This time, I’m on top, straddling his waist. He must’ve clipped his head, as his reaction time lags. He doesn’t immediately throw his arms up or defend as I wrench him by the collar, and I get three solid clocks to his face. His bottom lip splits, right eye beginning to puff, and this seems to wake him up. Again, he goes for the gut.
“Hah, motherf–!”
If your life is at stake, and you’re physically able to fight for it, shit gets messy. Anything goes. Borislav and I are more evenly matched than he’d probably care to admit, but in realizing it, he’s no longer fighting just to kill me, but to keep his own life in the process. Less an assassination, more a vicious dog fight. Knees, elbows, fists, feet, everything that’s goddamn available. Thumb to the eye socket, dick shots. There’s no code of conduct. He catches me by the throat, immediately clamping around my windpipe, and I retaliate with a hook rocketing into his jaw. When his hand gives, I crane my neck and sink teeth through his wrist.
He grits a shout, returning the favor by smashing his available knuckles against my temple. See, the trick is: you keep lashing out through the ACME stars and tweeting, little birds. Even if your vision is doubled and someone’s shrieking in your ear, throw whatever you’ve got. In this case, it’s a knee to the soft meat between his legs.
He doubles over, instinctively snapping his hands into a protective cup around his dick. It’s the best chance I’ll get. I heave into an almost–sitting position, fumbling blindly on the nightstand behind my head until my fingers knock against what I’m looking for. The table clock, shaped like a brick and just as heavy. Tightening my hand around the edges, I swing it down against the slope of Borislav’s head with all my strength. There’s a loud, sickening thud, and the durity of his skull bounces back into my hand. The numb, tickling sensation of nailing a baseball or a mailbox full of cement.
Boneless, he slumps over.
Panting, dumbfounded, I sit and process for a long time. I’m understandably worried I’ve just killed a guy, but his back lifts with breath. He’s alive, but blows to the head are no joke. There’s no telling what state of mind he’ll wake into, but–
Hey, that’s not my fuckin’ problem. He started it.
Crazy as it sounds, I’m insulted.
What, I’m not worth the time or effort to do me in himself? Zakhar sent an underling?
Is it sentiment? He doesn’t want to dirty his hands with someone he’s stuck his cock in?
Sentiment, my ass.
Scowling, I climb to my feet with the nightstand’s support. In situations like this one, there’s the inevitable question: what the fuck do I do now?
Should I…finish the job? Kill this guy? Dump him over the balcony’s railing like he’d certainly have done with my lifeless corpse? If he doesn’t make it back to Zakhar, things might take a darker turn for me. Loyalty, bonds of brotherhood, all that. To Zakhar, I’m a good time. Disposable. Nothing more, nothing less. Borislav probably ranks significantly higher on the totem of who he gives a shit about. But, I really, actually want to fucking live.
“Tch, such bullshit.”
Stepping over Borislav’s unconscious splay of limbs, I circle the bed to where it’s pressed against the wall. It’s the world’s biggest bitch fishing his gun out from that strait space, as the bed’s platform frame doesn’t allow anything or anyone to get under it. Bolted to the floor. Five whole minutes of grazing my fingertips against the handle, tipping it upwards until I can pincer around it. There’s the risk of setting it off, which is so fun. To think I had the balls to bitch about my boring, normal life.
By the time it’s retrieved, I’ve decided on what to do. Don’t get your hopes up, I’m not John fuckin’ Wick. Zakhar isn’t bulletproof, but a paranoid pestilence in the back of my mind whispers: what if he is though?
We dock in Rome midday tomorrow. There’s only one place I can think to go where I won’t be discovered, the last place on Earth anyone would look. In a little backpack I’ve been taking off the ship, I stuff it with everything I can’t go without. I can’t come back to this room. Phone, wallet, keycard, charger, gun, and Charlie’s Xanax. I’m stressed, sue me. Stuffing myself in a hoodie, it’s three long corridors and a two-floor ascension to the refuge in question. The door flies open after two uninterrupted minutes of my pounding on it.
“Who the fuck–?!” It starts as a scathing, bitten-off snarl, but tapers off into stunned silence. Charlie, who’d actually taken the time to throw a robe on–what a prick, rears back at the sight of my face from underneath the hood’s shade. He doesn’t drop the scowl, it only twists with confusion.
“Carrington? What the fuck…?” His tone suggests there were too many questions to pick from.
Dragging out the ‘ay’, “hey, buddy.”