Chapter 45 – MAKSIM
Forty-Five
MAKSIM
Idon’t have to wonder what it feels like to teeter between consciousness and the brink of death.
I’ve been there too many times to count.
Where time dissolves and pain becomes a memory, distant but humming just beneath the surface.
But for Casper—or Callum, as he finally confessed under slight duress—I can’t allow that mercy.
I need him here. Present and aware, every nerve alive, and every breath earned.
He’s going to feel everything I have planned for him like an itinerary straight from hell.
Until he’s begging me to kill him.
And he will.
Of that, I’m certain.
I slap his face, freshly swollen and split open. He grunts, and his head lolls from one side to the other.
“Wake up. We haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.” I grab a fistful of his hair and wrench his head back. “You know, the part where you start to sing for me. Tell me everything I need to know.”
“P-please,” he stammers, blood and spit rolling down his chin.
“Begging won’t help you. It only pisses me off some more.”
I release him, and his head falls forward, snot landing in his lap.
Pathetic.
“I don’t know anything,” he cries. “They came to me. I had no choice.” He struggles to look at me, one eye completely swollen shut, nearly bulging from his skull. “What did you expect me to do? Let them kill me?”
I laugh quietly and circle him, dipping close to his ear. “Yes.”
My gaze lifts, and I give a single nod.
“Derek.”
Nothing else needs to be said.
I turn toward the window and wipe my blade as Derek’s dark silhouette closes in. A moment later, the sound of Callum’s screams splits the air, and I let Derek do what he came here to do.
I glance down, turning my hand over, staring at the blood-stained bandage covering the fresh ink beneath.
Kolibri.
I know where she is tonight. If it were up to me, she’d be home, safe, locked away, where no one could harm what’s mine. But as much as it kills me, I’d never be the man who clips her wings.
Callum’s howls come back into focus, and I whip around and raise a hand to Derek.
“That’s enough.”
His eyes meet mine and narrow in defiance.
“We need him alive a little longer.”
Without looking away, Derek severs one more finger, then drives the blade through what’s left of the man’s hand, pinning it to the wood before slinking back into a shadowed corner.
I crouch, grip Callum’s chin, and tilt his head before he drowns in his own blood.
“What do you have for me now? Balterra had ties to Ares. Point me in the right direction, and maybe I’ll let you die fast.”
Dominic Balterra was an only child. His parents are dead, and he has no known family as far as we were able to research. Someone close to him, and close enough to Valentina, ordered the hit.
“They never told me who sent them,” he wheezes, every word scraping his throat raw.
I pick up on what he’s not addressing. Never once asking who or what Ares is. Maybe it’s the blood loss. Maybe he’s just out of fight. Either way, he dies.
I rip the knife from his hand and toss it aside. He yelps once before I grab the cuffs binding what’s left of his wrists and drag him across the floor.
“I think you need a little more persuasion.”
Derek’s already thumbing his phone, no doubt summoning the cleanup crew. I don’t look back. I have one goal left before I can finally get the fuck out of here and be with my girl.
His body thuds against each step as I drag him up the stairs. Two flights of heavy impacts and streaks of blood later, we reach the roof. I kick the door open and haul him across the rough concrete until we hit the ledge.
“Last chance.”
His breath rasps, wet and broken, grating on what’s left of my patience. I fist his hair and force his head over the edge, make sure he sees what’s waiting for him, even through that half-shut eye.
“Tell me what you know.”
He shakes his head weakly. “I-I…can’t.”
There it is.
“Name.”
“I don’t know…no one does.”
The bottom of my boot crushes his mangled hands. His scream ricochets off the walls of the high-rises around us.
“Talk.”
Death is calling. His breaths are shallow now, desperate.
“All I know is his alias,” he gasps. “Nothing more.”
“Tell me.”
“The…Architect.”
“What fucking architect?”
He spits blood, the words catching in his throat. “Bigger—looking for the Ledger.”
His eyes roll back before I can press for more. I shake him, slap him, but the motherfucker is gone.
“I knew I should have caved your face in that first night.”
I spit on his corpse, grab a fistful of his shirt and waistband, and heave him over the edge, watching his body pinwheel twenty stories down.
Derek’s crew has a new stain to clean.