Chapter 4 #2
"You're going to kill yourself," I informed her, using my weight advantage to pull her fully back inside. She was lighter than I'd expected, all bones and anger, but she made up for it with sheer viciousness.
"Just let me go," she spat, twisting in my grip like a snake. Then she did something I hadn't expected—she sank her teeth into my forearm.
Not a quick bite, not a warning nip. She bit down like she was trying to tear through to bone, her jaw locking with desperate strength.
I could feel individual teeth, molars grinding against muscle, incisors breaking skin.
The pain was immediate and intense, shooting up my arm into my shoulder, white-hot and primitive.
My first instinct was violence. Ball my fist, drive it into her temple, make her release through pure force.
That's what I'd been trained to do, what every instinct screamed for.
You didn't let someone bite you without consequences.
You established dominance, maintained control, showed them that attacking you came with a price.
But I didn't hit her.
Maybe it was the desperation in the bite, the way she was using her last weapon because everything else had been taken from her.
Maybe it was the tears I could see gathering in her eyes even as she tried to tear through my arm.
Or maybe I just didn't want to be another man who'd hurt her, another reason for her to bite the next person who got too close.
Instead, I pressed my thumb into the pressure point behind her jaw, the spot where the nerve cluster made it impossible to maintain bite pressure.
It was almost gentle, clinical, the kind of thing they taught in defense classes for hospital workers dealing with violent patients.
Controlled force instead of brutal retaliation.
She held on for another second, then gasped and released, stumbling back against the bathroom wall.
My blood was on her lips, bright red against her pale skin, and she looked wild.
Hair tangled, clothes torn from the window glass, my blood in her mouth, those mismatched eyes blazing with hatred and something else I couldn't quite identify.
"Feel better?" I asked, examining my arm. She'd gone deep—I could see the perfect imprint of her teeth, blood welling up and soaking through what was left of my sleeve. It would need stitches, maybe antibiotics. Human bites were worse than dog bites for infection, all that bacteria in the mouth.
She glared at me, chest heaving, my blood still on her lips. She didn't wipe it away, wore it like war paint, like proof that she'd made me bleed even if she couldn't make me let her go.
"I'll feel better when you're dead," she said, and meant it. Every word came with total conviction, the kind of promise that would keep me checking shadows for the rest of my life if she ever got free.
The thing was, I believed her.
Damn.
I was going to need to escalate.
The zip ties were in the kitchen drawer where I kept them, right next to the duct tape and rope—my household basics for situations exactly like this.
Except nothing about this situation was basic.
Basic was grabbing some low-level dealer who'd skimmed product.
Basic was securing a witness until Alexei decided what to do with them.
Basic didn't involve teeth marks throbbing in my forearm or blood—mine and hers—dripping onto my kitchen floor.
Eva saw me pull out the ties and immediately went into fight mode again.
She grabbed the nearest thing—a ceramic mug from the counter—and hurled it at my head.
I ducked, and it shattered against the wall behind me, leaving a coffee stain on the exposed brick I'd paid too much to have professionally distressed.
"You're not tying me up," she said, backing toward the living room, looking for more ammunition.
"Yes, I am," I said, advancing slowly, herding her toward the chair I'd already picked out—heavy wood, solid construction.
She threw a book—some airport thriller I'd never opened—then a lamp that had cost eight hundred dollars at a Chelsea design shop.
That one I caught before it could shatter, setting it carefully aside while keeping her in my peripheral vision.
She was running out of room and weapons, backing herself into the corner I'd been guiding her toward.
"I'm three times your weight and trained in four different kinds of restraint," I told her, holding up the zip ties. "We can do this easy or hard, but it's happening either way."
"Fuck your easy," she snarled, then tried to dart past me.
I caught her around the waist, lifted her off her feet entirely.
She went wild—elbows flying, heels kicking, head snapping back trying to catch my nose.
One elbow connected with my ribs, driving the air from my lungs.
Her heel found my shin, the same spot she'd kicked in the car, deepening what would be an impressive bruise.
