Chapter 8
EIGHT
KSENIA
Looking around the small bathroom, I’m surprised to find modern fixtures everywhere.
For a castle in the middle of nowhere, this sink has a nice marble countertop and fancy fixtures.
I take the opportunity to use the toilet and wash my hands, then take several handfuls of water from the sink. The water is cold but pure tasting.
We have to be nearish to civilization, right?
I try to retrace my steps to the chateau location.
Well, the ones Dad didn’t ask me to blindfold myself for.
All I knew was that I flew from Helsinki to a small Finnish airport, then was driven for about six hours.
I have no idea in what direction. Because of the blindfold and Dad’s secretiveness, I suspected into Russia.
But still. Northern Russia might be remote, but it’s not so remote that a place like this could just go unknown.
Then again, the blue guy mentioned something about invisibility, so if. . . magic of some sort was real. . . I shake my head. Did they make this whole place invisible? Is that even possible?
Twenty-four hours ago, I would have said that big man-monsters with six arms or lion-goat men with wings were impossible. But what do I know?
No, nothing that happened today feels real. After I go to the bathroom and wash my hands, instead of getting dressed right away, I find myself staring at my two knives.
Dad gave me the first one, a Bowie knife made with high carbon steel and a fine bone handle, on my tenth birthday.
Yeah, yeah, most people might think it’s weird to give your kid a wickedly sharp, deadly weapon, but neither of us ever pretended to be normal. I mean, maybe we were for a little while when I was small, but that was back when we had Mom.
If there’s a single truth about my father, it’s this: he loved Katia Volkov with every fiber of his being. And when a rival bratva brutally killed her when they broke into our home looking for my father. . . Well, he never got over it.
He went apeshit and murdered the head of the bratva who’d ordered the assassination in one of the most brutal attacks the Russian public had ever seen.
He used an axe and killed not only the Pakhan but all his sons who worked for him, sparing only a recently married man’s young wife.
He considered her an innocent, but she witnessed the attack and immediately went to the authorities.
My father had connections with the police like most Pakhans, but not even they could protect him when the press made news of the brutality of the attack public.
My father has been in hiding ever since, running things from behind the scenes with his brother as a front man and, as I came of age, me as a go-between.
Since I was a child, my father had been preparing me to take over for my uncle. Other daughters were Daddy’s little princess. I was Daddy’s little assassin.
I was my father’s princess in some ways. He prepared me ruthlessly to take over his own crown one day. But ever since what happened to my mother, he was determined that neither of us would be caught unawares again.
So he homeschooled me. I preferred this because the one year he’d tried enrolling me in public school when we were in Bulgaria, I only ended up regularly getting in fights with the boys and being sent home when I gave them all bloody noses.
After morning lessons with him at home, doing boring things like reading and math, I began what I considered real school.
Weapons training. Knives. Guns. How to kill with objects found in an office. A kitchen. Hand-to-hand combat. Along with studying strategy.
My father never lamented the men he’d killed, only how sloppy he’d been about getting caught.
And still, I think my father only thought all was mostly self-defense training. My. . . other job didn’t come about until later when another of our enemies found my father when I was visiting him in Kazakhstan for my twenty-first birthday.
They attacked us in the middle of the night.
I froze for fifteen seconds when I heard the noise of glass shattering. Fifteen seconds that might have cost my father his life.
My training kicked in, and without hesitation, I grabbed the knives I kept sheathed under my pillow, opting for them instead of the gun in my nightstand.
I didn’t know how many of them there would be, but if I could dispatch as many as possible as quietly as possible, we’d be better off. My father yelled at me later for not grabbing the gun.
I considered it more important that he was alive to yell at me after I’d slit the necks of all four assassins before they could get to his bedroom.
And when we needed money to make an important investment a couple years later, I decided to diversify our portfolio by offering additional services.
I let it be known among the right people that my father had access to an assassin we would hire out should the parameters be right—no women, no kids, half up front, half on delivery.
