Not that I was allowed.
I heard the doors burst open before I saw them, with Dmitry coming through them like a sudden explosion. His face was streaked in blood, his eyes so dark that from the distance we were at they almost looked as black as mine. He didn’t pause after the doors hit the walls on either side either, striding angrily our way with a face like murder.
“We go now,” he barked, more an order than an explanation. His voice was thick with the same fury so tightly coiled in his muscles.
“We go where?” I asked rationally as Shura hauled me one-handed from my seat. I didn’t fight being moved, especially not as I was being handed off to Dmitry who held an expectant hand out for me. My fingers pushed through his despite the warm blood coating them.
“We go to my father’s home,” he bit out, his teeth audibly grinding as he pulled me to a faster pace.
Through the doors he had left open, I could see two bodies stretched across the conference table, the bodies still present now milling about and cleaning up the considerable mess.
“They told you something?” Shura asked from my other side as he broke pace to go ahead of us and towards the doors leading outside.
“They put a hit out on Manya’s head,” Dmitry hissed, the words sounding like curses versus the statement that they were. He glanced to me only briefly before hauling me outside.
“The men inside?” I asked hollowly, looking over my shoulder to view their dead bodies once more. I craned my neck, but it was too late. The heavy front door closed behind us.
“Nyet,” Dmitry answered, the one word clipped. “They gave me other names, but those will wait.” Shura tossed Dmitry a set of keys, slid behind the wheel of the vehicle we had been in, and pulled off without another word. Dmitry opened the door of an older model Jaguar for me, all but pushing me in through the passenger door before straightening up.
“First we handle you, then I handle that,” he muttered.
It was the last thing he said before the door of the car slammed between us, the outline of his body through the tinted glass just as tense as it had been before. Handle me, he said, and I knew that he meant protect, but my throat dried anyway. There was no argument to be made, nothing else to offer . . .
There was a hit on my head . . . and if that wasn’t irony, I didn’t know what was.