Chapter Forty
Reaper
Something isn’t right. I’ve never had much of a sixth sense for danger — hell, my senses all led me straight into danger and addiction — so maybe what I’m feeling isn’t so much that something’s wrong, but that I need to be with Adriana right now.
Maybe it’s from her touch, her smile, or maybe it’s that the idea of having her here, now — even skipping Mayhem and Mrs. Eng’s fucking amazing rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ to fuck Adriana in the bathroom at this dirty karaoke club — is so powerful it’s less something that I want and more something that I need as much as I need to breathe.
“I’m going to go check on her,” I say as I stand.
Tank rolls his eyes at me. “It’s not even been a minute. You really going to skip Mayhem and Mrs. Eng’s song to go help your lady take a piss?”
“You know that’s not what I’m doing.”
Diesel laughs and chimes in. “We wouldn’t judge you if you were. Water sports are no big deal, just make sure you clean up after yourself. This is a public place, and we don’t want to be rude.”
“I’m not going back there to pee on my lady.”
“I didn’t say you were. She seems the type to top. But whatever you do, again, don’t be rude.”
I flip him the bird and head toward the dank, dark hallway leading to the bathrooms.
The hallway yawns empty and smells like bleach is losing a war with stale beer and whatever unholy scents are wafting from the bathrooms. Fluorescent tubes hum, a mosquito buzz of light over sticky tile and a beer-stained wall poster curling at the corners.
I pass the men’s room and head for the door with the cracked pink sign.
There’s a sound on the other side — low, muffled, like someone breathing hard through a hand.
I stop with my palm an inch from the swing door.
My brain does a quick, ugly reality check.
It’s possible she’s doing exactly what people do in bathrooms, and I’m about to shoulder my way into something that kills whatever fragile, bright thing we’re building.
I can live with a lot. Watching her take a — whatever involves heavy breathing and grunting in the bathroom — probably isn’t where I want to plant my flag tonight.
Then the wall thuds. Something slams into tile. A deeper grunt cuts through the door — masculine and hurt. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and the need turns into something irresistible.
I hit the door, and it slaps open into chaos.
Adriana is squared up by the sinks, shirt slashed high and wet with a line of blood across her stomach that makes my guts turn to ice.
She’s got one forearm up, braced against a stocky guy’s wrist to keep a knife from dipping lower.
Another man is climbing out from a shattered stall door, with a thin stiletto in his hand and a wolfish grin under a patchy beard.
The third one’s flanking left, knuckles white around a box cutter.
Blue eyes, cheap aftershave, Russian prison-star tattoos peeking over a collar. My night, ruined.
“Hey, fuck you guys,” I hear myself say, and then I’m already moving.
The one closest to me lunges without looking.
He figures big and dumb equals easy. He’s wrong.
I parry his wrist with my left — his blade grazes the back of my hand, hot and thin — and I slam his forearm down on the sink edge.
There’s a crack like breaking kindling, and his fingers spasm open.
His knife clatters. I shove his face into the mirror hard enough to spiderweb the glass, then bounce the back of his skull off the hand dryer. He drops like laundry.
The bearded one whistles something in Russian I don’t need translated.
The one with Adriana jerks, trying to twist free.
She spins into it, flowing past him, using the momentum to drive her knee up into his thigh.
He grunts and swipes, wild, and the knife kisses her again — just a scratch, I tell myself, just a scratch — before she seizes his wrist with both hands and torques. His elbow pops and he screams.
I snatch the knife off the floor in one smooth motion.
The flanker with the box cutter comes in sideways, eyes shiny, to open me from kidney to spine.
I step into him instead, chest to chest, hook my left behind his ankle and throw him over my hip.
He goes hard into the floor, air blasting out of him.
Before he can suck it back in, I drop a knee on his arm and put three inches of steel through the meat of his shoulder.
He howls. Not lethal if I keep it high and out of the artery. Pain for pain. A message.
“Stay the fuck down, you asshole.”
Behind me, porcelain breaks. The bearded one misjudges a kick and takes out a sink.
Water gushes, spraying everywhere, making the tile slick.
Adriana uses it, like she uses everything.
She slips under his guard, coming up with a palm strike to the bottom of his jaw.
His teeth clang shut. She slaps the knife from his hand, dancing sideways even as blood ropes down her belly.
