Chapter 10 The Underworld
POV: Nicander
The temporary suppressor Zinovia had synthesized felt like liquid static in Nicander’s veins. It did not cure the freezing ache of the Requiem Toxin, but it erected a brittle, synthetic wall against it, forcing his trembling muscles back into lethal obedience.
They moved shoulder-to-shoulder through the suffocating claustrophobia of the Dredge.
Located within the hollowed-out concrete foundations of a sunken naval drydock, Crovenco’s black market was a subterranean nightmare of brutalist architecture and lawless commerce.
The air was thick with the smell of roasting street meat, ozone from sparking, exposed power lines, and the sharp, coppery tang of unrefined narcotics.
Sickly neon tubes, flickering in violent shades of magenta and sickly green, cast long, distorted shadows against the weeping concrete pillars.
Nicander kept his head bowed, the collar of his scavenged, grease-stained leather jacket pulled high.
Beside him, Zinovia walked with an unsettling, spectral grace.
She wore an oversized, hooded canvas trench coat they had stripped from a deserted supply locker, concealing the ruined, chemical-burned remnants of her silk slip.
She didn't shrink away from the towering, scarred criminals shouldering past them.
She moved like a ghost calculating the structural weakness of every man she passed.
"The ballistic armor those mercenaries wore," Nicander murmured, his lips barely moving, pitching his voice strictly for her ears over the chaotic din of the market.
"It was high-density polymer. Woven carbon-nanotube joints.
You don't import that kind of tactical gear into the archipelago without a local fence clearing the shipping manifests. "
"And you know a fence stupid enough to equip a hit squad against the two ruling syndicates?" Zinovia asked softly, her dark eyes tracking a pair of armed enforcers stationed by a brothel entrance.
"I know a man greedy enough to try," Nicander corrected.
He steered her down a narrow, pitch-black alleyway that branched off the main thoroughfare. The ground was slick with oil and rotting waste. At the dead-end of the corridor sat a reinforced corrugated steel stall, illuminated by a single, buzzing halogen bulb.
Behind a cage of rusted rebar sat Bozidar—a massive, heavily tattooed arms dealer with a cybernetic optical implant whirring softly in his left socket.
Nicander stepped into the halogen glare, pushing his hood back.
Bozidar’s organic eye widened in sheer, unadulterated terror.
He instinctively reached beneath his metal counter, but Nicander was faster.
In a blur of kinetic motion, Nicander slammed his hand through a gap in the rebar, seizing Bozidar by the throat and pinning his massive skull violently against the back wall of the cage.
"Hands on the counter, Bozi," Nicander purred, the vibration of his own voice ringing with the suppressed, homicidal energy the serum had granted him. "Or I rip the trachea out of your neck."
Bozidar choked, his thick hands instantly flying up to rest flat on the rusted metal. "Vargos. The street said you were dead. Burned in the cathedral."
"I am notoriously difficult to incinerate," Nicander replied, easing his grip just enough to allow the man a ragged sliver of oxygen.
"Forty-eight hours ago, a squad of ghosts breached the Palazzo di Caedes.
They were wearing ultra-lightweight, matte-black carbon rigs.
Reflective compound visors. Standard-issue for elite PMCs, but modified for Crovenco's climate. Who cleared the crates?"
Bozidar swallowed hard, a bead of greasy sweat tracking down his temple. His cybernetic eye whirred frantically, adjusting focus. "I swear on my mother’s grave, Nico, I didn't supply them. I wouldn't touch a hit on the syndicates."
"You didn't supply them," Nicander agreed, reading the microscopic twitch of Bozidar’s jaw muscles. "But you know who processed the crypto-payment for the transit."
Before Bozidar could answer, the heavy, metallic scrape of boots echoed at the mouth of the alley behind them.
Nicander didn't turn his head. His tactical peripheral vision mapped the shadows instantly. Three men. Massive, heavy-footed, and reeking of cheap stimulants. The telltale shhhk of a rusted trench knife being drawn from a leather sheath hissed through the damp air. Bozidar’s personal security.
"Zinovia, step back," Nicander ordered, his voice dropping an octave into absolute, lethal calm. He released Bozidar and turned slowly, dropping into a loose, balanced combat stance.
He expected her to retreat. He expected her to flatten herself against the corrugated steel and wait for him to neutralize the threat, like any pampered syndicate heiress.
She didn't move.
