He walked a step ahead of her, a hand clenched around her arm as he dragged her through the door. He shook her away from him and stood in the doorway, his body half in and half out, his head directed back down the hallway that they had left behind. Resting there, his back up against the frame, Mikhail didn’t think twice about telling the guards to pull the triggers in a whisper that nobody would have heard. In his head he counted, one , two, three . The guns went off in unison just as he reached three. Nobody screamed, nobody made a sound, but from somewhere below them, Mikhail thought he could hear a growl from the thing trapped in the foyer.
Closing the door, he walked in and regarded his jacket, one side, his right side where he had been keeping something hidden and held up, uneasily, under an arm. He wasn’t looking for long, but it was enough for him to know that she must have noticed something. He didn’t smirk at her this time, didn’t smile. He was grim, serious.
“I have something here. It’s an antique and I spent a pretty penny trying to get it away from its former owner’s hands.” Over five thousand dollars, and that was a bargain. The thing was old, very old and worth the money, he’d been told. “It’s medieval. They call it the Cat’s Paw and from what I’ve read, it hurts like hell.”
Mikhail opened his jacket and pulled it out, a device as large as four fingers of a man’s hand, attached to a short handle, with the curved spikes sticking out, rusted around the tips. “It was used as a torture device, to rip skin. I thought it was neat.”