Chapter 25
25
The Corner Pocket was every cheater’s favorite haunt, whether in marriage or a game of poker. A squalid back-alley dive, the bar looked like it could give you a sexually transmitted disease for walking by too slow.
They stopped across the street after Sergei insisted on a smoke, his hand shaking every time he lifted the cigarette to his lips. He rocked from heels to toes as if he could sway himself out of his job. It was remarkable given that he wouldn’t have to lift a finger with Kai there to drag the snitch out by the hair.
“So, how badly did this guy shit the bed?” Kai broke the silence.
A plume of smoke rose between them as Sergei exhaled. “Sold some pricy secrets. Got people killed because of it. As if that’s not bad enough, a few neighborhood teens were hit in the crossfire. One’s dead, and the other will need years of therapy.”
An icy tendril unfurled in the space behind Kai’s ribs, lashing at his bones until his stomach churned. He shouldn’t have been so affected by mundane tragedy—never was—but the phantoms from his nightmares kept threading through his mind, wreathing his thoughts in bramble. He could still smell the copper slicking his skin, making him itchy even now.
“What do you need me to do with him?”
Sergei flicked the embers off his cigarette. “I just need to deliver him to the right person. After that, he’ll disappear.”
Kai hung his head and laughed darkly. “Delivering him to his executioner. How sweet.”
“I’m not a killer,” Sergei said, his eyes on the bar across the way.
Kai bore into the mobster, his tongue clicking against the back of his teeth. “I’d have more respect for you if you were.”
Sergei stomped on his cigarette. “Men like you and Zverev speak only one language: violence. Makes you useful, but it also makes you rather dull.” He smacked Kai on the arm, ignoring his seething glare. “Let’s go. You’ll have your fill of blood.”
Kai followed despite the urge to crush Sergei’s skull like a walnut. He didn’t care if some self-important goon thought he was dull, but the assumption that he was stupid doggedly followed him through life. Whether it was incomplete homework, his lowbrow pastimes, or his penchant for aggression, people regarded him like he couldn’t rub two brain cells together to conjure a single meaningful insight. In truth, Kai spoke many languages. Violence was simply the one he’d become most proficient in.
As they reached the opaque doors of the Corner Pocket, a gaggle of drunk men shambled out. Shadows clung beneath their eyes, their faux-silk shirts and heavy coats suffused with cigar smoke.
“Poker players,” Sergei muttered as he stepped aside to let them pass. They waddled by like disoriented poultry headed toward the nearest crosswalk.
The inside of the bar sucked away the daylight like a fog bank at dusk, and the smell of worn rugs and flaking lacquer wrinkled Kai’s nose. A counter with stools ran the length of one wall while staggered pool tables commanded the floor space. The shelves were fully stocked with budget liquors, but there was no one in sight.
“Downstairs,” Sergei instructed, though Kai didn’t need to be told. His ears picked up a heartbeat below the floor.
The staircase was narrow and bare, concrete walls pockmarked with age. Kai was sure they were headed into some kind of cellar when the craggy door whirred open to reveal a decadent room swathed in finery. Burgundy velvet curtains cascaded down black marble walls that were adorned with massive paintings worth more than the building they were in. A fully stocked bar fashioned the basement into an entirely new income bracket, and a felted poker table crowned the stained parquet floor as a centerpiece, one of the six chairs occupied by a man counting chips.
Casually slung back in his seat, he propped a leg up on the table, one pointy snakeskin shoe tip waggling at the ceiling. His salmon-colored paisley print button-up—which he’d failed to button up more than halfway—revealed a thin gold chain navigating a dark thicket on his bare chest. His stubbled jaw ground left and right as he kept his stare trained on the chips, heedless of the two men who’d entered his luxurious cave.
“You didn’t tell me he looked like a rat,” Kai muttered to Sergei.
Sergei refused to dignify Kai’s quip with a response. He cleared his throat, drawing the gambler’s attention. “Maksim.”
The rat shook a greasy lock of hair from his eyes, then tucked it behind his ear. It was cropped midway down his neck, stiff as though he’d christened each strand with pork lard. “Sergei,” he drawled. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Kai couldn’t decide if Maksim was arrogant or lacked discernment.
