Page 8 of The Mad Don
I round another corner when an arm hooks around my throat from behind.
It is fast and professional, and my own body goes against me. I am pulled back, off my feet, and slammed down onto the concrete with the full weight of someone on top of me. The airgoes out of my chest in a cough. The gun is in my hand for half a second, and then a boot comes down on my wrist, and the gun skids away across the concrete and out of reach.
He pulls me up by the front of my vest and pins me to the side of the container with his forearm across my throat. My feet barely touch the ground.
The attacker is dressed in black and armed. Abalaclavacovers his face from the bridge of his nose down. A black cap pulled. Nothing of him is showing except his eyes.
The eyes.
I should be fighting. I should be reaching for the second gun at my back. I should be jamming my thumb into his eye socket or driving my knee up between his legs. I am trained to do all of those things in under a second.
But his eyes are dark. They are calm and completely still. They are looking back at me with a quiet attention that does not belong in the middle of a firefight.
I have never seen these eyes before.Yet, I have seen these eyes before.
I cannot place either thought. They sit on each other, and neither wins.
“Yana!”
The voice cuts across the dock underneath the gunfire.
It’s Kirill.
The sound of my name snaps something back into place.
I kick the man, and my knee drives up into the soft place at the inside of his thigh, and he grunts. His grip loosens for half a second, and that is enough. I shove him back with my good shoulder, and he stumbles, and I am reaching behind me for the second gun at my back.
He pulls his, and we point at each other from a few meters apart. The sleeve of his jacket has shifted in the scuffle. At his collarbone, just above the line of the black fabric, the edge of a tattoo is showing—the body of a snake. The head and the rest of it disappear under his clothing.
I shoot, but he spins before the round leaves the barrel. He spins to the right, and the bullet goes past his shoulder, and he is on me again before I have adjusted. His arm hooks around my neck from the side and pulls me back against his chest, and his other hand catches the wrist of my gun arm and twists it down toward the concrete.
His mouth is at my ear, the balaclava muffling his voice.
“You’re everything they said you were, huh?”
I elbow him, aiming for his chest, but he absorbs it, and he shoves me away from him, sending me staggering forward across the open space.
I almost fall, but two arms catch me.
“Yana.” Kirill’s voice against my head. “I have you.”
Mikhail is at his side, gun up, firing past us into the dark where the masked man was a half second ago. The man is gone.
I twist out of Kirill’s grip to go after him.
Kirill grabs my arm, the bad one.
“Fuck!”
He pulls back and sees the blood. “Yana. We are outnumbered. We are leaving.”
“Pakhan, the container!”
“Now.”
I look at him. There is blood on his sleeve and his head. He is not asking.
We run and come out to the cargo area, firing at anything that moves between us and the perimeter. Mikhail goes down, getsback up with a hand pressed to his side, and keeps running. We reach the car, and we throw ourselves into it—Kirill at the wheel and Mikhail in the back. I’m in the passenger seat with my arm bleeding into the upholstery.
