look of such loathing that she instantly dropped her hand and scuttled backwards on the dirt floor. He switched his focus from her to the injured man, who was sputtering water and groaning in pain.
Jozef grabbed hold of his collar with both hands and lifted him off the ground, his legs swinging uselessly underneath him. Shaun wanted to scream out, to tell him to leave the man alone, that he was in too much pain to be of any use. It didn’t seem to matter though, she was the only one cared about his state beyond getting him to tell them whatever they needed.
The man who had come downstairs with Jozef, the one who spoke with her in the van, stepped up to them and snarled, “Tell us where Krystoff is.”
The injured man blinked several times as if trying to remove a fog, then groaned loudly, bringing his unbroken arm up to shield himself. It was no use though, as Jozef dropped one arm, using his other hand to hold the guy up off the floor. Shaun was amazed at the strength it would take to do that. She could usually tell how much a person weighed by looking at them, a hazard of her profession, and she suspected Jozef was holding a two-hundred-pound man as if he weighed no more than a sack of groceries.
Jozef pulled his fist back and sent it flying into the other guy’s gut. Hitting him in the belly, then continuing to punch him, getting him in the face, arms and stomach. The hits would be unbearable over top of his other wounds and the squeezing pain in his chest, but they weren’t lethal. Jozef seemed to know what he was doing; like a surgeon, he was precise.
Shaun bit her lip so hard that it bled into her mouth. She wanted to scream. She wanted to leap to her feet and defend her patient, but she knew it was a lost cause. They were going to kill this guy and then her. Maybe if she kept her silence, they would forget about her. At least for now. She’d seen too much death in her career, which had prepared her for the inevitability of dying, but now, every precious second seemed to count. She wanted as many as she could get, even if those seconds came along with the horror of watching someone else beaten to death.
She was about to cry out that the man was dying, that he couldn’t talk to them, when his groans turned to words. The words were garbled gibberish, pushed through a mouth full of blood and broken teeth. Shaun didn’t understand what he was saying, then she realized that he wasn’t speaking English, but Ukrainian. She’d managed to pick up enough to interact with her patients on a basic level, but she hadn’t been in the country long enough to speak fluently, or understand it well, especially when the words were being spoken with rapid desperation.
Finally, the words ended, and Jozef nodded. He dropped the man, who fell backward with a crash, his head hitting the floor so hard it bounced. Shaun winced and started to crawl toward him. Maybe if they were done the interrogation they would leave and she could tend to the man, at least make his passing a little more comfortable.
Before she could reach him, Jozef pulled his gun again, trained it on the man and put a bullet through his head. It was a clean shot. The head remained intact, the only sign of a fatal injury a couple of drops of blood seeping from the wound. Shaun let out a scream of horror and scrambled away, crawling back until she was pressed against a wall.
Her heart thundered, and she looked up at Jozef, expecting the gun to swing around toward her. She was going to die in that dirty basement, next to the stranger she’d failed to protect. She didn’t know what to expect. She thought maybe her mind would flood with images of her family, or maybe a bright light. Instead, there was nothing but blank terror. Every instinct within her was screaming at her to run away, to try her hardest to escape the fate that was rushing at her, but her limbs were locked, and she could do nothing but watch the gun swing toward her.
She stared up at Jozef defiantly, tried to tell him silently that he didn’t scare her, that she was prepared for death. None of it was