Chapter 14 Konstantin
fourteen
Konstantin
Blood dries like leather on skin if you let it sit for too long.
The faucet hammers heat into the ache in my knuckles until the water runs clear. I dry my hands and then tuck my chin to my chest as I try to step out of the Bogeyman skin and go back to just being a man again.
With a sigh, I shake my head and make my way back into the office where Misha decided to stay once we got back to my house.
The charm sits on top of my desk, a wicked taunt with teeth.
Misha leans against the window, chewing on a cigar that isn’t lit. “She enjoyed herself,” he says in Russian, nodding to the charm.
“She enjoyed the part where she wasn’t around for me to put my fist through her throat,” I answer, making sure my blade is still secured at my side. “That will eventually be corrected.”
I pocket my phone and pause at the door, looking back at the one thing in here that she touched—the photograph Cressida handed me before I left.
I tuck it into my inner jacket pocket without thinking.
“Ready?” Misha asks, watching the movement, but not saying anything.
“Da. Let’s go.”
The war room below my compound purrs with quiet violence. Dragomir, Yuri, Zavid, and Sasha take their places along the far wall. Stasia waits with a slim tablet, her dark eyes sliding to the charm in my hand. She doesn’t flinch when I flip it to her.
“Metallurgy?”
Stasia studies it intently. “Composite. Definitely not cheap. CNC etched, not hand cut.” She smirks, amused by the Reaper’s theatrics. “She wants you to know she can spend money to taunt you.”
“How decadent.” I sit and flick my wrist in her direction. “The compound breakdown on the drug.”
Stasia’s mouth tightens. “Whatever this ‘Reaper’ serum is, it’s not just one thing. It’s layered. The base looks like a synthetic stimulant, but something in it binds it at the genetic level. It’s why our tox screens keep coming up inconclusive. The binder degrades fast.”
“Is it old bloodline?” Misha asks, his voice flat.
She shakes her head. “It mimics, but it isn’t powerful. It’s more like it’s a . . . parasite. It hitchhikes the way a bad rumor does.”
“Have you tested it?” I ask.
“Yes. Two hours of manic strength in both. Forty-seven minutes of psychosis. Then cardiac arrest.” Stasia’s tone doesn’t change. She knows I don’t like cruelty for sport, but I like it for truth, for knowledge. “I wouldn’t put this on my worst enemy.”
“I would,” I say.
Stasia almost smiles at that.
“Supply lines?”
“Your Philly address from Kron Vass checks,” Misha cuts in, pushing a map across the table. “It’s not a safehouse. It is a meet point. Broker comes in Tuesdays and Fridays at midnight. Cash in, product out. They move through the port as ‘frozen pollock’.”
“Which carrier are they stamped with?”
“Blue Harrow,” Stasia says, swiping to a manifest. “They’re clean on paper, but not after tonight.”
I tap the dock coordinates. “We hit both. The meet and the cold storage. If she is as arrogant as she reads, she’ll test us again as soon as she knows we’ve found her little charm.”
Misha arches a brow. “You assume she wants the dance.”
She wrote on a dead man’s wall, ‘Catch me if you can.’” I bare my teeth at him. “I have always been very good at the chase.”
“Protections for the princess?” Dragomir asks, referring to my bonded.
“Triple her coverage tonight. Lucetta remains lead. She knows Cressida best. Pair two of ours to her hip and rotate the outer ring. I want eyes on every approach within five blocks.” I look up, my voice lowering.
“No one tells Cressida we are using her place as the decoy grid. She will only agree, and I do not need her bravery tonight.”
Philadelphia is a wet mouth of smoke when we arrive. The townhouse at the edge of Fishtown looks like a hundred others—gritty brick, cheap blackout curtains, and a security camera tucked up the gutter like a spider waiting.
We take the back.
Sasha cuts the chain on the rear gate with a soft crunch. Zavid ghosts the camera with a magnet shroud while Yuri works on picking the lock. I love when my men are quiet, but I love it more when they’re fast.
