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Zevran steps out, unhurried and self-possessed, straightening his jacket, entirely unmoved by the officer’s uniform or gun.

The hysterical giggle is right there behind my teeth. My hand flies to my mouth. This is not funny. None of this is funny. Zevran is about to be arrested on a back road at dusk, and I am trying not to laugh like a woman coming apart at the seams.

The trooper steps forward, getting into Zevran’s space the way men like him do. Zevran doesn’t step back. He stands exactly where he is.

“I don’t like your attitude.”

“I don’t like your fucking face.” Zevran’s smile is so brittle it could shatter at any moment. “Since I’ve finished with your mother, why don’t you go and crawl back up her?”

I’ve never understood why men are rude about each other’s mothers, but the insult lands with terrifying accuracy.

The trooper drives his fist hard into Zevran’s stomach.

My laughter dies instantly.

Zevran doubles over, baring his teeth as he tries to suck air back into his lungs.

I’m out of the car before I’ve even decided to move.

One second I’m sitting in the passenger seat watching the cop hit Zevran, and the next I’m on the road with the door swinging open behind me, my feet carrying me forward in blind, hysterical fury.

“Don’t you dare touch him!”

Both men turn to look at me. The trooper’s expression cycles through surprise and confusion as a small blonde woman in clothes four sizes too large comes storming across the gravel at him.

Zevran forces himself to straighten up, his eyes wide with pure shock. “Viktoriya.” His voice is sharp and commanding. “Get back in the car. Now!”

My eyes are fixed on the trooper, and I keep coming.

I’m not seeing him. I’m seeing the police station with fluorescent lights, and a man in uniform, tearing a report in two. I’m thinking about making myself so small in the basement where I suffered alongside a dozen other women, where Emily died. I remember all the times I made myself small and agreeable and did as I was told, and none of it made anything better for me.

I’ve had enough. It’s been enough for a long time, but I just didn’t know until right this second.

The trooper is armed and towers over me, and I have only one good hand, but I make use of it. I ball up my fist and pummel his arm, his chest, his stomach.

“Don’t you touch him!” I’m barely aware of what I’m saying. My words are closer to shrieks. “Don’t you fucking touch him!”

“Viktoriya, don’t—”

I feel Zevran’s hands on me, trying to pull me away.

The trooper’s face flashes with ugly anger. He raises a meaty hand and violently backhands me across the face.

The world tilts. The road comes up fast, and I hit the dirt with the heel of my good hand, the impact juddering all the way up my arm. There’s dust in my mouth. A sharp bloom of pain across my cheek. I stay there on my hand and knees, blinking at the gravel, too stunned to move.

“Viktoriya.”

When I look up, Zevran’s face is completely unrecognizable. Clenched tight, murderous fury burning in his eyes. He bears down on the trooper like an apex predator. He punches him across the face, and I hear a heavy, sickening crack of bone. The cop is a big man, but it only takes three brutal punches for him to collapse into the dirt in a burst of crimson blood, and his eyes roll back into his head as he goes limp.

Zevran doesn’t pause. He rips the cop’s radio receiver from his shoulder and smashes it against a boulder. He fishes a phone out of the unconscious man’s pocket, stomps on the screen until it shatters, and flings it deep into the trees. Then he stalks to the patrol car, reaches inside, and with some teeth-gritted swearing in Russian, wrenches the heavy radio dash unit right from the console, breaks it against the gravel, and kicks the ruined object into a drainage ditch.

All this happens in the space of a few seconds while I’m on the ground, breathing hard and too stunned to move.

Then Zevran’s hands are on me, careful, warm, and trembling slightly. He crouches in the dust in front of me, his face appearing above mine, his jaw set in a way that has nothing to do with the trooper.

“Let me see.”

I let him look, and he turns my face left and right, examining me in the dim dusk light.