Sergei’s expression turned dour. “No pleasure. This is just business, I’m afraid.”
The greaseball flung a chip across the table. It rolled over the felt before wobbling to a stop. “You were always far too serious for this life.”
“And you were never serious enough.” Sergei gave Kai a weighty look. A bead of sweat trickled down his temple, his spine rigid like he had a fire poker menacing his sphincter.
Too bad. Things were about to get a lot more uncomfortable.
Kai’s mouth bent into something not-quite-smile and not-quite-sneer. Sergei wanted him to play errand boy—to leash his boss’s rabid hound and wrangle the beast back to a cruel master. Maybe Maksim deserved it, but Kai didn’t care about what people deserved. They got what they got regardless of how virtuous or vile they were. Psychopaths helmed governments responsible for millions. Rich kids with a blank cheque for their futures died of cancer. Poor ones with good health got their organs harvested to extend the shelf life of an expiring oligarch. If there was any design to it all, it was a madman’s playbook, the rules little more than a gibbering cackle.
Maksim launched to his feet and kicked the chair forward, a nervous laugh skittering out of him as he backed away. At least he knew enough to reckon he’d done something wrong. “What is this, Sergei? Pyotr snipped your balls, so you brought your pet to do your dirty work for you?”
Sergei’s breath hitched, though he remained rooted to the floor, apparently determined to stay and watch as Kai took the bloody reins. “He offered, I accepted,” came his quiet reply. “And frankly, I feel no need to vindicate my masculinity to a child killer.”
The rat’s unruffled exterior finally fractured, and he reached for what Kai assumed was a loaded firearm strapped to his belt. Before he could brush his fingers over the grip, Kai closed in with an easy lunge. He swiped at the inside of Maksim’s elbow to halt his scrabble for the gun, then drove a fist into the softness between his ribs. Maksim gagged on a strangled yell, his body folding with the force of the strike. Fingers coiling around the rat’s clammy neck, Kai slammed him back into the bar, bottles clamoring as glassware toppled and shattered against the parquet. With his free hand, he hooked the pistol by the trigger guard, casually lifted it from the holster, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“F-freak!” the snitch choked, spit flecking his chin as he struggled to breathe.
Kai slanted his head in consideration. “In the sheets, maybe.”
Before Maksim could sling another insult, Kai flung him to the floor like a broken doll. It was so easy, too easy, to take every iota of suppressed rage—rage at himself, his parents, his past carving him hollow—and unbridle it in this putrid corner of the underworld. To unleash every dark impulse on this fragile body animated by a withering soul.
Then again, maybe Kai was no different. Maybe that’s why it was so easy .
He stalked closer, his shadow swallowing his prey’s. And this scrambling meat sack was prey. He was sobbing now, his mouth working to form something—anything—that would stop Kai’s brutal advance.
“Sergei, call your executioner.” Kai’s voice was pitiless, resolute.
Eyes wide with realization, Sergei uncrossed his arms and stood pin straight. “You can’t—there…there are methods ,” he stammered. “To ensure no one’s caught.”
Kai’s gaze lifted from the quivering heap on the floor to Sergei’s dumbstruck face. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
As his attention slid back to the snitch, a prickling sensation spidered up his spine. It’d been a long time since he’d felt this, though perhaps not long enough. Barring the strange incident with the stranger who’d hired Miya, Kai had complete control over his transition. And ever since he’d acquired that control, he kept the animal locked away.
All with good fucking reason. The change was a saw-toothed blade, his most painful experience—and Kai had experienced a lot. But he wasn’t here to be comfortable in his skin. He was here to make a point.
Kai’s lips peeled back as he loosened the shackles on the wolf, the predator stirring from its long slumber in the darkest recesses of his being. The animal was a legacy doubly imposed. Once from his parents, and once from Sendoa, the god whose essence he’d inherited. Sendoa died in the shape of a wolf, and those contours plaited with Kai’s soul, sinking their teeth into him life after miserable life. Kai didn’t know why his parents shared his condition when he harbored the spirit of an ancient deity, but the answers were lost, fractured to pieces and ground to dust by the slow march of time.
