My men—feral and loyal, born from shadow and baptized in my violence—form up without needing a command.
I step into the dark with my bone-handled blade sheathed at my side and bullets in my pocket that already have fucking names on them.
The convoy cuts through the streets, the city blurring past the windows as every turn drags the bond tighter around my spine.
Cressida talks to me in my head, a new ability we had barely touched the surface of before she was taken. She gives me any information she thinks will be useful—the number of guards, what the inside of their location looks like, Giselda’s plans. I think she’s doing it more to comfort us both, though.
“She’s alive,” I rasp, my blade twirling through my fingers.
It tastes like a prayer on my tongue.
Misha nods. “She’ll stay that way.”
We breach her territory without words. Giselda’s soldiers spill from alleys and doorways, their bodies twitching, their eyes glowing with a power that’s unnatural. They’re quick as they swarm the streets.
They’re addicts baptized in someone else’s ambition.
These people are already dead, they just haven’t noticed it yet.
“Kill them all,” I give the order.
My door swings open before the convoy stops and I shoot three of them before my boots hit the pavement.
These people were once someone’s sons and daughters. They were someone’s siblings, someone’s significant others.
It is for them that I whisper my mercy into the night. “Tvoi grekhi—moyo svidetel’stvo. Tvoyu mogilu ya otdayu. Zemlya tebe pukhom. Ya otpuskayu to, chto bylo chistym.”
Your sins are my testimony. I give you your grave. May the earth rest softly upon you. I release what was pure.
Misha shoots me a quick look of approval before slicing into another one and whispering the same death rite. My men fan wide, disciplined and efficient.
I am not disciplined. I am not efficient.
I am their fucking ruin.
Another soldier lunges at me with a chain and I rip it from his hand, strangling him with it before snapping his neck. Another comes at me with a tire iron, and I break his forearm before shoving my bone-knife under his chin and out the top of his skull.
Speed blurs the world around me as bones break and blood sprays warm across my face. I snap necks, crush throats, and carve through flesh like I was born for it.
Because I fucking was.
This is who I am.
Who I have always been
The Bogeyman.
The reason children don’t sleep. The whispered conversations of the Pakhan with the blade made from the femur of the traitor who dared betray him.
I keep the bond wide open so my little fox knows I’m coming.
This time, I don’t shield her. This time, I let her feel every breath I take. Every fucking soul I rip apart.
We move street by street, block by block. Every body I drop is another step closer to my woman and child. My men fire, reload, and fire again. Tires burn and glass shatters, the city’s veins opening under our boots.
At the corner of Seventh, a group of Giselda’s soldiers try to hold the line. These must be her newer recruits because they don’t seem as far gone as the others. Their eyes spark deliriously, their bodies fidgeting with the corrupted power coursing through them.
They’ve set up overturned cars as barricades, Molotov’s in hand. One grins at me, his lips split wide with madness, and lights his rag. I shoot him before he can throw, and the bottle explodes against his chest, the flames swallowing him as he screams. My men clash with the rest, and for a second, I worry as it seems like they are about to overpower mine. But then they prove to me why I have them at my side—Zavid, Dragomir, Yuri, and Sasha cut through them viciously.
