Chapter 16
Sixteen
Onyx
The Foundry smells like rosemary and garlic. The delicious combination offers a coziness and warmth that seeps into old brick.
I stand in the bedroom doorway, freshly showered, wearing a pair of dark jeans and one of Kon's henleys that hangs past my hips and smells so much like cedar and smoke that wearing it feels like being held by him.
My laptop sits open on the desk, the USB drive Kon gave me plugged into the side, files from Luca's intelligence sprawling across the screen in organized folders.
The Malone exposé is taking shape. Real shape.
Stomach-turning, award-winning, empire-burning journalism that will leave nothing standing when it hits print.
The Syndicate Research folder sits in the sidebar. Still there. Still not deleted.
Tomorrow. I'll delete it tomorrow. I've been telling myself that for over a week and the lie has become so familiar it barely registers anymore. But I mean it this time.
I move through my bedroom while I towel-dry my hair and catch myself smiling at my own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
The woman staring back at me has color in her cheeks and a softness in her eyes that I barely recognize.
Three weeks ago, this face was all sharp edges and dark circles and the haunted look of a woman running for her life.
Now I look like someone who sleeps well.
Someone who eats. Someone who has a reason to smile in a bathroom mirror at six o'clock on a Thursday evening.
Kon did that. This place did that. And I'm done pretending it doesn't matter.
For the first time in my life, I have people to visit.
A best friend healing in Lincoln Park who sends me texts full of cherry-lip emojis and threats to interrogate my boyfriend.
A family of Syndicate wives who add me to group chats about teething schedules and bad action movies.
A man downstairs who grows roses on a rooftop and cooks me breakfast and loves me even though I haven't said the words to his face yet.
Tonight. I'm going to tell him tonight.
The decision sits steady in my chest, warm and certain, planted there by three weeks of breakfasts and arguments and tender sex and a man who turned off his security cameras because he trusts me.
His footsteps reach me from the hallway, the measured stride I've learned to recognize the way I recognize my own heartbeat.
He appears in the doorway and leans against the frame, arms crossed, dark hair loose around his jaw, those bottomless black eyes sweeping the room and landing on me with an expression that makes my pulse stutter every single time.
The hard lines of his face soften. Just for me. The scar through his eyebrow relaxes and the perpetual tension in his jaw eases and for a moment he's not the Bratva Beast or the Syndicate's enforcer. He's just Kon. My Kon.
"I want to go see Sloane tomorrow." I toss the towel onto the bed and cross to him, my bare feet quiet on the carpet. "Can you take me?"
"Da." He uncrosses his arms as I approach. "I'll drive you."
I rise on my toes and press my lips to his, soft, unhurried, tasting the coffee he's been drinking and the cedar that clings to his skin.
His thick stubble scratches against my chin as the kiss shifts angle and the rough texture of it sends a shiver down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold.
His hand comes up to cup the back of my head, fingers threading through my damp hair, and his other palm settles on my hip with a possessive weight that sends heat pooling low in my belly.
The kiss deepens and my fingers curl into the front of his shirt, his body radiating warmth through the fabric like a furnace, and for a moment the whole world narrows to this doorway and this man and the steady drum of his heart against my chest.
I pull back. Look up at him. Open my mouth.
I love you. Right now. No more waiting. No more practicing in the dark while he sleeps.
His eyes shift over my shoulder. The softness in his jaw tightens by a fraction, a micro-expression so subtle that anyone else would miss it but I've been studying this face for three weeks and I read it the way I read headlines.
I follow his gaze to the desk. To the laptop screen. To the folder name visible in the sidebar: SYNDICATE RESEARCH.
My stomach drops through the floor. Heat floods up my neck and into my cheeks so fast my skin prickles and a cold sweat breaks across the back of my shoulders.
His hand stills on my hip and I can feel his fingers tighten by a fraction, a pressure so slight most people wouldn't register it but I've memorized the language of this man's hands and that tiny shift screams louder than words.
"Kon, that's not what you think." The words rush out, tripping over each other. "I've been meaning to delete it. I should have already. It's old and I haven't added to it in weeks and I was going to..."
Glass shatters somewhere below us.