Her eyes find mine in the mirror — a split second, a question. I give her a nod that says I’m ready.
I throw a heavy fist into the face of the Russian beneath me — sending him limp — and stand.
The bearded one throws a look from Adriana, to me, then back to her again.
Good, he’s taking his time, trying to figure out which one of us is the easier target, and if he has any common sense, he’ll realize neither and he’ll run the fuck out of here.
He doesn't run. Of course he fucking doesn’t.
Instead, he charges me like a fucking bull, all shoulders and rage.
I sidestep and catch him in a clinch, feeling his breath hot against my neck as we grapple.
The smell of vodka and desperation rolls off him in waves.
My hands find his throat, thumbs pressing into the soft hollow where his pulse hammers like a trapped bird.
He claws at my wrists, nails raking skin, but I've got leverage.
"Should've stayed in Moscow, Boris."
I slam him backward into the wall. His skull cracks against tile, and his eyes roll white for a second.
That's all Adriana needs. She moves in, her fist hitting him right in the groin.
He releases something between a gasp and a moan, and I release his throat, and she follows through with two more merciless kicks straight to his groin. He crumples, twitching, helpless.
The bathroom falls silent except for the sound of water still gushing from the broken sink and our ragged breathing. Blood pools around my boots, mixing with the spreading puddle. Adriana presses a hand to the slash across her stomach, crimson seeping between her fingers.
"You okay?" I reach for her, but she steps back, scanning the carnage with those sharp eyes.
"I'm fine. But we have a problem." She kicks at the bearded one's phone where it's fallen near the urinal. "Before you came in, this one was talking to someone. He said something like, 'we found them' and got a response."
Ice slides down my spine. "How many more?"
"I don't know. But they're not working alone." She winces as she moves toward the door. "We need to get out of here. Now."
I grab a handful of paper towels and press them against her wound. "Can you move?"
"I've had worse." But I can see the pain flickering behind her eyes, the way she favors her left side.
We step over the bodies and push through the door into the hallway. The fluorescent buzz seems louder now, more urgent. From the main room comes the thunderous crescendo of voices raised in perfect, drunken harmony: "Nothing really matters, anyone can see, nothing really matters... to meeee."
Mayhem and Mrs. Eng's voices soar above the crowd as we stumble back toward our table. The applause that erupts is deafening, drowning out the sound of sirens in the distance.
Tank looks up as I approach, his grin fading when he sees the blood on my knuckles, the way Adriana's holding her side.
"We need to go," I tell him, leaning close to his ear. "Russians found us. There's three down in the bathroom and more coming."
His face goes granite hard; a nod, and a gesture is all it takes, and Diesel is on his feet and Mayhem is protectively putting his arm around Mrs. Eng and guiding her down from the karaoke stage while whispering something in her ear that turns her smiling face into a grim mask.
We move as a unit toward the exit, Tank taking point while Diesel brings up the rear.
Mrs. Eng clutches her martini glass like it's a weapon, her eyes sharp despite the alcohol.
The karaoke crowd is too drunk and loud to notice us weaving through the bar, but my skin crawls with the certainty that we're being watched.
The heavy door swings open, and we step into the Sacramento night. The air hits my face, cool and sharp, carrying the scent of asphalt, exhaust, and old, warm trash. Our black limo sits under a flickering streetlight twenty yards away, and my heart drops into my boots.
Four Russians circle the vehicle like wolves, their weapons catching the orange glow.
Machetes, baseball bats, a couple of hunting knives.
One of them is taking a crowbar to the rear window while another slashes at the tires with methodical precision.
They're not trying to steal it — they're making sure we can't leave.
"Shit," Tank breathes beside me.
"Stupid trash Boris!" Mrs. Eng's voice cuts through the night like a blade.
Before any of us can react, she hurls her martini glass in a perfect arc.
It catches the nearest Russian square in the face, gin and vermouth exploding across his features.
He staggers backward, clawing at his eyes and screaming.
I catch Adriana's eye, and we share a look of pure disbelief. Boris? She calls them Boris too?
But there's no time to do more than share a look, because the other three Russians have spotted us and they're charging with murder in their eyes.
"Mrs. Eng, stay back!" I shout, already moving.
Tank and Diesel fan out to my left while I go straight up the middle.
