Kaden
Chapter thirty-eight
Four Years Later
Six years.
Thirty-two days.
Four hours.
Twenty-seven seconds.
My internal clock ticks down the time I’ve spent away from her. It’s a habit I picked up the night everything went wrong. As I stared at the clock on my phone, ignoring every missed call and text message, I internalized the mechanisms of time. I needed something to hold onto to keep myself sane.
Now, it plays on a broken loop in my mind, the only ordinary thing about my schedule that still has innocence and isn’t tainted by my hands. It does nothing in hindsight, only living as a constant reminder of how long I’ve been without Melody’s touch.
Melody.
Melody.
Melody.
My sister lives rent-free in my head, the image of her burning into the back of my eyelids anytime I close my eyes. She’s the one that got away, but it’s all my fault she even left to begin with. In the end, the logistics of it all don’t matter. She’s still mine.
Twenty-three hours.
Twenty-three hours.
Twenty-three hours.
How long it’s going to take me until I’m on the next flight back to New York. Ivan has no idea yet, but I’m standing on the front doorstep of my last loose end.
Our deal is still fresh in my mind, breaking through the continuous loop of time.
“If you can bring me the head of every Sokolov crime family member, then I’ll give you anything you want, Kaden,” he laughed.
He had little faith that I could wipe out a whole crime empire in what little time was allotted to me.
“Done,” I accepted.
Ivan sat back in his chair and intertwined his fingers under his chin. “Good luck.”
Since then, I’ve been tearing through each of them one by one. While I’m not running drugs or killing off men who can’t return their loans with interest, I’m hunting each Sokolov member down. They’ve thinned over the last three years. Naturally.
After I blew up one of their safe houses last week, eradicating the next heir to the Sokolov empire and his men, the old Pahkan remains. Since he caught on to his crumbling empire, he’s taken to barricading himself in his home, tucked away with enforcers protecting him. He thinks he’s untouchable.
Little does he know that I lost my sanity long ago, the very moment my sister turned me out of her life. If I couldn’t live with her, then I didn’t care about living at all. That kind of drive makes you reckless. It rewired my brain, destroying any fear of death I had.
When you’ve lost it all, you don’t care about your safety, dignity, or pride. You become something entirely new.
You become a fucking monster.
I walk easily up to the massive double oak doors, the cameras in the corners of the frame whirring on me as I knock politely.
It doesn’t take long before a big man answers.
He’s clean-shaven with hulking shoulders that crowd the entryway.
He scowls down at me, his tattooed knuckles gripping the corner of the door.
“Weird question,” I start before he can speak. “Is Dimitri in?”
The man’s jaw shifts. “And who are you?” He asks in heavily accented English.
My brows lift as my lips tug up into a deranged smile. “I’m the man who’s going to kill him.”
Before he can process my words, I’m on him. The knife I had pocketed is stabbed into his side, slicing through his clothes as I shove him out of my way, and he falls to the ground, his momentum sliding him along the polished marble.
My opponent is large, but I’ve spent the last six years turning myself into the machine I am today.
My muscles are earned from years of hard labor and training—the kind to carry rather than just hold.
As I drop to my knees over the man bleeding out onto the floor, he lifts his hands to push me away, but he’s no match as I strangle the air from his lungs with a tight grip.
Footsteps scatter around the home, but I’m entirely focused on choking the life out of the enforcer below me. “God dammit, you’re stubborn,” I sing loudly as he swats at me. “Just die already.”
His face is turning blue, his airway crushed to dust beneath my fingers, before a set of hands grabs me and yanks me off of him. I’m surrounded by three other guys, each one ready for a fight, as I hold up my hands.
“Okay,” I sigh. “I don’t like to use weapons, but this is getting annoying.”
The first guy swings at me, and I side-step him before pulling my gun out of its holster and shoving the barrel under his chin. The crack pierces the air as his head juts back unnaturally. Blood sprays, soaking my face as he crumbles to the ground in a heap.
The next two men brandish their guns, aiming at my chest as they bark at each other in Russian. I always have a failsafe in place for moments like these.
I hold my hands up in surrender, tilting my head. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I have an ability that no one knows about.”
They either can’t understand me or don’t care as they argue loudly. I deadpan at them before pointing to the guy on my right. The nearest window shatters with a sniper shot, and the bullet blasts through the side of his skull, sending him to the ground in a mutilated mess.
The last man looks wildly between his very dead friend and me as if he can’t believe what just happened.
I shrug, taking advantage of his shock as I aim at his face and fire. “I tried to tell you.”
He drops before I make my rounds and shoot the man I was strangling just to put him out of his misery. My earpiece crackles to life before Saint’s voice filters through. “He’s upstairs. Want me to take him out?”
I call back in. “Nah, he’s mine. Get the car ready.”
I take the spiral staircase with quick steps, my freedom closer and closer with every movement forward. Nothing can destroy the sheer delight of this evening.