“Two heat signatures,” Misha whispers from the alley, his eyes on the screen in his hand. “Back room. One moving.”
I nod. “On my count.”
We breach as one, not giving anyone inside time to prepare. The man at the table doesn’t even stand before his cheek caresses the wood as my knife kisses his throat. The second reaches for a pistol taped under the chair, but Misha puts him to sleep with the butt of his gun quicker than a prayer.
The table is a broker’s altar. Burner phones, a phony ledger, and three neat rows of vials that glow faintly red under the cheap LEDs with the familiar Reaper logo. I uncork one and the scent hits the back of my nose. There’s power there, but it’s tainted. Muted and not right.
“Don’t,” the man under my hand rasps. “You don’t want that.”
“I want many things I should not have,” I murmur, applying pressure until his face goes red. “Give me names.”
He licks his lips. “You’ll kill me.”
“Of course, I will. But that is what happens when you choose to play in my playground. You know who I am, and you know that I do not let go those who betray me. Your only choice now is how quickly it happens for you.”
Still, he hesitates, so I apply more pressure.
He cracks quickly. They always do when their options are narrow and they believe speaking the truth will keep them alive.
Fucking fools.
“The cargo comes in on B-H Fifty-Four. A reefer container with a big blue crown painted on the side. Two men in a white van will pick up and run down to cold storage on Noble. We don’t keep it long.”
“Where is the Reaper?”
His eyes flutter, but he keeps quiet, smart enough not to say a name. I tighten my fingers until his breath whistles past his lips. “Last. Question. Where. Is. She.”
There’s a beat of silence before he admits, “Not here. She doesn’t touch the ground. She sends others to do it for her. She . . . she said the Bogeyman will always chase the wrong shadow.”
I consider that angle. The charm in the dirt at the border and the photo slipping through Blackwell security as easy as breath. My smile turns violent. “I do not chase shadows. I eat what casts them.”
Releasing him, I step back and straighten the sleeves of my jacket.
Sasha hauls him upright. “What do you want done?”
“Bag both and deliver them to the pit. I’m done bending an ear to cowards who only find their tongue after I’ve ground their face into the dirt.”
“Are we bringing the stock?” Yuri asks, gesturing to the vials.
Stasia’s voice crackles softly over the comms. “Bring them. I want what’s inside.”
“Port’s moving,” Dragomir says from the door, his eyes on his phone. “B-H Fifty-Four just pinged the harbor beacons. Fifteen minutes out.”
“Then we’re late.”
We slide through the stacks of steel at the docks without a sound. A big blue crown on a reefer box points at us from a hundred meters away like a middle finger. The crane grinds, cables swaying, then lowers the prize to the asphalt with a low, old groan.
There are two men in a white van idling three lanes over, just like the broker promised. They don’t notice us until it’s too late to matter.
“Zavid.”
I don’t have to say more than his name.
He steps into their headlights, raises a hand, and smiles like a saint.
While their eyes are focused on him, my world snaps clean and I move too quick to be seen.
I wrench their passenger door off its hinges and toss the man to the ground.
Misha drags the driver out by his hair, and he gets one syllable of a prayer out before Sasha ends the conversation with an elbow and zip ties.
“Boss.” Dragomir’s tone is sharp. “Do you hear that?”
There, under the hum of the generator, is a thin insistent ticking that doesn’t belong on this dock.
The hairs on my forearms rise as I recognize the tone.
My men move without thinking, placing their bodies between me and the container as I step to the lock.
“Careful,” Misha barks, his eyes scanning the world around us.
I snap the lock and roll the doors, cold air exhaling against my face.
The inside of the container should be stacked with fish.
Instead, it is a theatre set up for our entertainment.
Empty metal shelves line either side like pews and in the center is a chair bolted to the floor with a man tied to it.
His mouth is sewn shut with a coarse black twine, and his shirt is open to the sternum where one word is carved neat and deliberate.
ALMOST.
The ticking gets louder, and my blood turns to ice before heating.
“Bomb,” Sasha says.
“Find it now,” I order.
Sasha slides under the chair the man is bound to.