For the last five years, that’s what I’ve been doing.
I wouldn’t say full-time. Maybe four to six jobs a year.
Dad wasn’t exactly happy about it, but it increased his brand profile and, on several occasions, gave him the kind of favor and pull with the right people.
So when he said he had a chance to come out of exile, I was stupid enough to believe him.
I thought, wow, maybe I’ve helped him in a crazy, roundabout way.
Little did I know it would all go sideways when we were betrayed by the one person he completely trusted besides me—
My eyes squeeze shut as fury washes through me.
For so much of my life, I could never understand what my father felt when he killed that Pakhan and his sons in such a rage.
Yes, I’d lost my mother in a violent way.
In many ways, I thought I had even more rights to rage about it than my father, for.
. . reasons. But the effects of his rash actions screwed up so much of the rest of his life.
I never said it to his face, but I was mad at him for lashing out in the thoughtless way he had.
I was always dispassionate in my kills. Calculating and cold. I was a mere instrument of death, taking out people who needed removing from the world.
I had no illusions about the shadowy world of crime my father and I operated in.
There were few innocents, and I always had enough time to research my subjects before taking their lives to satisfy myself that none were in that category.
I had enough blood on my hands at this point; I knew I wasn’t an innocent either.
But my mother had been, so I respected life and told myself I’d never accept collateral damage.
Still, now, the buzzing red rage burning through my veins thinking about my uncle’s betrayal. . . I open my eyes, shaking.
I understand my father more than I ever have.
I want to kill my uncle and everyone he’s ever loved. And I don’t want to do it quickly. I want to make him suffer. I want him to beg me for mercy. Then I want to deny him it.
I look down at my second knife, which immediately calms me. It’s almost as beautiful as the first, though it’s a more obvious weapon. Bigger and shorter, though not heavier, it has a sharp, tapered point and a hook crafted into the steel.
It’s a knife made for gutting.
I set both knives on the bathroom counter and stare at them, my mind calming. Yes, I will make my uncle suffer before the end. And I will make whoever helped him watch helplessly before I do the same to them.
I pace the small bathroom, then shake my hands out vigorously as I look at the door. Even as my heart thumps for revenge, it’s strange to come back to my body and the here and now and remember I’m in a castle surrounded by monster men.
First, I have to escape here and get back there.
I quickly pull on the other woman’s clothes, frowning at the bright colors.
There’s a turquoise sweater with peach-colored circles, but at least the jeans are dark blue.
I’m European. I prefer dark colors. And considering my job, I usually only want to stand out when I use my assets as a distraction.
It can be helpful to be a small, pretty blonde woman sometimes.
No one ever expects the gutting knife until it’s twisting and pulling their intestines out before their very eyes.
And usually, by then, they’re too choked up on their own blood to express their surprise.
It’s too cold in any room without a blazing fire to linger long, so I pull the sweater over my head, intentionally not looking in the mirror.
I look at the knives on the counter instead. Carefully, one side at a time, I stick the unsheathed knives into the pockets so they pierce through the fabric. I smile at the ease with which they slice through the material.
Then I pull them back out, sheathe them, shove the sheathed blades into the pockets, and pull the jeans on.
The woman and I are close to the same size, and I don’t care if the monsters can see the sheaths through the fabric of the jeans.
They can apparently crumple steel with their hands, so there’s no point hiding them anyway.
Tomorrow, though, I’ll be gone from this place, and if I face another creature like that lynx, I want my blades within easy reach.
When I emerge from the bathroom, the big two-faced man with wings and a tail is there. I jerk, about to slam the door in his face, when he’s yanked backward by the one with all the arms.
“I am sorry for my brothers,” he says, jerking two thumbs toward the other one.
I’ve noticed that sometimes his arms do that—move in tandem with his speech.
It’s curious. I suppose I don’t think about moving my arms, so maybe it’s the same for him.
Has he always had them, or are they some sort of lab experiment gone wrong?