“I don’t regret a single fucking heartbeat of it,” I whisper. “Even the messy parts. Especially the messy parts. Because you . . . you make me feel human again. You’re not just mine in blood, Cressida Kirovsky.” I press my forehead to hers. “You’re mine in the places I didn’t know were hollow until you filled them.”
We clutch each other tighter.
Not out of fear, but out of knowing.
Knowing that this strange, haunted, unholy love is real.
twenty-three
Konstantin
Themaskfitsovermy face like a promise, my world narrowing to only the empty eye sockets.
We sit in a circle of five, shadows stitched from different continents, bound by old blood and older rules. Bratva, Cosa Nostra, The Firm, the Cartel, and The Irish Mob. There was a time our bloodlines would’ve happily slit each other’s throats and fed the pieces to the dogs. Now, we stand in the same room and call ourselves family.
Venatori Nocturnus. Hunters of the night. Enforcers of the laws our great-great grandfathers carved in bone.
Tonight, we hunt.
Battista slides his gloves on slow, like it’s just foreplay to the violence we’re about to unleash. Tiernan mutters something that might be a prayer or an excuse. With him, it’s probably both. Ignacio checks his magazine without blinking. Kingston adjusts his mask with the efficiency of a man who hates the ceremony but never misses a step of it.
We ensure our bodies are covered in black from head to toe. People may assume they know the identities of the men in skullmasks, like Giselda, but we leave nothing that would allow them to identify us. That would be too dangerous for all of us.
“We don’t leave witnesses,” I say. My voice comes rough through the modulator, distorted and monstrous. “No recruits. No messengers. Anyone carrying her scythe brand dies. Tonight, I want us cutting arteries, not veins.”
They nod their agreement, our movements already syncing up. You can feel it in the air, the otherworld-ness of us.
We don’t knock.
We descend.
Five cloaked nightmares stepping from shadow into slaughter.
The streets taste of fear. It clings to the fog and the steel skeletons of buildings half-finished but never claimed.
The Reaper’s infection has spread. Her loyalists peddle her forbidden serum on our streets. Cities that have belonged to our bloodlines long before she was ever old enough to hold a blade.
When we reach the warehouse, the stink of rot and chemicals pour out of it like a confession.
Inside, men and women with glassy eyes and veins lit beneath their skin roam. More of Giselda’s soldiers—addicts, guinea pigs, soldiers in name only. They don’t see us at first. Why would they? Shadows don’t announce themselves.
I move first.
The bone knife slides free of its sheath with the ease of a story I’ve told a hundred times. I catch the first guard under the jaw and drag upward before he even has time to open his mouth to scream. His blood pours hot over my wrist, and the bond grates with Cressida’s jolt as she feels the violence, the surge, even from across the city. I shove it down, leaving her to feel the echo of triumph instead of the raw meat of what I am inside.
Gunfire cracks as Ignacio lays down a wall of bullets. Tiernan moves like smoke, his blade catching throats in neat, quick arcs. Battista ghosts up behind a man and snaps his neck before thebody knows it’s dead. Kingston fires his gun, irritation carved in each shot as if killing is paperwork that we’re making him file late.
I carve. I’m not neat about it, not quick. I am the lesson they need to learn, so I ensure I teach it well.
Bodies hit the floor like thunder, and their blood sings to the monster inside me.
A guard lunges with a syringe, the drug glowing faint red in the barrel. I catch his wrist before he can touch me, crushing his bones, and shove the needle into this throat. He gurgles and twitches, his body collapsing at my feet and convulsing like a fish on pavement.
Tiernan cackles as he cuts through two men at once, dual blades spinning like a butcher’s ballet. “This is almost fun,” he muses, kicking a severed hand off of his boot.
I grab a straggler by the hair and slam him into a concrete pillar hard enough to leave a wet bloom behind. “Where is your false queen?” The voice modulator makes my voice sound like a whisper from Hell.
The man’s eyes roll back in terror. “I—I swear—I don’t know. She never shows up, she just—”
