Kazimir #2
“May I?” she said, voice low and husky with the aftertaste of a Spanish accent. She didn’t wait for my answer. Her hand landed on my forearm, fingers long and unadorned, nails painted a subdued gold. The touch was calculated, a test. A dare.
In Obsidian, no one touched me without permission.
The room’s energy shifted—subtle but immediate. Conversations dipped in volume. On the stage, one of the aerialists lost rhythm for a beat before regaining her flow. Even the witches at the bar watched, waiting to see if I would rebuke the intrusion.
Devon entered the lounge just as Rosa leaned in for her second attempt, the one where she meant to make it clear to everyone watching that I was both available and already spoken for.
The effect was calculated: a sharp ripple through the room, eyes darting from me, then to Devon, a tableau of dominance and defeat.
For an instant, Devon’s eyes went glassy and wide, like a deer catching the blur of oncoming headlights. Her lips parted, but she didn’t look away. She just stood there, rigid, letting the room see her pain before she crushed it down and replaced it with nothing at all.
My vision narrowed to a tunnel. In that instant, I hated Rosa with a purity I hadn’t felt in centuries. Not for the trespass, but for the harm inflicted on my mate. I didn’t think. I acted.
The sigil burned itself into my palm before I was even aware of forming it. Axiom answered instantly, a ripple in the fabric of the club’s reality: one heartbeat, there was only music and velvet darkness, and the next, a monster the size of a small horse materialized in the center of the lounge.
Axiom was not a dog, not even close. At rest, he stood five feet at the shoulder, a double row of teeth glinting from a jaw designed to rip through armor.
His hide was dark and wet-looking, like freshly spilled oil, the surface crawling with hints of shapes that might have been runes or might have been old scars.
His eyes glowed with an unnatural yellow, their pupils slitted like a serpent’s.
Each step he took left a faint scorch mark on the floor, the heat of his presence curling the wood.
The entire lounge froze. Drinks stopped halfway to lips. A glass slipped from someone’s fingers and exploded on the floor, spraying vodka and blood from a careless cut.
Axiom fixed on Rosa immediately. He lowered his head, hackles up, and let out a growl that made the walls shudder.
Saliva, viscous and tinged with smoke, dripped from his jaws.
The club’s scent profile shifted in real time: fear sweat, ozone, pheromone spike.
All of it barely masking the metallic sweetness of anticipated violence.
Rosa didn’t run, not at first. To her credit, she was Montoya’s lieutenant for a reason. But even she couldn’t mask the panic in her eyes as Axiom closed the distance, his body vibrating with the desire to tear and rend.
I watched, unblinking, as the hellhound backed her up against a wall. She tried to speak—maybe a plea, maybe an invocation—but Axiom snarled and snapped his jaws shut inches from her thigh. She crumpled, falling to her knees, hands held up in surrender.
The rest of the lounge cowered against the far wall, a human and supernatural barricade of wide-eyed onlookers. Most would be traumatized for life, but that was not my concern.
What did concern me was the sudden movement to my left.
Devon. Not running, not hiding, but walking toward Axiom with slow, deliberate steps.
She was scared—I could see it in the flex of her fingers, the way her breath hitched on every inhale. But she kept going, cutting through the petrified crowd until she was ten feet from the beast.
Amelia reached out to grab her, trying to anchor her in place. Devon shrugged her off, her jacket slipping from her shoulders. Underneath, she wore the white tank and wide-leg pants, both clinging to her too-thin frame.
Axiom turned at her approach, lips peeling back to reveal every one of those blade-sharp teeth. The room collectively held its breath. Even I, who had never once lost control of the hellhound, felt a flicker of doubt—what if he didn’t recognize the rules tonight? What if he went for her?
Devon stopped three feet from his snout. She crouched low, hands open, palms up. “Easy, big guy,” she said, voice trembling but clear. “You don’t want to hurt her.”
Axiom cocked his massive head, a sound somewhere between a rumble and a whine escaping his throat.
No one in the room moved.
Devon smiled, small and lopsided, then reached out her hand. “You’re a good boy, aren’t you? You only do what you’re told.”
For a second, nothing happened. Then Axiom took a cautious step forward, nose twitching, and—impossibly—pressed the top of his skull against her palm.
She ran her fingers along the ridges of his head, scratched behind his ear, and the beast made a noise of pure animal contentment.
His eyes half-lidded. His tail, a clubbed thing of scar tissue and bone, thudded once against the floor.
Somewhere in the crowd, a witch gasped. At the bar, the glassware rattled from the impact.
Devon laughed—a sharp, incredulous sound that cut through the tension like a scalpel. “He’s not so scary when you get to know him,” she said, still petting the hellhound. “Just misunderstood.”
I stared, unable to speak. No one would ever dare approach a hellhound unless they had a death wish.
Rosa Alvarez, still crumpled against the wall, looked from me to Devon and back, her face a rictus of humiliation and terror. “What are you?” she managed to choke out, voice raw.
Devon didn’t answer. She kept her gaze on Axiom, running her hand down his back. The hellhound leaned into it, tongue lolling out of his mouth in an expression that could almost be called goofy.
I let the silence build, watching the shockwaves ripple through the room. The balance of power had shifted, and everyone felt it.
Finally, I stood.
Axiom looked up, eyes meeting mine. I nodded once, and he vanished, dissipating into a smear of shadow and sulfur that lingered for a heartbeat before fading entirely.
Devon straightened, brushing her hands against her thighs as if the interaction had been no more significant than petting a neighborhood mutt.
The crowd parted for her as she walked back and took her jacket back from Amelia.
She didn’t look at me, but I felt her presence like a magnet pulling every molecule in my body toward her.
I turned to Rosa, who was struggling to regain her composure.
“Leave,” I said, voice soft. “If you ever touch me again without invitation, there will be nothing left of you but what the hellhound spits out.”
Rosa nodded, scrambling to her feet. She didn’t bother with dignity; she just fled, nearly tripping over the bodies in her way.
The lounge remained silent, everyone processing what they’d witnessed. Bohdan caught my eye from his post, gave a barely perceptible shrug that said, Well, that was unexpected.
Devon stepped back, arms crossed over her chest. She looked shaken, but there was a calmness to her now—a confidence, maybe, or relief.
It took less than thirty seconds for the crowd to vanish.
Even the most bloodthirsty regulars knew when to yield to the will of the Sovereign, especially after a hellhound manifestation.
Bohdan executed the evacuation with his usual ruthless grace: a raised eyebrow, a sweeping hand, and suddenly every chair scraped backward as the supernatural elite remembered pressing appointments elsewhere.
Amelia was the last to go, pausing behind the bar to collect herself, her gaze switching between Devon and me. She flashed a half-smirk, half-warning at Devon, then slipped through the service door with a swirl of copper hair and residual adrenaline.