1. Gemini – Sasha
CHAPTER ONE
gemini
SASHA
Ghost.
No Face.
Reaper.
All the names they’ve given me over the years, but only one of them stuck—phantom.
“A nightcrawling vigilante who has taken the law into their own hands.” Or at least that’s how the officials like to put it. Little did they know, my motivations had little to do with ridding this dreary city of evil—altruism has never been my forte.
Revenge, however—now, that’s my speciality.
Take the fucker lying in a pool of blood at my feet, any motivations for me to beat his fucking face in are strictly self-serving. His screams echo off the warehouse walls, but they'll die here—just like him.
“Please!” His hand shoots out as he cowers before me, trying to appeal to my better angels. “I have a family, my daughter is only five.”
It's music to my ears, a perfect staccato to warm my blood. Each shriek is a symphony, each gurgle a crescendo that makes my pulse hammer against my temples.
I grab his collar, fabric squelching between my fingers, and drive my fist into what remains of his face.
Bone splinters beneath his skin, teeth scattering like dice against blood stained concrete.
My father's final moments flash behind my eyes, the way it always does just before a kill—how he whimpered my mother's name, how this piece of shit stood over him grinning as the bullets tore through his flesh, how he fucking laughed while my father's blood pooled beneath his feet.
There’s no one to watch his final moments, no one to see how he will suffer—there’ll be no one to watch him sink to the bottom of the Hudson once I’m done with him.
I lean close to his ear and whisper, "I was eight when you sent my father to the lord. When time comes for her revenge, she’ll know where to find me."
My phone rings just as I slip my Glock out of its holster, and I let the whimpering sack of shit hit the ground with a thud.
“Yo,” I answer without looking at the ID.
“Co je sakra ‘yo?’” Sergei’s voice rolls through my earpiece as I screw my signature silencer tightly to the end of my gun.
This place is too secluded for me to be heard, but in the city noise travels, so you can never be too discreet. “What have I told you about answering the phone like that? You keep that up, no one will take you seriously.”
“I’m sure the end of my gun in their mouth will show them how serious I am,” I huff, rolling my eyes. “Is there something you need or…?”
“The family is ready for you, Sasha.”
My heart free falls into my stomach. “You said I had a few more years.”
“Your father wasn’t instated until he was twenty-five, so I thought they would do the same for you.
” I can hear stress and uncertainty creep into his voice in a way that I’ve never heard before.
Having Uncle Sergei was like having my father, although they are very different, they are the same in the ways that count—love of family, integrity, and valor.
“But then your grandfather was still alive, I don’t know why they want to instate you this soon. But it can’t be good.”
Petros Grigoryan whimpers underneath my boot, face pressed to the concrete “Oh shit, you’re Dragomir’s boy. Please, have mercy, that was so long ago.”
I ignore the sniveling tub of lard. “We’ll figure it out,” I grit, more on edge than ever. And I realize my gun won’t do, I need to feel his blood on my skin.
“Which one’s that?” Sergei chuckles.
“Number four.”
This hunt was founded by my father’s brother shortly after he passed, and that mantle was given to me, to continue my family’s vengeance, but nothing could fix the things I saw that night or the hole in my chest.
“I’ll call you when I’m done,” I say, my tone clipped.
“Sasha.” He pauses for a moment, and I wait there for the other shoe to drop. “They are pushing to install you by the end of this year.”
“It’s fine, I’ll be ready,” I tell him, even though it's the furthest thing from the truth. I don’t think anyone could ever be ready to be head of the Dragomir legacy.
“Will you be?”
I hang up without another word.
“Where were we before we were so rudely interrupted, hmm, princess?” I crouch down to his level, slapping his cheek so that he comes to, looking up at me with the one eye that isn’t swollen shut.
The motherfucker coughs as if he might choke out a lung, but his fourteen ballad broadway play does nothing for my nerves.
I slip my gun back into the holster strapped to my chest and pull my father's knife from the holster on my hip, the motto my father lived by, engraved into the metal—Nikdy nezapomeň. Never Forget.
“P-Please, I’m be-be-begging…” He winces, shivering as the cold New York night swirls around us. “Y-you.”
He's dying. And, at this rate, if I left him here he would die a slow, painful death. But I slash the precise blade across his throat instead, reveling in the way his body spasms as a thick curtain of warm blood rolls down his neck and onto my hand.
The calm it brings me should be studied.
Every time I kill another one of these maggots the tightness in my chest loosens, and I can almost breathe again, but only for a moment until that same old emptiness creeps in again.
After a quick stop across town at my loft to polish myself off into something resembling some semblance of a sane human being, I’m back to my normal programming…being at my mother’s beckon call.
“Honey, I'm home!" I call out, kicking off my Italian leather oxfords that cost more than most people's monthly rent.
"Jsem v kuchyni, pusinku." My mother's sweet voice floats from the kitchen along with the rich aroma of garlic and paprika. Even after two decades in America, her rich Czech accent is still thick. But it’s what I love most about Alina Dragomir—she was always the balance to my father’s darkness, his equal… yet, different.
Our penthouse sits thirty-eight floors above Manhattan, with floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the glittering skyline like a living painting.
But even this glass fortress isn't worthy of her.
She haunts these rooms as if they're sacred ground, obsessed with preserving the memory of my father's rare moments of peace.
This was the only place the great Ev?en Dragomir dared silence his phone, protected by a battalion of surveillance systems and killers disguised as security.
When they fished his corpse from the East River—nine bullets, three to the face—she convinced herself this penthouse was all we had left. She has no idea about the empire waiting for me.
If only she knew about the offshore accounts, the properties scattered across four continents, the blood money that flows like an underground river beneath the Dragomir name.
I discovered the truth at fifteen, the day my uncle handed me my first gun and told me what it means to be a Dragomir—the day I took my first life.
Since then, I’ve been training under Uncle Sergei, proving my worth as a mercenary, cementing my duties to The Family before I’m seated as the head of an underground empire that most couldn’t even fathom.
On paper, I'm just a twenty-year-old college student who occasionally misses a class or two because of family obligations.
But I can never forget that I am Aleksandr Dragomir, son of the late Ev?en Dragomir, preparing to step into his blood-soaked shoes.
It’s a mantel as heavy as it sounds. And even if I’m not prepared, it doesn’t matter—I will not sully my family's legacy.
Now has to be the time for me to sturdy the fuck up.
The Family—not the kind that gathers for Sunday dinners, but the kind that gathers for territory negotiations and revenge killings—stretches its fingers from the docks of New York to the cobblestone streets of Prague, a shadow empire my forefathers built, and I’ll now silently inherit.
My mother would shatter like fine china if she knew the monster I’ve become—how many men have choked on their own blood while staring into my eyes, begging for mercy I never gave.
Or how I've learned to sleep peacefully with brain matter still crusted under my fingernails—I find the smell of fresh death almost… soothing.
But what I believe would tear her apart is that I know my father's killer–all the rest have been target practice. I've hunted down every witness, one by one, watching the light drain from their eyes as I sent them to hell.
But Vahan Arakelian—his presence on this earth burns in my veins like acid.
I don't just want to put a bullet between his eyes. I want to watch him beg, make him feel the terror my father felt in his final moments when he knew he wouldn’t see his family again.
Sergei preaches patience, but when I close my eyes at night, I see only blood—Arakelian's blood, painting the walls as I carve my family name into his flesh.
He is my final target, the only thing standing between me and my empire, because the title will never feel right until it’s soaked in his blood.