Chapter 23 Konstantin
twenty-three
Konstantin
The mask fits over my face like a promise, my world narrowing to only the empty eye sockets.
We sit in a circle of five, shadows stitched from different continents, bound by old blood and older rules.
Bratva, Cosa Nostra, The Firm, the Cartel, and The Irish Mob.
There was a time our bloodlines would’ve happily slit each other’s throats and fed the pieces to the dogs.
Now, we stand in the same room and call ourselves family.
Venatori Nocturnus. Hunters of the night. Enforcers of the laws our great-great grandfathers carved in bone.
Tonight, we hunt.
Battista slides his gloves on slow, like it’s just foreplay to the violence we’re about to unleash.
Tiernan mutters something that might be a prayer or an excuse.
With him, it’s probably both. Ignacio checks his magazine without blinking.
Kingston adjusts his mask with the efficiency of a man who hates the ceremony but never misses a step of it.
We ensure our bodies are covered in black from head to toe. People may assume they know the identities of the men in skull masks, like Giselda, but we leave nothing that would allow them to identify us. That would be too dangerous for all of us.
“We don’t leave witnesses,” I say. My voice comes rough through the modulator, distorted and monstrous. “No recruits. No messengers. Anyone carrying her scythe brand dies. Tonight, I want us cutting arteries, not veins.”
They nod their agreement, our movements already syncing up. You can feel it in the air, the otherworld-ness of us.
We don’t knock.
We descend.
Five cloaked nightmares stepping from shadow into slaughter.
The streets taste of fear. It clings to the fog and the steel skeletons of buildings half-finished but never claimed.
The Reaper’s infection has spread. Her loyalists peddle her forbidden serum on our streets. Cities that have belonged to our bloodlines long before she was ever old enough to hold a blade.
When we reach the warehouse, the stink of rot and chemicals pour out of it like a confession.
Inside, men and women with glassy eyes and veins lit beneath their skin roam. More of Giselda’s soldiers—addicts, guinea pigs, soldiers in name only. They don’t see us at first. Why would they? Shadows don’t announce themselves.
I move first.
The bone knife slides free of its sheath with the ease of a story I’ve told a hundred times.
I catch the first guard under the jaw and drag upward before he even has time to open his mouth to scream.
His blood pours hot over my wrist, and the bond grates with Cressida’s jolt as she feels the violence, the surge, even from across the city.
I shove it down, leaving her to feel the echo of triumph instead of the raw meat of what I am inside.
Gunfire cracks as Ignacio lays down a wall of bullets.
Tiernan moves like smoke, his blade catching throats in neat, quick arcs.
Battista ghosts up behind a man and snaps his neck before the body knows it’s dead.
Kingston fires his gun, irritation carved in each shot as if killing is paperwork that we’re making him file late.
I carve. I’m not neat about it, not quick. I am the lesson they need to learn, so I ensure I teach it well.
Bodies hit the floor like thunder, and their blood sings to the monster inside me.
A guard lunges with a syringe, the drug glowing faint red in the barrel. I catch his wrist before he can touch me, crushing his bones, and shove the needle into this throat. He gurgles and twitches, his body collapsing at my feet and convulsing like a fish on pavement.
Tiernan cackles as he cuts through two men at once, dual blades spinning like a butcher’s ballet. “This is almost fun,” he muses, kicking a severed hand off of his boot.
I grab a straggler by the hair and slam him into a concrete pillar hard enough to leave a wet bloom behind. “Where is your false queen?” The voice modulator makes my voice sound like a whisper from Hell.
The man’s eyes roll back in terror. “I—I swear—I don’t know. She never shows up, she just—”
“Wrong answer.”
My knife goes deep into his stomach, then up, higher, until it notches bone and drop him like garbage. “You chose the wrong person to worship.”
More of her soldiers come at us and Battista meets them in the center. His hands flash, three bodies dropping in quick succession. Kingston takes out the others, showing them no mercy.
When we’re done, the warehouse looks like a painting gone wrong. Red smeared and pooling and bodies folded where their spines failed.
Then the space fills with silence except for the low humming from the back.
Tucked into the back like some goddamn altar to addiction is at least a dozen unmarked crates. Kingston cracks one open, and inside, black vials glow faintly, like venom with a soul.
Whatever this new blend is, it’s angrier. It clings to the glass like it’s alive.
Kingston hisses. “She changed it again.”
“How do you know?” I ask, stepping closer.
He touches the vial, and it pulses once as if it’s greeting the blood that runs through his veins. “Because it’s reacting to bloodline markers.”
“She’s evolving it. Trying to adapt to us,” Battista muses.
“To mimic us.”
My grip tightens around my blade. She’s trying to recreate the power that runs through us. Trying to make herself as strong as we are. That won’t happen. She’ll never truly be able to replicate our blood no matter how much she tries. She’s not the first who has tried, and they’ve all failed before.
“Twenty down,” Battista says, his eyes roaming around the space we’re in.
“Twenty wasted,” Ignacio corrects. “Addicts desperate enough to not care what they’re shooting into their veins as long as they get the high they’re seeking. They’ll do whatever she asks of them for it.”
Kingston shakes his head. “She’s not building an army. She’s building chaos, and chaos eventually eats itself.”
“She thinks she’s clever,” I say, wiping my knife on a dead man’s shirt. “But chaos doesn’t last.”
We stand in the ruin like five monsters who were supposed to rip each other apart, looking at what we made. Blood pools at our boots, thick enough to stick.
“She feels us,” I murmur. “Every body we cut down, she feels it. She knows we’re coming.”
“Good,” Tiernan says.
“Let her feel it,” Battista adds.
Ignacio spits on the floor. “Let her choke on it.”
Kingston sighs. “You’re all bloody lunatics.”
“Yes,” I agree.
The smile I wear behind the mask is sharp enough to bleed.
We torch it all before we leave. Every crate, every vial.
We crack open abandoned fuel barrels and drench the drugs before striking the match.
We don’t leave anything that can be scavenged.
No remnants, no fucking hope to build again from this.
The fire races like its starving, eager to eat anything that will fuel it and satiate its hunger.
We walk out together like a funeral procession of demons then turn to watch the fire.
A dealer crawls out of the flames, half his face melting, coughing for mercy. Without hesitation, Kingston walks over and snaps his neck with his boot.
This isn’t justice.
This is fucking wrath.
Sirens wail far off as we climb into our SUVs but none of us look back.
The city moves outside in blurs of neon and shadow. The bond whispers steadily to me now, quieter, but I can feel Cressida’s pulse in it, her unease, her stubborn fire. She doesn’t know what we’ve done tonight, not in detail, but she knows the monster in my blood is hungry.
“Closer,” I whisper to myself. “Every body brings me closer to your throat, Giselda, and before long I’ll be stepping on it.”
The Bogeyman doesn’t lose.
He doesn’t stop.
And tonight, the Bogeyman wasn’t hunting alone.