Page 23 of Hellbent

“Can … can you help me?”

He holstered the pistol but stayed alert. “Who put you here?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember. I … I…”

Her posture suddenly snapped into shape, a bundle of coiled muscle. She pivoted into a vicious leg sweep, leading with the hard edge of her heel, sweeping both of his boots out from under him.

As he accelerated into weightlessness, he saw the glint in her eye matched by the glint of the fixed-blade combat knife in her right hand. A sharpening stone lay on the carpet, the stone she’d been crouching over, scraping away when he’d walked in. Already she’d rotated, spinning up onto her feet, readying to drive the blade through his sternum.

He struck the floor, the wind knocking from his lungs in a single clump, and it occurred to him just how badly he had misjudged the situation.

11

Enemy of My Enemy

Evan’s first focus was the knife.

Darting down at him like a shiv stab, all blade, nothing to grab.

Laid out on the carpet as if he were a corpse, he swept the bar of his forearm protectively across his chest, hammering the girl’s slender wrist and knocking the knife off course just before it broke skin. The tip skimmed his shirt above the ribs, slicing fabric.

His second focus was her fist.

Which she’d cocked and deployed even while her knife hand had still been in motion. He had a split-second to admire the technique—knuckles following blade with double-tap timing—before she broke his nose.

He rolled his head with the punch, tumbled gracelessly up onto his feet. She grabbed the back of his shirt, but the magnetic buttons gave way—click-click-click—and he spun right out of it. His eyes watered from the blow to the nose, but the escape bought him a much-needed second to blink his way back to some version of clarity. She flung the shirt aside and launched a barrage of kicks.

He parried, parried, parried, bruising his forearms and knuckles, holding his attention mostly on the knife.

She came at him again, a jailhouse lunge, but now he was ready for it. His hands moved in blurry unison, a bong sau/lop sau trap that simultaneously blocked and grabbed her arm. He clenched hard, slid his fist up the length of her forearm, and hit the bump of her wrist with enough force that her fingers released and the knife shot free.

They were nose-to-nose, her mouth forming an O of perfect shock. He had a wide-open lane to her windpipe—one elbow strike and she’d be over—but Jack’s Eighth Commandment sailed in and tapped the back of his brain: Never kill a kid.

He barreled her over and pinned her with a cross-face cradle, a grappling move that left her locked up, her knee smashed to her cheek, arms flailing uselessly to the sides.

“Get off me!” she shouted. “I will kill you! I will fucking—”

He pressed his forehead to her temple, immobilizing her head and shielding his eyes. “Breathe,” he said.

She inhaled sharply.

“Again.”

She obeyed.

“Where is the package?” he asked.

“What?”

“What’d you do with the package?”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“You saw the message. You beat me here.”

“Can you get your knee out of my ribs?”

Evan eased off the pressure. “What’d you do with it?”