Page 2 of Fight

Her body would never be found.

Unfortunate, but there were few people who would miss her, and she’d never been much into sentimentality anyway.

She saw the tick of the man’s finger as he began to pull, anticipated the loud sound that would emerge from the gun. Any second now.

“Wait.”

Fuck, but this day was only getting worse.

Of all the voices she wanted to hear during her last moments on earth, his was not one of them. It was this asshole’s fault she was here in the first place.

She lowered her gaze to his when he came into the room—the fact that she was so much taller than him gave her another reason to smile—and let her biggest, brightest, shit-eating grin cover her face.

On a day full of stupid moves, this one was the stupidest.

Agitating Markov was the reason she was here, but she hadn’t been able to help herself then, and it seemed she couldn’t help herself now.

His icy-gray eyes, eyes that might have been attractive were they not in the skull of a man who was pure evil, flashed and then went flat and dead like they usually were. That was Markov, hot like a volcano and then as icy as the Ukrainian winter in the next breath.

More than an inkling of fear began to gather at the base of her skull, and she tried to remember what the space outside those door looked like, mentally tried to formulate something that resembled an escape plan.

If she could make it through the door, and then—

Markov stepped directly into her line of sight, filling her vision. He was shorter than average but still pretty bulky for his height. Under different circumstances, she wouldn’t have worried.

But these weren’t different circumstances, and she was definitely worried. Because one look at Markov, and she knew she was not getting out of this room until he was ready for her to. And what would happen to her once she did… She shuddered to even contemplate it.

“What happened here?” Markov said in a calm, chilly voice that betrayed no urgency. He had no reason to feel any as far as she could tell.

As he spoke, he kept his eyes glued to the woman, watching, measuring, assessing.

Always assessing.

She hated that feeling more than anything, hated the way he looked at her like she was a puzzle he wanted to solve, or more accurately, an animal he wanted to dissect.

“She bit his dick off,” one of the others said.

“Just a piece,” she interjected, though on second thought, she realized she probably wasn’t helping her case.

In fact, she should have stayed quiet, but that wasn’t possible, not when Markov was staring at her like that. She had to do something, anything to relieve some of the tension of his gaze.

Whatever minuscule relief she got was fleeting at best, because after Markov looked to the man who still lay on the floor screaming, he turned icy eyes back to her, his gaze even more intense than it had been before.

“You should get him to a doctor,” Markov said over his shoulder.

The one with the gun still pointed at her paused for a moment as if such a thing had never occurred to him and then went to the other.

Markov tilted his head ever so slightly. “And take that with you.”

The one with the gun frowned, but scooped up the tiny piece of his friend and then dragged his companion out of the room, calling for help as he went. The two others who had followed each grabbed one of the man’s legs and together they carried him out, their footsteps retreating in much the same haste as they had approached only moments ago, though to the woman those tense moments had felt like hours, days even.

“Whatever am I going to do with you?” Markov said, a little smile that chilled her to her core playing on his face.

“You could let me go,” she responded. She kept the tremble out of her voice, but couldn’t squash down the fear that was steadily rising.

He turned his lips up in what she assumed he intended to be a smile. “I could, but where’s the fun in that?”

Then he looked to the spot that the injured man had only recently left and focused on the dark, wet pool of blood before he again held her eyes with his.

“So you like to fight?” he asked.

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