She even tried to bite again, twisting her head around at an angle that shouldn't have been possible, teeth snapping at empty air.
But physics was physics. I had eight inches and probably a hundred and fifty pounds on her. Training from before I could walk, decades of subduing people who wanted me dead. She had rage and desperation, but those only went so far against simple mass and leverage.
Still, she made me work for it. By the time I got her into the chair, we were both breathing hard.
My shirt was torn at the shoulder where she'd grabbed and pulled.
Her nails had left scratches down my neck that burned in the apartment's climate-controlled air.
The bite on my arm had bled through the makeshift bandage I'd wrapped around it, and my ribs ached where she'd connected with that sharp elbow.
The zip ties went on with practiced efficiency—wrists to the chair arms, ankles to the legs.
Not tight enough to cut off circulation, but tight enough that she couldn't slip them even if she dislocated something trying.
I'd seen people do that, pop their thumb out of joint to escape restraints.
Something told me this girl was exactly that kind of desperate.
I crouched in front of her, finally able to really look at her without worrying about her trying to gouge my eyes out.
Up close, she was a contradiction that made my chest do something uncomfortable.
The dirt from the storage unit had mixed with my blood, creating dark streaks across her face.
That infected cut on her palm was worse than I'd thought.
She was too thin, cheekbones sharp enough to cut, dark circles under those impossible eyes that said she hadn't slept properly in days, maybe weeks.
But underneath the damage, she was striking.
Not beautiful in the conventional way, not like the models and actresses who decorated my world.
She was sharp angles and defiance, a face that would never be forgettable even without those eyes.
The blue one had gold flecks near the pupil I hadn't noticed before.
The green one was darker at the edges, like forest giving way to sea.
Her mouth, even twisted in a snarl, had a shape that made me think things I shouldn't be thinking about someone young enough to be my—
No. Not going there.
Her hair was tangled, dark with hints of auburn where the light caught it. Long enough to wrap around my fist, to pull her head back and—
Stop.
"Stop looking at me like that," she snapped, jerking me out of thoughts that had no business existing.
"Like what?" I kept my voice neutral, clinical, but she'd already seen too much.
"Like you're trying to decide whether to fuck me or kill me."
The accuracy of it hit like cold water. Because that was exactly the war happening in my head—attraction battling with logic, want fighting with should.
She was too young, too damaged, too complicated for someone who kept his life in neat, separate compartments.
I didn't do messy. I didn't do complicated.
I did simple transactions with clear boundaries and clean endings.
This girl was none of those things. She was chaos in human form, a lit match in a room full of gasoline, trouble I couldn't afford and definitely couldn't control.
"I don't fuck teenagers," I told her coldly, needing to establish distance, to put her firmly in a category that didn't include the thoughts currently trying to take hold in my brain.
"I'm twenty-two, asshole."
Twenty-two. Still too young. I was thirty-two, a decade older, a lifetime of violence older. She was barely out of college age, probably still got carded at bars, still had that mix of defiance and vulnerability that meant she hadn't been completely broken by the world yet.
Which meant I definitely needed to search her and get this over with before my thoughts went anywhere more dangerous.
"Stay still," I ordered, though the zip ties didn't exactly give her a choice.
"Don't fucking touch me."
"I'm searching you for weapons, not copping a feel," I said, though the distinction was getting blurrier than I liked.
I used the back of my hand, doing everything I could to make her feel comfortable—if that was even possible.
My hands moved professionally over her clothes, ignoring the way she flinched at every contact, the rapid rise and fall of her chest that pressed against the thin fabric of her shirt.
She was hiding something—people who fought this hard always were.
In her jacket pockets, I found the expected: seventy-three dollars in small bills, probably picked from different marks throughout the day.
A bobby pin bent into a lock pick. A small knife, barely two inches, but sharp enough to matter.
"That's mine," she said when I pocketed the knife. I was surprised she hadn’t used it on me.
"Was yours," I corrected, continuing the search.