The first thug lunged, swinging a rusted lead pipe aimed directly at Nicander’s skull.
Nicander ducked under the arc, driving a devastating, precise elbow into the man’s floating ribs.
Bone shattered with a sickening crunch. Before the man could hit the ground, Nicander pivoted, catching the wrist of the second attacker who came at him with the trench knife.
He twisted the joint until the cartilage snapped, burying the attacker’s own knife into his thigh.
A heavy boot scuffled against the oily pavement. The third man—a towering brute with a scarred, bulldog face—bypassed Nicander entirely and lunged for Zinovia, his massive hands reaching out to grab her by the throat.
Nicander’s heart slammed against his ribs. No. He ripped the knife free to throw it, but he was a fraction of a second too late.
What happened next fundamentally altered the architecture of Nicander’s universe.
Zinovia did not scream. She did not flinch. As the giant closed his hands toward her, she stepped into his guard, utilizing his own forward momentum against him. Her right hand blurred beneath the hem of her oversized canvas coat.
A flash of matte titanium sliced through the dim halogen light.
Zinovia swept the surgical scalpel in a flawless, agonizingly precise horizontal arc across the inside of the man’s right forearm.
She didn't blindly slash; she executed a targeted, anatomical dissection in real-time.
The blade severed the flexor tendons and sliced cleanly through the radial artery.
The man let out a wet, strangled gasp as his hand went entirely dead, dropping uselessly to his side. A pressurized spray of arterial blood painted the concrete wall behind them.
Before the thug could even process the shock, Zinovia swept her left leg behind his knee, dropping him to the oily pavement with ruthless efficiency.
She stepped smoothly over his collapsing frame, her knee pinning his uninjured shoulder to the ground.
In the same fluid motion, she pressed the bloodied edge of the scalpel directly against the pulsing, exposed flesh of his carotid artery.
The alley plunged into absolute, terrified silence.
The only sound was the rapid, wet dripping of blood from the man’s severed artery onto the concrete. The thug lay completely paralyzed beneath her, his eyes rolling back in sheer panic, afraid to even swallow lest he push his own throat against her blade.
Nicander stood frozen, the bloody trench knife hanging uselessly in his hand. He stared at his wife.
Zinovia knelt in the filth of the undercity, surrounded by the stench of death, looking like an avenging angel of anatomy.
Her dark eyes were devoid of fear or adrenaline; they were chillingly, beautifully empty.
She pressed the scalpel a millimeter deeper, just enough to draw a single drop of blood from the thug's neck.
"I can sever the internal jugular vein in exactly zero-point-four seconds," Zinovia whispered to the trembling man beneath her, her voice a soothing, terrifying lullaby.
"You will bleed out into your own chest cavity before your brain realizes it is dying.
Or, you can tell me the name of the broker who hired the men in the carbon rigs. "
The man opened his mouth, a pathetic, weeping sob escaping him. "Olek! It was a mid-level ledger-thug named Olek! He routed the offshore accounts!"
Zinovia held his gaze for two agonizing seconds, ensuring the truth of it. Then, she smoothly stood up, stepping back and wiping the titanium blade completely clean on the man’s heavy denim jacket before slipping it back into her coat.
"Apply direct, localized pressure to your forearm, or you will expire in four minutes," she instructed the weeping man clinically.
She turned to face Nicander.
Nicander felt a dangerous, undeniable heat flare deep in his chest—a localized inferno that had nothing to do with the poison or the synthetic suppressor in his blood.
He had spent his entire life viewing the Veltri family as cowards who hid behind glass and chemistry.
But looking at Zinovia now, watching the calm, lethal grace with which she dismantled a threat twice her size, the animosity evaporated.
In its place rushed a profound, begrudging respect. And something far more dangerous. A dark, twisted fascination.
Nicander holstered the scavenged knife and stepped over the groaning bodies, closing the distance between them. He looked down into her dark, unreadable eyes.
"Remind me never to underestimate your bedside manner, Dr. Veltri," he murmured, the low gravel of his voice betraying the sudden, electric tension humming between them.
"Just point me toward Olek, Vargos," Zinovia replied quietly, though he didn't miss the faint, adrenaline-laced flush coloring her high cheekbones. "I have a sudden desire to practice my incisions."
Nicander watched her walk past him, the heavy canvas of her coat brushing against his arm, and realized with a terrifying jolt that if they somehow survived the next twenty-six days, he was never going to be able to let this woman go.