It didn’t matter anymore.
His head jerked to the side, and a snarl ripped from his throat. That prickle morphed into a simmer, punctuated by a riving along his spine. Pain twisted his face, and he heard Sergei swear while the snitch remained paralyzed—a deer preparing for death. A bone-deep chill quaked through Kai, but his skin felt scalded, screaming for reprieve as thousands of needle-like hairs prodded his flesh from the inside. The wolf twitched and shook, revolting against Kai’s flimsy internal cage. Something between a harsh shout and feral growl tore from his chest as a joint splintered, followed by another, until his frame could no longer support his weight, and he collapsed to his knees. His clothes slipped away; they weren’t made for these contours. Fingers curled in on themselves, fusing into nubs. Nails thickened into claws, and his canines sharpened, lengthened, biting into his lip as he clamped his jaw to keep from screaming.
What big fucking teeth you have .
Kai sneered, mocking the beast as the pain wrapped him in a savage embrace.
And he welcomed it.
Spiky, disheveled black hair rose to hackles, sprouting along his back and over his limbs, colonizing every inch of skin. His jaw broke, mincing his efforts to contain the agony. The sounds that left him were neither human nor animal—monstrous roars to accompany a monstrous thing.
Every scrap of external stimuli scrambled his senses as he adjusted. Sights were blinding, noises disorienting, smells nauseating. His tail burst from his body like some alien thing racing toward life, and as it swooped low against his haunches, he settled back into his body.
The wolf had always felt like home.
“What the fuck is that!” Maksim shrieked, every syllable a stutter as he kicked uselessly against the floor.
Dark eyes haloed in crimson snapped to the bumbling meat sack, a low sound reverberating from behind bared teeth. Kai’s muzzle rippled as charcoal lips skinned back, and the cage of white opened, tongue lashing in anticipation of flesh.
Ears flat against his skull, Kai sprang forward with strength that outsized his canine body. But humans bruised so effortlessly under the pin-point pressure of a blunt claw. Maw splitting open in a fiendish grin, Kai locked his fangs around Maksim’s jugular. Blood spilled into his mouth, an animal satisfaction purring through him as he rent his victim’s neck like a blade through ripe fruit. Maksim lurched, limbs thrashing, his screams devolving into pathetic gargles as his jaw went slack, and his mouth hung open. The tension seeped from his bones, leaving him like limp rubber.
Kai gave the man’s throat a final wrench, and his life spattered carelessly across the parquet, staining it in copper. A deep, predatory rumble thrummed out of the wolf, and he finally let go. The rat’s body hit the floor with a wet smack, a scarlet mural crowning his rolling head.
His spine had been so brittle, thinner than Kai remembered, the meat encasing it more tender than expected.
Five calloused pads stamped their mark in the blood bridging Maksim’s body and his wayward skull. The wolf rotated in placed, nose grazing tail tip like a shadow-inked ouroboros. He retraced his path, prowling toward the only remaining pulse in the room.
Sergei plastered himself against the wall, his breaths drawing shallow as he peered at the wolf stalking closer—a hundred and forty pounds of piercing teeth and palpable terror.
Kai halted several yards from his accomplice. He’d put on a good show, but only half the point had been made.
Before his mastery over the transition, he’d fall asleep a wolf and wake up a man. He didn’t know why the reverse metamorphosis was seamless—a shift during slumber—but today, he didn’t have the luxury of waiting for that comfort. Today, he’d have to spur the change, will himself to break, to endure the same torture that twisted him from man to beast.
It’d taken him a long time to accept that he was neither one nor the other but both at once. A chimera. A hybrid. He used to think of himself as a wolf clothed in human skin, not unlike Gavran—a raven wearing a boy’s corpse. He knew better now. The wolf erupted from the confines of the man, and the man from the shape that made the wolf.
