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Zenya
“Cut her face.”
“Rip her eyes out.”
“Shove a knife up her cunt.”
“All of that at the same time.”
The four men advance on me, two holding guns, another swinging an axe, and the last with a baseball bat propped on his shoulder. I’ve already felt the vicious blow of the bat. My ankle is throbbing like it might be broken, and I’m covered in blood and crouching over my last surviving ally.
Andrei lifts a shaking hand and seizes my wrist. His face is pale beneath his tan, and his trembling lips are turning blue. “Zenya.Run.”
I have my hands pressed over an axe wound on Andrei’s chest, and blood is bubbling up between my fingers. If I run, he’ll die. My other two men are already dead, their body parts littering the floor of this dingy warehouse, along with three more corpses. I killed a man tonight. The first time in four years that I’ve taken a life.
I shake my head rapidly. “I’m not leaving you.”
Andrei’s been working for my father almost as long as I’ve been alive. He has a son. For the last two years, he’s stepped up and helped me while Dad has grown sicker and sicker. Andrei is as good as family, and family is all I have.
Andrei’s hand slips from my wrist and falls to the floor. His face slackens and he stares fixedly at the ceiling.
Pain slices through me and I can’t breathe. Every day, it feels like my family is growing smaller and smaller. I keep losing people. Mom. Uncle Kristian. Dad’s fading away to a brittle skeleton before my eyes. Now I’m responsible for Andrei’s, Radimir’s, and Stannis’s deaths, because I asked them to come here with me tonight.
I take a shuddering breath and lift my hands from Andrei’s chest. He deserved better than dying on a cold concrete floor in a warehouse. All three of them did.
“Aww, is she going to cry?” one of my attackers taunts in a hideous baby voice. “Is the widdle girl going to fall apart?”
I stand up and glare at the advancing men, and nearly slip on the blood covering the floor. There’s so much blood. More than I’ve ever seen in my eighteen years, and I once witnessed four men being tortured to death.
There’s no point screaming for help. There’s no one around for miles on this wet and lonely night to hear me. I scan the floor feverishly for a weapon. My gun is out of bullets and I throw it aside.
I spy a knife laying in a pool of blood just a few feet away, and my heart leaps. I take a step to one side, and my injured foot skids on someone’s trailing intestines. Pain blazes through my ankle and I grit my teeth on a scream.
“Dumb fucking Belyaev bitch,” a greasy-haired man taunts me. “Your family is finished. It’s our time to rule this city.”
“Like hell we’re finished,” I snarl in reply. “The Belyaevs aren’t going anywhere while my father and I are still breathing.”
The man holding the bloody axe brandishes it at me with a grin. “Troian Belyaev’s a walking corpse, and we’re going to fix the other half of that problem right now.”
They mean every word. Rival families and gangs have been circling Belyaev territory like vultures ever since Dad’s sickness returned. If these men get their hands on me, I’m dead, and they won’t be quick or merciful about it either.
I desperately want that knife. If I go for it, they’ll be on me, so I make myself wait. I drop into a crouch and curl my hands into fists. It’s not much, but it’s all I can do right now. I’m only five-foot-three, and someone used to tease me that a strong breeze could carry me away like a dandelion seed. My insides convulse with hurt and anger as they do every time I think of Uncle Kristian. My father’s brother. He loved to trail his fingers through my silky, silvery hair and call me his dandelion. His princess. When he was banished from the family two years ago, he left me struggling with my head barely above water, just when I needed him most.
But I don’t need him now. What I need is a weapon and a clear head, and so I push the memory of my tall, dangerous uncle away.
I wince as I slowly back away from the men in front of me. All right, I wouldn’t say no to Uncle Kristian’s muscle, ruthless energy, and creative violence right about now, but he’s not here, is he?
So fuck him.
I’m not giving up without a fight.
Even if I don’t survive, I’ll take one or two of these shitheads with me.
I study the four men before me, hunting for recognition in their faces, tattoos, jewelry, but nothing seems familiar. My men and I came here to collect a shipment of black-market goods, but these assholes got here first and ambushed us.
The man closest to me runs his tongue over his teeth, his eyes glinting with malice, and I see he has a jeweled tooth. “Shall we kill her? Or shall we send her back to the Belyaevs bleeding from every hole?”
