Page 9 of Enforcer Daddy
"Stop," he said against my ear, voice calm as a frozen lake. "You'll hurt yourself."
That made me fight harder. I tried to drop my weight, to twist, to find any gap in his hold. Nothing worked. He adjusted his grip minutely, and suddenly I couldn't move at all. Not paralyzed—I could feel everything, every point where his body pressed against mine—but completely immobilized.
His chest was solid as a brick wall behind me, and he smelled like expensive cologne mixed with gun oil and something darker—blood, maybe, or just violence itself made into perfume. Each breath he took expanded his ribcage against my back, steady and controlled while mine came in ragged gasps.
"Finished?" he asked, and there was something in his tone that might have been amusement if machines could be amused.
I hawked and spat, putting all my remaining defiance into it. The glob landed on his shoe—Italian leather, probably cost more than I'd ever owned at one time.
He looked down at the spit on his shoe, then back at me. Still no anger, just that empty assessment that was somehow worse than rage would have been. Rage was human. This was something else.
"Interesting," he said, like I was a math problem he hadn't expected to encounter.
"You’re just another fucking mob psycho," I snarled, still testing his grip even though every attempt just taught me new ways I couldn't escape. "What is it with you people and the intimidation theatrics? The gun, the lurking inshadows, the whole stone-cold killer aesthetic—compensating for something?"
My mouth had always been my worst enemy and best weapon. When I couldn't fight with fists, I fought with words, and right now words were all I had. Even if they got me killed, at least I'd die running my mouth instead of begging.
"You think you're so fucking scary?" I continued, the words pouring out like water from a broken dam. "Big man with a gun, catching teenage girls in storage units. Real tough guy. Bet your mother's real proud of what her little boy became."
His chest rumbled against my back—not quite a laugh, more like the sound a mountain might make if it found something amusing. That pissed me off more than silence would have.
I tried to headbutt backward again, aiming for his nose, but he simply tilted his head and my skull hit nothing but air. The motion made me stumble, but his grip kept me upright, controlled, like a puppet master with particularly uncooperative strings.
"Let me go, you piece of Mafia shit!" I thrashed harder, putting every ounce of strength into breaking free. My wrists burned where he held them, not from his grip but from my own struggling against it. "Chenkov's going to get his money back anyway when you kill me, so what's the point of this whole production?"
That got a reaction. His body went still behind me—not tense, just perfectly motionless like someone had hit pause on him.
"Mafia?" His voice came out different this time, lower, with an edge that hadn't been there before. "You think I work for those suka?"
The Russian profanity rolled off his tongue like honey mixed with broken glass. I knew that word—had heard it spit at me by enough Russian vendors when I'd tried to lift food from theirstores. It meant bitch, but worse somehow when said in Russian. Everything sounded worse in Russian.
"Italian Mafia, Russian Bratva, Albanian psychopaths—you're all the same," I spat, even though my survival instincts were screaming at me to shut up. "Blood and money and bodies in the river. So just get it over with already."
"I don't work for Chenkov," he said, and there was something in his tone that suggested being associated with Chenkov offended him more than being called a piece of shit. "Or the Italians. Or the Albanians, for that matter."
"Right, you just happen to be hanging out in a storage unit at 2 AM with a gun and bloody knuckles for fun."
"This is my storage unit," he said, like that explained everything. "You're the one who broke in. Am I not allowed to apprehend the intruder?"
Oh. Well, fuck.
Before I could process that particular complication, movement in the corner caught my eye. The puppy had woken up, probably disturbed by all my thrashing and screaming. He wobbled out from his newspaper nest on legs that barely worked right, his swollen eye weeping pus, his ribs showing through patchy fur.
My whole body went rigid. Not from fear for myself—that ship had sailed—but for him. I'd seen what men like this did to inconveniences. Had watched a dealer kick a stray cat to death just because it was in his way. Had seen worse things done to animals whose only crime was existing in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The puppy sniffed the air, wobbled closer on those unsteady legs. His tail—what was left of it after someone had done a hack job trying to crop it—wiggled slightly. He was heading straight for us. Straight for those expensive Italian leather shoes with my spit still glistening on one.
"No," I whispered, trying to somehow project the thought at the puppy. "Stay there. Please stay there."
But puppies don't understand the danger of approaching men with dead eyes and bloody knuckles. He kept coming, stopping right at the man's feet. He sniffed the shoe, the one I'd spit on, with serious concentration. Then he circled once, twice, and lifted his leg.
The stream of puppy piss hit the leather with remarkable accuracy for something that could barely walk straight. It went on for what felt like forever, the sound echoing off the storage unit's walls like the world's most inappropriate fountain.
I tensed every muscle, waiting for the kick. The gunshot. The casual violence that always came when animals inconvenienced humans who saw them as things rather than lives. My throat closed up, preparing for the puppy's pain to be my fault, another failure to protect something helpless.
Instead, the man chuckled.
Not a fake sound or a cruel one. An actual, genuine chuckle that rumbled through his chest and into my back like distant thunder that promised rain instead of lightning.