The sound rips through The Foundry with the violence of a gunshot, followed by the heavy, splintering crack of the front entrance being breached.
Voices flood the ground floor, rough and overlapping, barking orders in accents I recognize from my father's kitchen table.
Boots slam against concrete. The metallic rack of weapons being chambered echoes up through the stairwell with a sound that turns my blood to ice water.
The file. The conversation. The three words I was about to say. All of it evaporates, burned away by the adrenaline that hits my bloodstream so hard my vision sharpens and my hands stop trembling and every nerve in my body snaps to full alert.
Kon transforms in the space between one breath and the next.
The man who was kissing me with gentle hands and soft eyes disappears.
His jaw locks tight, the scar through his eyebrow pulling taut, and his dark eyes go flat and black as if someone flipped a switch behind them and shut off everything human.
His breathing drops to a slow, controlled rhythm through his nose, each exhale measured, each inhale deliberate. The muscles in his arms and shoulders coil beneath his shirt and his hands flex at his sides, fingers spreading and curling, poised and ready to deliver men to the devil's doorstep.
He pushes me behind him with one arm while the other reaches for the Glock he keeps mounted beneath the hallway shelf.
"Stay behind me." His voice comes out low, clipped, stripped of accent and emotion, the operational tone of a man shifting from lover to killer without a wasted syllable.
I shoot him a scowl. "Like hell I will."
He cuts me a look, dark and sharp, that says we will absolutely be arguing about this later if we survive the next ten minutes.
Then he moves toward the stairwell with a silent, fluid grace that makes the hair on my arms stand straight.
Volkov built him for this. Rafael refined it.
Twenty years of violence perfected it. Every muscle calibrated, every sense firing, every instinct honed to a lethal edge I've never seen this close before.
With shaky hands, I dart to the bedside drawer and pull out the handgun Kon showed me how to use last week in the training room.
A compact nine-millimeter that fits my palm but feels heavy as a brick in my shaking grip.
He spent an afternoon teaching me the basics.
Stance, grip, breathing. Where the safety is and how to disengage it.
"Squeeze, don't pull," he told me, positioning my fingers on the trigger.
"And don't point it at anything you're not willing to kill. "
Cold metal meets my fingers.
I flick the safety off. My hands are sweating. My heart pounds against my ribs so hard I can feel the heavy thudding in my teeth.
Brennan's voice booms up through the stairwell, that thick New York growl I'd recognize anywhere, and the sound of it drags a cold finger down my spine.
The same voice from the alley outside Scarlet Thorn.
The same hands that grabbed me in the dark and dragged me toward a van while Sloane screamed my name.
"Vetrov!" He spits on the concrete floor, the sound of it echoing off the brick walls. "Send the girl out and maybe we let you keep breathing." He cracks his knuckles, the pop carrying up the stairwell like small caliber gunfire. "Your choice, big man."
I edge toward the top of the stairs and peer down into the main floor.
Six men. Brennan plus five, spreading through the ground level, weapons up, tactical formation that tells me Seamus didn't send amateurs this time.
They came through the garage entrance, the reinforced door hanging off its hinges, the biometric panel sparking.
Brennan stands at the center of the formation and he's exactly the physical threat I feared. Tall, taller than Kon by at least an inch, with a build that suggests he's been fighting since he could make a fist. I should know, he’s been with my father for a long time and I’ve spent the better part of my entire teen and adult years avoiding him at all costs.
His shoulders strain the seams of a black tactical jacket, his neck is thick with muscle, and a scar bisects his left eyebrow in a pale slash that mirrors Kon's in a way that feels obscene.
He moves with the blunt confidence of a man who has won more fights than he's lost and enjoyed every one of them.
Kon descends the stairs with slow, measured steps.
Each footfall lands deliberate and silent on the concrete, his shoulders loose, his breathing steady.
His scarred hands hang open at his sides and his dark eyes never leave the ground floor.
There's no rush in his movement and no sound except the quiet exhale through his nose as he rounds the final landing and meets Brennan's eyes across twenty feet of concrete.
Both men size each other up across the distance, measuring damage and reach. I can tell from the way they settle into their stances that this only ends when one of them stops breathing.