Page 215 of Savage Throne
The good thing was that I was free of Chen’s hold.
The bad part was that I had lost my balance and was falling back.
Ahhh!
Before I hit the ground, strong arms caught me.
Oh, thank God!
I glanced back.
Dima helped me up. “Got you.”
I blinked up at him. “I have to get down there—”
“You do.”
I checked the arena.
Lei was moving again, crawling forward. His body trembled as more black liquid spilled from his mouth.
My chest tightened.
I headed down the stands.
“Hold up. Let me give you something.” Keeping my pace, Dima got to my side and tried to hand me his gold phone. “Take this. I would use it myself but a Flower Mafia leader killing Leo would cause an unnecessary war. Yet, the Mountain Mistress doing it, would be legendary and poetic.”
I stared at his phone. “What do you want me to do with that, call the police?”
We left the stands and got to the ground.
“It’s not a phone.” He moved his fingers in a blur of precision. With a soft click, he slid the top of the device back, and the sleek unmistakable glint of a tiny gun barrel emerged.
The rest of the fake phone’s case fell to the ground.
“Shit.” My breath hitched. The transformation was surreal—what had been a perfectly innocuous smartphone a second ago was now a compact, deadly weapon.
Four inches wide.
Three inches long.
Barely an inch thick.
Its bullets must have been pretty tiny.
It was smaller than any firearm I’d ever seen, but there was no mistaking its lethality.
“3D-printed.” Dima quickly turned it in his hands and talked fast. “I needed something inconspicuous, something no one would suspect.”
The trigger was concealed within a narrow groove, and the grip extended smoothly from what had once been the edge of the phone.
He twisted the gun slightly, showing me the safety mechanism, a tiny, recessed switch along the side. “Slide this down to fire.”
Fast, I grabbed it from him.
“You’ve got three rounds, loaded and ready. That’s it. Make. Them. Count.”
“Thank you!” I tore across the chaos of the arena, my heart pounding in time with my frantic steps. I tightened my hand around the gun and flicked off the safety switch.
