Page 94 of Captured By the Pakhan

Then, unmistakably, gunfire.

Oh, thank God.

That's my actual first thought, and I want to be honest about it. Not what's happening. Not who it is. I am sitting in a basement with sixty hours in it and a man who has just told me the date of my own death, and something starts shooting upstairs, and my entire body says: good.

I am on my feet with my back against the wall and my hands out in front of me when the door comes open, and Louis comes down the stairs fast.

And he isn't the man who was on the crate four minutes ago.

That man was enjoying himself. This one has a weapon out, and his face has gone completely white, and I have seen this exact transformation on about eleven men in nine years, and it means the same thing every time.

He's not in control of what's happening, and he wasn't told about it.

"Get up. Get up⁠—"

"I am up."

"We're going out the⁠—"

I hit him with both hands.

Two zip ties, wrists together, in front — and a pair of joined hands swung from the shoulder with the whole body behind them is a mace, and I've had sixty hours to think about the exact angle. It takes him across the side of the jaw, and he goes into the brick wall.

The weapon goes somewhere.

Then it's ugly.

He is bigger than me, and he isn't restrained, and he is frightened, and frightened is fast. He gets a hand in my hair and puts me onto the floor, and I take it on the shoulder again — the same shoulder, which lights up like something electrical — and then his weight is on my back, and his forearm is coming across my throat from behind, and this is how people die.

I get my chin down.

That's all you get, and I get it — chin tucked, so his arm is on my jaw and not my windpipe, and I have about eleven seconds before the arm slides, and it doesn't matter what my chin is doing.

I stop trying to pull the arm.

I go for his hand instead, both of mine, the little finger, and I take it back to the wrist, and I feel it break.

He screams, and the arm comes off, and I am out from under him and moving.

And I go for the weapon, and I am two feet from it when he gets my ankle, and I go down hard on the concrete on my hip, and I twist as I land — I twist without deciding to, my whole body turning to take it on the side rather than the front, and I hear myself make a sound that isn't about the pain.

Louis comes up on his knees with a bleeding hand and gets to the gun first.

And then the door at the top of the stairs comes apart.

Not open. Somebody puts something into it at the lock, and it comes off the frame in one piece, and there is a shape in the doorway with a rifle up, and the room goes very loud, twice.

Louis Mendez is dead before he finishes turning around.

I am on the floor of a basement in Georgetown with my hands tied and my hip screaming, and somebody is coming down the stairs three at a time.

He goes down on one knee beside me.

Ilya's face is grey. There's blood on his left side that has come through his shirt and his coat, old blood, and dust in his hair, and there is an expression on him I have never seen on any human being.

"Raven—"

"Don't touch me."