Adriana moves with me despite the blood still seeping through her shirt, her face set in grim determination.
The Russian with the machete reaches us first, swinging the blade in a vicious arc toward my face.
I duck; the steel whistles over my scalp, and I come up inside his guard, driving my elbow into his solar plexus.
He doubles over, gasping, and I grab the machete handle, twisting until his grip breaks.
To my right, Tank has the crowbar guy in a headlock while Diesel grapples with the one carrying a Louisville Slugger. The bat cracks against the limo's hood, leaving a dent the size of a man’s head.
The Russian I disarmed tries to tackle me around the waist. I sidestep and bring the machete handle down on the back of his skull, sending him face-first into the asphalt.
He plants his hands against the asphalt like he’s going to push himself up, and I press the tip of the machete to the back of his neck.
“Don’t make me, Boris,” I say.
He freezes.
Then Mrs. Eng’s voice cuts through the sound of combat. “Cut that Boris head off.”
“I will,” I say.
“Don’t.”
“Then stop fucking around, Boris.”
“My name is Mikhail.”
“Do you really want to die on this hill, Boris?”
“No,” he says, and lies limp on the ground. “I’ll be a good Boris.”
"Good Boris," I say, keeping the blade steady.
A crash echoes behind me. Tank has slammed his Russian into the limo's door hard enough to spider the window, while Diesel finishes his dance with the bat-wielder by introducing the guy's face to his knee.
The crack of cartilage breaking carries across the parking lot.
The Russian that Mrs. Eng threw her glass at is still on his knees, pawing at his face. He might be blind.
"That's all of them," Tank calls out, breathing hard. The Russian with the crowbar lies unconscious at his feet, blood pooling from his nose.
"For now." I step back from my Boris but keep the machete ready. "Adriana's right — there's more coming."
Mrs. Eng surveys the carnage with the satisfaction of a general reviewing a successful battle. "These Boris are very stupid. Attack a lady during karaoke? No class."
Mayhem appears at my shoulder, keys jangling in his hand. "Time to roll, yeah? This neighborhood's gonna be crawling with cops in about three minutes."
I glance at the limo. The rear window's a spiderweb of cracks, and two tires are definitely flat — rubber hanging in shreds from the rims. "Can we even drive that thing?"
"Can we drive it?" Mayhem grins, a manic gleam lighting up his eyes. "Brother, I once drove a Humvee thirty miles on three wheels and a prayer through Kandahar. This is just Tuesday night for me."
“It isn’t Tuesday night.”
“Exactly.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“If you’re going to be driving, yes, I fucking would.”
“No more playing around,” Tank says, as he helps Mrs. Eng toward the limo while Diesel keeps watch on our unconscious Russians. Adriana leans against me, her breathing shallow but steady. The blood has slowed, but she needs medical attention soon.
"You sure you're okay?" I ask her quietly.
"I'll live. But we need to get out of here now. If the cops pick us up and put us anywhere in jail, there’s no telling what connections Volkov has, and I am not fucking dying by shiv.”
Mayhem yanks open the driver's door and slides behind the wheel. The engine turns over with a purr that sounds almost apologetic for what we're about to put it through. Tank helps Mrs. Eng into the back while Diesel and I get Adriana settled beside her.
"Everyone in?" Mayhem calls back. “Ready for some fun?”
"Go," Tank says, slamming the door behind him.
The limo lurches forward with a grinding sound that makes my teeth ache.
The flat tires thump against the asphalt in an uneven rhythm, but Mayhem keeps us moving.
We wobble out of the parking lot like a wounded animal, sparks flying from the rims as they scrape concrete.
I cast a look through the rear window, sighing in relief at the total absence of flashing lights.
We just might make it out of here.
There’s a click as Mayhem turns the radio on. Pop music — Adele — begins blaring from the speakers. Mrs. Eng lets out a pleased ‘ooh.’ Mayhem cackles and lets out a whoop.
"You want to know what’s a great way to come down from almost being murdered?” He says to an unwilling audience — except for Mrs. Eng. When no one answers, Mayhem turns, takes his eyes completely off the road, and stares right at Tank. “Well?”
“Don’t you fucking say it,” Tank says.
“Is it karaoke?” Mrs. Eng says.
Mayhem cranks up the radio. “Winner winner chicken dinner.”