day or two of beard growth on his chin. I wasn’t certain if his dark brown hair was peppered with gray or if there was soot in it too.
His gaze settled on me, and he lifted a single brow in surprise. I didn’t know who he was, nor did I much care because I had another problem to handle now. I’d deal with the new stranger after that.
In the scuffle, Yuri had managed to somehow get a single finger underneath the rope, and he jerked his hand forward. The man at the door strode forward purposefully and Yuri practically growled beneath me. Apparently, he didn’t know this man either and sputtered off something in Russian that sounded angry and threatening.
The rope around his throat made it hard to speak.
I smirked. Hopefully, it made it hard to breathe too.
The strange man smiled, and his eyes went dark. He cocked his head, his answering chuckle ominous in the silence. I pulled the rope tighter, and Yuri staggered from side to side. He started to wheeze. He was weakening, but not nearly fast enough. He pitched his entire torso forward, but I was ready for him. Hurriedly, I wrapped my legs around his waist, holding on as he struggled.
The man in the suit sighed heavily, pulling his arm back and clocking Yuri in the side of the head hard enough to rattle even me on his back. For a fraction of a second, Yuri swayed until he leaned precipitously toward the floor.
I knew enough to jump off before I got hurt.
Yuri slammed down to the floor, knocking his head again on the hard surface. It was jarring to see the whites of his eyes, but it was clear he was down for the count. I watched for a few moments longer, not really trusting that he’d been hit hard enough to knock a brute like him out. When enough time had passed where he didn’t move, I glanced up to the stranger, a little bit impressed.
“Don’t worry about him. I’ll deal with him later,” the man said. The quiet confident rumble of his voice rattled me. He didn’t have an accent, which meant that he wasn’t associated with the Russians or my father’s men.
Either way, he looked to be a man of means and in the world I came from, you couldn’t trust a man with money. I wasn’t going to trust him either.
He made no move to come after me. In fact, he was looking at me with the same sense of wariness that someone might give a wounded animal. For the moment, it seemed like he wasn’t a threat. I decided to ignore him until he became one.
I glanced around the room. Above me were several large sturdy pipes and I threw the rope up and over one. The man said nothing as he watched me. I looped it over a second pipe, in essence making a pulley system with just rope alone. I pulled it down enough to wrap it around Yuri’s throat.
The man in the suit didn’t move. He just watched me with a strangely disturbed expression on his face. The rest of the women watched in silence. Some of them still bore the marks on their faces from the consequences of speaking up.
I yanked the other end of the rope. The pulley system made it easy to lift a man of Yuri’s size up and off the floor, but it still used all my strength.
Moments after his feet left the floor, Yuri woke up. His legs kicked and he made a strange gurgling noise, but I looked away and instead watched the suited man while Yuri hung to death beside me.
The man’s gaze was dark. He didn’t intervene or try to stop me as I killed the Russian man. His cautious wariness only seemed to escalate, but there was something else there, a seductive gleam that hinted that my ability to fend for myself aroused him in some strange way.
I yanked the rope a bit farther, wrapping it around a hook on the wall several times to secure it. When I let go, the rope didn’t budge.
“Who are you?” I eventually ventured, cocking my head as he watched me.
