Chapter 93.
Alek jumps back, pain flaring across her hand, barely out of reach of Lopez’s knife, knowing there is no way for her to reach down for her own without being slashed again.
Or perhaps just gutted this time.
Lopez grins and casually jabs at her again. It forces Alek to jump back a second time. As she does, she makes sure to keep her eyes locked on the Colombian’s knife.
“You know what they say,” he says softly. “A nick here, a nick there, and soon you are bleeding to death.”
He jabs again—testing her, measuring her. Alek keeps backing up, hands up, eyes locked, putting her hands out in a defensive posture.
Lopez points at her knife, on the floor between them.
“Go on,” he says. “Pick it up. Make it interesting, little girl.”
Not only bigger than you, but faster, she thinks.
Before Lopez can swing his weapon again, Alek takes a long step toward him.
Not going for her knife.
Going for his.
Don’t be a victim.
Promise.
Lopez’s eyes flicker with surprise—just a fraction too late. Alek is inside Lopez’s reach before he can react, surprising him by clamping both of her hands on the wrist of his knife hand, snapping the wrist into a vise.
She hears a grunt from him as she forcefully bends the wrist back, the blade of the knife pointing straight up in the air between them.
“Now I kill you,” he hisses at her.
“If you can,” Alek says.
She squeezes harder on his wrist as she bends the blade toward Carlos Lopez an inch at a time. Then she jerks his arm away from his body, trying to tear the arm from his shoulder.
Lopez screams in pain.
As he does, Alek drives her right knee as hard as she can manage into his groin.
Lopez tries to scream again, but the pain from what Alek has just done to him ends up trapped in his throat.
She still has not let go of his knife hand.
Alek moves to the side now, turns her hips, and uses his momentum against him. A shove. A hook. Finally taking the knife away as she kicks his legs out from underneath him and puts him on his stomach.
She sits on top of him then, knee planted between his shoulder blades, his knife in her hand, pressing the tip of it to the back of his neck.
“If you are expecting me to beg, I will not,” Lopez says, the side of his face pressed to the floor, afraid to move his head even slightly.
Alek doesn’t respond.
“Do what you have to do,” Lopez says, “and get it over with.”
She does.
Alek leans in close enough only he can hear her. And whatever she says makes him go still. Not fear.
Humiliation.