I worked on him for half an hour, cutting little pieces of him off and letting them land on the plastic with a wet sound.
His body sagged, fought, sagged again, blood slicking the floor beneath the chair as his strength bled out with him. He’d long since lost his voice, and now only made wet gurgles as saliva and blood sprayed out.
When his eyes rolled back and his focus slipped, I leaned in close. “Takie kak ty umirayut medlenno i bez imeni.”Men like you die slowly and without a name.I drove the knife into his heart and held it there.
He shuddered once, twitched and thrashed, then went still. I stared into his wide eyes, watching as life faded from them. The silence settled in the room like dust.
I stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, hands slick with his blood, and my chest lighter.
Something inside me had finally snapped loose, and I closed my eyes and let that rush move through me. I let myself feel that relief for a moment before Zoya came back into my mind. I wanted—no, I needed—to get back to her. I had to make sure she was okay.
I had to touch her, hold her, and make sure she was safe and alive.
I wiped the blade on his ruined shirt and set it aside. Then I worked the way I always did. Slow and methodical, leaving nothing behind that could speak later.
Tools cleaned and accounted for. Plastic sealed, folded, and removed. The room was stripped back to anonymity, the kind that erased memory and evidence.
The body didn’t stay. I wrapped him and moved his corpse out through the service bay where no one looked twice at trucks coming and going at odd hours.
I handled it alone. Moved the body and made sure the space was cleared, erasing the sequence of events until nothing connected him to that room or to me. When I was done, he wasn’t a problem, a question, or a memory. He was just an absence the city would absorb without noticing.
The air bit at my skin when I stepped outside, sharp and honest. All I wanted now was to go back to the bunker beneath the slaughterhouse. To the woman wrapped in warmth and safety, and waiting… for me.
For the first time in my life, blood on my hands wasn’t the only thing pulling me forward.
Chapter 13
Zoya
Ididn’t sleep. I lay on the cot with the blanket pulled tight, the heater humming beside me, the bunker sealed and quiet like a held breath. Every sound sharpened my nerves; every second stretched thin. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I was afraid of what he’d bring back with him.
When the lock turned, it was soft and controlled, measured in a way that told me he was already contained. No rush. No hesitation.
I was already sitting up when the door opened. Dmitry stepped inside and shut it behind him, securing it without looking. He didn’t scan the room or check the perimeter. He looked only at me, his gaze sharp and assessing, as if he needed confirmation that I was still exactly where he’d left me.
I noticed immediately that he was clean. Not just freshly showered, but scrubbed with intent, because I knew where he’d been going when he left earlier. He wore a fresh shirt and pants, and his gray hair was still damp at the nape of his neck. The scent of soap and cold night air clung to him.
Whatever he’d done, it had been savage and brutal, and he’d stripped every visible trace of it away. The violence hadn’tfollowed him back, and I knew it was because he didn’t want me to see it.
I searched his face for wounds, for blood he might have missed, but all I found were his dark eyes locked on me and the firm line of his mouth beneath his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard, like he was keeping it shut on purpose so he didn’t say something that would scare me.
“You’re awake,” he said.
“I waited,” I answered honestly.
His jaw tightened, just barely, and before I could register the shift, he crossed the room and stopped in front of me. Dmitry stood close enough that my knees brushed his thighs. Heat radiated off him, contained and dangerous.
“Why?” he asked quietly.
I swallowed around the sudden thickness in my throat. “I wanted to.”
His gaze flicked to my mouth and then back to my eyes, his expression calculating and controlled, like he wanted something he refused to allow himself to take.
“It’s done,” he said before I could ask.
A dark, twisted relief loosened something in my chest. “Are you hurt?”
Surprise flashed across his face and vanished just as quickly. It hit me then that he hadn’t expected concern from me at all.