“There. Left rear under the rails. HG switch. Mercury trigger. There’s a glass capsule filled with liquid metal.
Tilt it, jostle it, breathe wrong, and the mercury rolls, closes the circuit, and the whole damn thing lights up.
It’s an anti-handling bastard, which means the bomb’s rigged to kill anyone trying to move it.
If that silver bead sloshes to the wrong end, we’ll paint the sky red, Boss. ”
“Can you defuse it?” Misha asks.
“Yes.” A pause as he studies it more. “No.”
“Which is it?” Dragomir grinds out.
Sasha slides out from underneath the chair carefully and his mouth tightens. “Timer’s short. Whoever packed this wanted us to find it in time to be scared and not in time to be safe.”
I step into the cold and over to the bound man. His eyes roll to me, wild with tears dripping down his face. The stitches in his mouth tremble as he tries to plead with me.
There’s a moment where I wish I didn’t remember every face I can’t save.
“Kon,” Misha says, low and urgent.
Choose.
I put my hand on the man’s forehead. “You are seen,” I tell him in Russian.
He won’t understand, but it doesn’t matter.
The dead speak all languages.
“I am sorry.”
Then, I move.
“Clear,” I roar, catching the chair in both hands and lifting.
Sasha swears and dives as the world snaps into a single vein of sound.
Then I run.
The water waits for me as I speed toward it. The bomb’s heartbeat rips through my bones, but I don’t count or breath. I just throw.
Metal kisses black river, and the night splits its lips. The blast punches the water up like a wall, spraying glittering shrapnel into the starless night. Then the echo rolls the docks like thunder laughing.
The silence after is a living thing.
Misha and Dragomir are beside me in seconds while Sasha drags himself up by a ladder, grinning and pale.
“That was not standard operating procedure,” he jokes.
“You’re welcome,” I mutter, dusting my hands off and shoving them into my pockets.
“Eyes up,” Yuri warns. “Cameras.”
I grin wolfishly. “Let her watch. She should know what she is up against.”
“Stasia, scrub the footage,” I order.
“Already done, boss.”
Sirens bloom in the distance, our cue to fade into the shadows.
Stasia meets us at the garage with a rolling cart and a frown. I slide the intact vials to her, hands trembling when they’re normally steady. She clocks the shake, but doesn’t say anything proving to me, once again, why I pay her more than the lawyer we have on retainer.
“Find me whatever the fuck she has hiding in this blood.”
“I’ll pull out every thread,” she promises.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I pull it out. Stepping into the dim corner, I slide my thumb along the screen. “Kisa,” I greet her, using a shortened version of her name I’ve become fond of.
There’s a pause and then a soft sound breaches the speakers, the kind you make when you’ve been holding your breath for too long. “Monster man.”
“Go to sleep, Lisichka,” I murmur, some of the iron around my ribs loosening.
“Bossy.” There’s a shift as she moves around in her bed. “I felt you do something stupid. What did you do?”
“Effective,” I correct.
“What?”
“I did something effective and saved my men’s lives. I will not apologize for that.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.” She exhales slowly. “You’re okay?”
“Da.”
When I expect her to poke, to push, to make a fight where there isn’t one, she instead sends what she sent earlier. Heat that is not just want and warmth that is not just tenderness. It slides through the bond like a palm to a fevered brow.
The echo of the blast quiets in my head, and I sigh in peace.
“You are dangerous,” I murmur, and I don’t just mean in the way her legs wrapped around my waist in the cemetery. “Go to sleep, Lisichka. I will see you tomorrow.”
“Promise?”
“Always.”
I end the call before I say anything else that a wise man would keep to himself.
Misha is waiting at the door. “You good?”
“For now.”
“The Reaper?”
I glance down to my hand, where a sliver of black twine from the dead man’s mouth clings to it. “She thinks she is making a throne. What she fails to understand is that I am making a pyre.”
“Then let’s gather wood,” Misha replies, grinning sharply.
Somewhere out there is a ghost who calls herself a god, but something Giselda hasn’t learned is that even gods fall.