Once. Hard. Knuckles to cheekbone.
"That's for my mother."
He kept laughing, blood on his teeth now, staining them pink.
I punched him again. Harder this time. Same spot.
"That's for threatening her."
His head snapped to the side. Blood sprayed from his mouth—hot, red, splattering the polished floor beside us. He coughed, wet and ragged, blood bubbling at his lips. The laugh didn't stop. If anything, it got louder.
Alena's face flashed behind my eyes—sleeping in my arms, trusting me to come back, waiting in that apartment alone while he talked about making it slow.
The door slammed open.
Two more guards—bigger, meaner, fresh—stormed in, guns already drawn. They saw their brothers on the floor. One clutching his throat, gasping for air, the other curled around his shattered instep, saw Klaus bleeding and laughing, and moved on me like wolves.
I was ready.
But there were four now. And they weren't playing.
Klaus lay there, blood bubbling at his lips, oxygen mask askew, and still laughing—wet, ragged, delighted.
"See?" he rasped, voice thick with blood and triumph. "That fire. That's mine. You can't help it. You just proved it."
I smiled again. Cold. Empty.
"We'll see."
I tasted copper in my mouth. The punches had met their mark. Hard. I spat blood on his polished floor—a red stain on perfect black—and let the guards drag me back.
Because I'd made my point.
And Klaus?
He was still laughing—even as his new men pinned me down, even as the blood kept pooling around his head.
16
ALENA
Morning was a rumor on the horizon, that blue-gray hour when even ghosts seem tired of their own haunting.
The cursor blinked at me like an accusation I couldn't answer.
Write.
So I did. Fingers moving mechanically across the keys, back aching from hours hunched over my desk, eyes burning dry from refusing to blink. The story poured out in fevered bursts—the way it always did when the whispers grew impatient, when they crowded too close and demanded their due. They were everywhere tonight. In the corners where the shadows thickened into almost-shapes. Behind me, cold breath on my neck. Inside my own breath, tangling with my thoughts until I couldn't tell which words were mine and which were theirs.
And still—beneath all of it, louder than the whispers, more insistent than the scratches—one thought pounded through my skull like a second heartbeat.
Where is he.
I reached for my phone, the movement automatic, almost unconscious. How many times had I done this in the last twelve hours? Twenty? Fifty? I'd lost count somewhere around dawn.
The screen lit up the dim room in cold blue light. No new messages. No missed calls. Nothing from him.
No "home safe."
