Page 9 of Emerald

I see these thoughts flit across his face, and then he casts a swift glance at the bodyguard standing behind me.

I’ve been expecting this. The guard draws his gun from beneath his jacket and tries to point it at the back of my head. But he made a mistake when he took his position too close behind me.

I take a step backward and slightly to my left, so that his arm goes over my right shoulder, the handgun now pointed toward his boss instead of at the back of my skull.

I reach up and grab his wrist, then I yank downward and drive my shoulder upward, forcing his elbow to lock in the wrong direction. There’s a sharp cracking sound as the joint strains and then snaps. The man’s finger jerks on the trigger, and the gun fires directly at Babanin.

The bullet hits him in the throat, on the right side. Babanin claps his hand against the wound. There’s no staunching the flow of dark blood that pours over his fingers, down onto the papers on his desk.

“Shit,” I say.

I was telling the truth. I hadn’t planned to kill Babanin.

Irritated with the incompetent guard, I hit him once, twice, three times in the face, until he slumps to the floor, his arm twisted at the wrong angle beneath him.

All throughout this encounter, I hear the sounds of my brother struggling with the second bodyguard. Once I’ve dealt with the clumsy gorilla on my side, I’m free to watch Dom as he grapples with the sumo behemoth.

The fat man is more limber than I would have given him credit for. He and Dom are wrestling and bellowing like two wildebeest. Dominik is much fitter, but the bodyguard has the advantage in mass.

My brother rears his head back and brings the crown of his skull smashing down on the bridge of the bodyguard’s nose. The man goes limp, tumbling to the ground like a felled tree.

Dom stands up straight again, shaking his head to clear it and wiping the blood off his forehead with the back of his arm.

“Took you long enough,” I say.

“Thanks for the help,” Dom replies sourly.

“You had it covered,” I tell him.

Only then does Dominik notice that Babanin is shot. He looks at the old man, pathetically slumped over on his desk.

“Did you mean to do that?” Dom says.

“Ididn’tdo it. That idiot over there shot him,” I say, jerking my head toward the first bodyguard.

“Well, he won’t be getting his Christmas bonus,” Dom says.

I look around the office, at the file cabinets stuffed full of the coded records of fifty years’ worth of illegal shipments. It really is a shame that all Babanin’s work came to this. But he put me in a position where I had to make an example of him or look weak in front of a rising threat.

“What do you want to do with all this?” Dom asks.

He looks equally overwhelmed by the crowded office, the fallen bodies making a mess of the carpet.

“Burn it,” I tell him.

Dom takes the bottle of gin off the desk. He douses Babanin’s body, the papers on the desk, the carpet and the blinds.

“What about them?” he says, jerking his head toward the bodyguards.

“Burn it all,” I say.

Dom pours the gin over the bodyguards too, then pulls his lighter from his pocket. He sparks the flame and throws it down on the soaked carpet. With a soft roar, it catches fire.

We exit the office, closing the door behind us.

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