Twenty-two hours.
Thirty minutes.
To see her—touch her again.
What does she look like now?
Did she cut her hair?
Will she slap me the moment she sees me?
Will she cry?
Has she tried to move on?
They’re questions that have played on a loop in my head since the very beginning of this journey. Every thought has led me back to her, everything I’ve done was only a stepping stone forward, and every body I’ve dropped has been all for us.
Our future is finally here, and I’m dying to get on that fucking plane.
I whistle a loud tune as I barge into the Pahkan’s office doors like I own the place. “Honey! I’m home!”
The greying man sits at his desk, his hands held together in prayer as his head remains bowed. It’s precious to see someone with a horrid past turning to God in his final hours. He’s most likely trying to repent for all he’s done, but there is no mercy for him in the afterlife.
Not for any of us.
He looks up at me through his lashes, still muttering his prayer.
I hold up a hand as I lean against the doorway. “I’ll let you finish.”
He closes his eyes tightly, stopping as he switches to English. “If you’re going to kill me, just do it.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I croon. “At least put up a fight.”
“I know when I’ve been cornered,” he sighs. “All these years, and it’s some young boy who’s going to deal the final blow.”
“Poetic,“ I muse before my eyes become half-lidded and dangerous. “But I don’t have time for games. Not when I’m one step closer.”
“You have wiped my whole family out,” he shakes his head.
“Fun times,” I smirk. “You should have heard your grandson after the bomb detonated. He was still alive—barely. Twenty-three years old, begging his momma to save him. A tragedy.”
“Why are you telling me this?” The Pahkan whispers, his voice croaking with his sorrow.
I push off the door, stalking closer to him as the blood of his men begins to dry on my skin.
I place my hands on the top of his desk, my gun clicking against the glass.
“Because,” I mutter, leaning in so close that he can smell the cigarette smoke clinging to me. “I want you to hear it the way I did.”
His breath stutters, his tightly intertwined fingers shaking with the heaviness of loss and grief.
“I want you to picture it,” I continue mockingly. “The confusion, the panic. The way he kept proclaiming it wasn’t supposed to end like this.”
Outside the office, the hallway is silent. His men are slumped where they fell—loyal to the end, which is to say, not very far.
He swallows hard. “You think this makes you powerful?”
I tilt my head. “No,” I answer honestly. “It makes me thorough.”
He forces himself to meet my eyes, anger, sadness, recognition all battling in his gaze. “You could have just killed me…”
A laugh, sharp and surprising, bubbles up my throat.
“And miss this? You should see your face right now.” I drag a bloodied finger across the glass of his desk, making an eerie X.
“I can’t let you die quietly. Not after everything you’ve done.
You don’t get to repent before you meet your demise. That’s not how this works.”
He sucks in a ragged breath, a single tear sliding down his cheek. “You’ve taken everything from me.”
I tut, cupping his saggy face before giving it a condescending pat. “Not everything. Only your reasons for living. Maybe you will die with no regrets.”
“JUST KILL ME!” He shouts, slamming his fists down on the desk with so much force it rattles everything. His emotions boil over, getting the better of him as he sobs. “Please.”
I snatch his throat, the blood in my hands smearing across his skin. He’s marked with the essence of his fallen empire, every death marred into his flesh and buried deep in his bones. I want his last memories to be of sorrow and pain.
I want him to hurt.
The same way I have for the past six years.
I place my other hand at the top of his head as he closes his eyes and embraces the end. His breaths slow, almost reverent—like he thinks this is mercy.
“You think this is balance?” I whisper cruelly. “You think this will wash away the blood of the innocent on your hands?” His face screws up in pain as his hands lift to grab my wrists, but I don’t let him get that far. “Look at me!” I command.
His eyelids fly open, fear and terror clawing away at him.
“I want you to see the last thing they saw,” I whisper before a delusional chuckle tumbles past my lips. “Long live the Sokolovs,“ I taunt before my hands move in a precise, sharp movement, snapping his neck with a loud crack.
In an instant, he slumps forward, his head sliding against the desk with a slap. The sounds are muted until there’s nothing but the quiet embrace of death. The tension that once held me in my younger years has long gone, creating peace in this art form now.
I rest my head back against my shoulders, closing my eyes as I finally let the meaning of all my hard work come to terms. Melody materializes behind my eyelids, soft golden curls bouncing in the warm sunlight.
Her dusky mouth curves into a soft smile as she stares at me with amusement.
In these visions, she’s surrounded by a halo of light, her edges glowing so brightly that she’s forever marked as an angel in my eyes.
Perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Even the memory I have of her that night, fear blowing her pupils as tears tracked down her cheeks, she’s still perfect. She looked at me like I was a creature rather than a man irrevocably in love with her.
Little did she know that she couldn’t escape the demons of her past. Not when that very demon will be seeing her in time for Christmas.