His tail was the first to recede, slipping into the marrow of his spine. Where warmth once cocooned him under his coarse midnight coat, disruptive cold now kissed his naked skin. Fingers unfurled, rupturing from his paws, and his muzzle compressed, forcefully molding into a human-like mandible. There was deafness, followed by a high-pitched squeal cleaving through his ears. A blinding flash of color in a world muted by grays. The wolf standing on four sturdy legs transformed into a man on his knees, his palms flat against a floor mottled in blood, smelling of gore and shit.
Nausea struck like a torrent, and Kai swallowed down the pungent taste of bile. The vinegary lump stuck in his throat, but he refused to allow his body the purge. With an angry shout, he pushed off the parquet and rose unsteadily to his feet. He didn’t have time to adjust, didn’t care to retrieve his discarded clothes. Balling his fists at his sides, he wrangled his focus into a bullet aimed at Sergei’s chest.
Sparing himself one ragged breath, Kai stalked up to the petrified mobster. Red marred pristine white as he grabbed Sergei by the collar, jerked him off the wall, then slammed him back into it. Winded by the collision, Sergei wheezed pathetically. As he sagged, Kai snatched him by the throat and forced him upright.
“Do you know why I won’t join the mob?” Kai asked, a vicious snarl still wound into his features.
Sergei tried to shake his head, but Kai’s grip was too strong. All he managed was a sorry twitch.
Wrath dammed by a mere sliver, Kai’s breath scorched Sergei’s face. “It’s not because I don’t like getting my hands dirty.” He smeared Maksim’s blood over the mobster’s pallid cheek in a gruesome taunt, then leaned closer, the smell of iron radiating from his skin. “It’s because I’m no one’s bitch. Not yours, and not Pyotr’s. You may not be a killer, but I am. You fuck with me one more time—try to threaten my girl or strong-arm me into one of your pissing contests with another faction—and I’ll tear your spine out with my teeth.” Kai shoved him, the wall juddering hard enough to jostle one of the art pieces off its hook.
“Fuck,” Sergei whimpered, his knees buckling in time with the painting’s crash to the floor. “What the hell are you?”
Seeing Sergei in tatters mollified some of Kai’s festering rage. He averted his gaze, his expression mellowing from hellfire to boredom. “I don’t know, what the fuck is Ivan Zverev?”
“He’s a Zverev,” Sergei said stupidly, as though it was supposed to be illuminating.
“Yeah, I gathered that, asshole.”
“You’ve really never heard of them?” Sergei probed like he’d confirmed something he’d long suspected. With a shaky sigh, he unfolded his limbs and dragged himself up the wall. “They’re a clan from Western Siberia. Rumor—” he hesitated, then choked on a half-sob, half-laugh. “No, folklore has it they’re born with bodies hard as granite, unmatched strength and speed. They can smell death before he’s honed his scythe and see shadows on moonless nights. Zverevs are hard to come by, and even harder to kill.” Sergei’s nervous gaze flew to Kai as he confessed, “When I first saw you, I thought you were one of them, but you don’t seem to know anything.”
Sergei’s words abraded whatever slim composure remained on Kai’s face. “Western Siberia?” He was born in Western Siberia—in Surgut. He didn’t remember any of it; his family had relocated to the United States while he was still a kid. He didn’t even know how old he’d been, but he recalled tastes and scents too foreign for a rural town in the Pacific Northwest: sauerkraut, pickled fish, pirozhki. Motes of some vague, elusive memory, but nothing concrete. Nothing that told him anything truly useful. Even his childhood in Washington remained fuzzy, courtesy of the head trauma and repressed memories from the night his parents were killed. They would’ve been around his age when they died, maybe a little older.
His gut furled into a tight ball, his nerves flayed raw as it dawned on him: Ivan Zverev was likely a distant cousin.
Their botched fight clawed out his insides until he felt empty enough to curl in on himself. He’d relived his parents’ murder mere hours before learning that one of his kin wandered the very city where he’d chosen to build a home.
The universe was cruel. Callous, sadistic, and fucking cruel.
“You are one of them,” Sergei whispered, wonder, awe, and horror wavering his voice.
Kai whirled on him, his feet sticky against the wooden floor, his naked body slick with carnage. Behind Sergei, he glimpsed his reflection in the cold black marble wall. Eyes like blood stared back at him, trapped behind an impassable fa?ade.