Nie Jiuluo drove her knee into his groin and grabbed for the gun with her left hand in the same breath. Yan Tuo was fast. He clamped down on her left hand and pinned her knee, then slid his fingers down to her calf and wrenched it outward. Her grip on the gun never closed. The moment her fingertips grazed the barrel, she already knew it was gone. He was too strong. She couldn't pry it loose. She shifted. Her eyes caught the belt at his waist. No thought, just motion. She hooked two fingers into his waistband and used the leverage to launch herself upward. One breath, and her arms were wrapped around his head and neck from behind, body pressed flush against his back. She pressed her finger into the groove of his cervical vertebrae, found the right notch, and leaned close to his ear. "Die." She twisted. Yan Tuo felt it the instant her weight shifted onto his back. He knew exactly what that position meant. A bad angle on the cervical spine meant dizziness at best, dea...
Lin Xirou studied him. "Old Qian said you crashed your car and ended up in a coma. What aren't you telling me?" Yan Tuo kept his voice easy, deliberately scrambling the timeline. "That was before the accident. I'd been running on no sleep for days. Fatigue driving, hit the roadbed, went out hard. Long enough that people thought I was in a coma." He paused. "I used the needle on Sun Zhou while I was out there. Same one you told me to bring back if dog-teeth ever scratched him. You said the outside doctors couldn't handle that kind of wound." Lin Xirou's expression didn't move. "Banya doesn't attack people for nothing. Did you do something, even by accident?" "No." He shook his head. "While they had me, I caught a few words. Something about my car. They said it had a smell. A sexy smell." He watched her face. There it was — just a flicker, but it was there. "Aunt Lin," he said, "you kn...