Chapter 32 Konstantin
thirty-two
Konstantin
The bond rips through my ribs like a live wire. It’s not a warning this time, it’s a full-on animal scream lodged under my bones. Her fear slides into me the way acid eats metal—hot and immediate before fading into a cold that makes my hands steady and my mind sharp.
There’s only one reason she would be flooding me with this much pain and terror.
My Lisichka, my wife and my heir, the very thing that keeps the dark from finishing me off have both been taken from me.
Stolen.
The word coils around my throat, cutting off my airway.
I taste her terror like iron in my throat, hear the crack of her voice inside my skull, the weaponized rage around her scream. She’s fighting. Of course, she is. She was born with knives for teeth. She spits defiance in Giselda’s face even as she’s chained.
The bond flares and fractures, not from breaking, but from overloading. Her panic spikes and then drops into ice so cold, I almost stagger.
It’s the kind of cold only grief can birth.
That cold is me.
It is the Bogeyman stretching awake under my skin.
Misha doesn’t speak when I shove the holster down over my shoulder, my fingers slick with someone else’s blood. He just lays a hand on me in a brief grip, enough to anchor without asking for more than I have left.
“We will get them.”
“Da.”
One final, flat word in answer. My voice doesn’t shake, but the storm under it begs to be let off the leash.
He knows I’m preparing to burn the world down and the look in eyes tells me he approves.
I shove a blood-smeared scrap of paper across the table. A location wheezed out by a half-dead guard before I broke his neck for betraying me. He deserved to die with my name still echoing in his skull.
“Call them,” I order.
Misha nods once and makes the call. Within minutes, tires scream and steel doors slam and boots hit the pavement like thunder rolling in formation.
My men—feral and loyal, born from shadow and baptized in my violence—form up without needing a command.
I step into the dark with my bone-handled blade sheathed at my side and bullets in my pocket that already have fucking names on them.
The convoy cuts through the streets, the city blurring past the windows as every turn drags the bond tighter around my spine.
Cressida talks to me in my head, a new ability we had barely touched the surface of before she was taken.
She gives me any information she thinks will be useful—the number of guards, what the inside of their location looks like, Giselda’s plans.
I think she’s doing it more to comfort us both, though.
“She’s alive,” I rasp, my blade twirling through my fingers.
It tastes like a prayer on my tongue.
Misha nods. “She’ll stay that way.”
We breach her territory without words. Giselda’s soldiers spill from alleys and doorways, their bodies twitching, their eyes glowing with a power that’s unnatural. They’re quick as they swarm the streets.
They’re addicts baptized in someone else’s ambition.
These people are already dead, they just haven’t noticed it yet.
“Kill them all,” I give the order.
My door swings open before the convoy stops and I shoot three of them before my boots hit the pavement.
These people were once someone’s sons and daughters. They were someone’s siblings, someone’s significant others.
It is for them that I whisper my mercy into the night. “Tvoi grekhi—moyo svidetel’stvo. Tvoyu mogilu ya otdayu. Zemlya tebe pukhom. Ya otpuskayu to, chto bylo chistym.”
Your sins are my testimony. I give you your grave. May the earth rest softly upon you. I release what was pure.
Misha shoots me a quick look of approval before slicing into another one and whispering the same death rite. My men fan wide, disciplined and efficient.
I am not disciplined. I am not efficient.
I am their fucking ruin.
Another soldier lunges at me with a chain and I rip it from his hand, strangling him with it before snapping his neck. Another comes at me with a tire iron, and I break his forearm before shoving my bone-knife under his chin and out the top of his skull.
Speed blurs the world around me as bones break and blood sprays warm across my face. I snap necks, crush throats, and carve through flesh like I was born for it.
Because I fucking was.
This is who I am.
Who I have always been
The Bogeyman.
The reason children don’t sleep. The whispered conversations of the Pakhan with the blade made from the femur of the traitor who dared betray him.
I keep the bond wide open so my little fox knows I’m coming.
This time, I don’t shield her. This time, I let her feel every breath I take. Every fucking soul I rip apart.
We move street by street, block by block. Every body I drop is another step closer to my woman and child. My men fire, reload, and fire again. Tires burn and glass shatters, the city’s veins opening under our boots.
At the corner of Seventh, a group of Giselda’s soldiers try to hold the line. These must be her newer recruits because they don’t seem as far gone as the others. Their eyes spark deliriously, their bodies fidgeting with the corrupted power coursing through them.
They’ve set up overturned cars as barricades, Molotov’s in hand.
One grins at me, his lips split wide with madness, and lights his rag.
I shoot him before he can throw, and the bottle explodes against his chest, the flames swallowing him as he screams. My men clash with the rest, and for a second, I worry as it seems like they are about to overpower mine.
But then they prove to me why I have them at my side—Zavid, Dragomir, Yuri, and Sasha cut through them viciously.
“Warehouse ahead,” Misha growls, wiping blood off his blade with his sleeve. “Two blocks.”
I’m here, Lisichka. Hold on.
The last block is the bloodiest. Giselda’s people swarm us, dozens of them howling like animals. My soldiers hit them head-on. Steel screams as blades meet blades. Gunfire rattles and screams choke the air.
I push through the center, carving a path with my knife. One slash, two, a thrust up under the jaw. Blood rains warmly on me, my boots slipping in it, but I don’t falter from the fight.
One of her soldiers tries to crawl away, but I stomp his spine until it snaps. Another begs for his life, but I cut his tongue out and leave him gurgling in the gutter.
Every kill is a prayer. Every corpse is an offering. Every heartbeat I silence is a message that I’m coming.
Nothing will stop me.
Nothing will keep me from her.
From them.
The warehouse looms black against the storm, the windows boarded and doors chained. A scythe has been painted in red across the metal, dripping down it like it was drawn with someone’s blood.
With Giselda, it is likely.
I gesture and my men fan wide, taking positions. Misha stands at my side, breathing steady, calm in a way only he can be when the world is about to burn.
“Inside?” he asks.
“She’s there,” I say, my voice certain because I can fucking feel her.
The bond is my beacon now. Her heartbeat pounds against it, terror and fury both, the rhythm of my own violence.
“I feel her,” I snarl.
Misha nods once. “Then let’s take her back.”
I step forward, press my palm to the warehouse door, and whisper to the darkness inside me.
“Let’s show them why they fear us.”
Then I draw my knife, signal the charge, and kick the fucking door in.