by Black, Paula
He looked at me with a hollow gaze and a grim smile, and a shiver ran up my spine.
“They made a butcher of me, after all. They offered me Special Services, said I had an ‘aptitude.’ I leapt on the chance not to go back to that farm, but Mariya was not so fortunate. She was only fifteen, and she had no place to go. I wrote her a letter once, full of plans and promises, but I never sent it. Contact with our families was strongly discouraged. Recently, when I spoke with my mother about Mariya’s disappearance, she told me my sister never forgave me for leaving her behind.”
I hugged my cushion, when I wanted to hug him. “Where did the ballet come in? Was what Raider said true, about you training at the Kiev?” There was no denying his talent. The man had fierce skills.
He nodded. “We had a mentor in the Armageddon Force. He used unorthodox methods to hone us into his killing machines. Anything that would gain the edge over an enemy. Chess, linguistics, chemistry, anatomy, computer hacking, you name it. He handpicked his elite recruits and put us through it all. Ballet requires the strictest discipline. Core strength, flexibility, anticipation of movement, these are all weapons when combined with the right combat skills.”
Damn, I thought. Not a ballet school and tutus kind of deal then. “Your mentor sounds like a smart guy,” I said.
“Dante Barron is a psychotic genius.”
He’d mentioned that name before. “Dante? The same guy who did this to you?” I motioned down his battered body. “The one who thinks he owns you?” The man who may have murdered Daniel.
He drew a ragged breath and nodded. “Dante is a maverick. Highly dangerous, and extremely charismatic. He was like a God to us. He led us into hell, and we trusted him to bring us out. We were like the fucking musketeers, you know? All for one. We killed for him, on a word, without question, and he saved my life, more than once. I’ve been shot more times than I can remember. I was his second in command, and in time I became his friend. He called me Lazarus, because I never stayed down.”
His lips twitched up at the memories, but his words seemed tinged with remorse. My eyes strayed to the puckered scars on his chest, and to the bullet that hung from a silver chain around his neck.
“Is that a memento?” I asked.
“This?” He toyed with the scratched and dented casing, and smiled. Unlike the fakes I’d seen in Goth jewellery stores, this looked like it’d seen action, and the tarnish had been polished off in parts, a result of frequent rubbing? “This belonged to my Grandpa. He was a sniper. He fought against the Nazi occupation of my country. This, he called his final solution. He was saving it, in case he should be caught.”
“He never needed to use it?”
“No. He died peacefully in his sleep, a wrinkled old man.” Konstantyn’s fingers stroked the smooth metal of the bullet with a rhythm of familiarity. “Before the war, he was a renowned cellist. He gave me my love of music, and dance. I miss the old man. He was more a father to me than my real pop ever was.”
“I never knew my father.”
His brows popped, questioning.
I shook my head and smiled. “My mother would never tell me who my father was. I’m not even sure she knows herself. She’s high most of the time, and any time I try to broach the subject, she shoots me down. All I know is that she’d been living on some Greek island, but she fled when she was pregnant with me and came to London.” I thought about what the psych nurse had said about her running from a cult. “I’m not even sure if that’s the truth.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I never felt I was missing out on that much, and Daniel and I had each other, you know?”
Chewing on his bottom lip, Konstantyn’s eyes read my grief.
“You and my mother have something in common, you know.”
He frowned.
“That serpent tattoo on your back. She has that exact image on her arm.”
“No. That’s impossible,” he said, his brow creasing.
“Why? What does it mean?”
“It’s the insignia of Dante’s elite Armageddon Force. Only a handful of men have ever earned the right to wear it, and most of them are dead.”
“Then why does my mother have that same tattoo?” For a moment, I tried to picture her as some kick-ass Ukrainian special agent, but the image was beyond ridiculous. It couldn’t be coincidence though, surely.
“You are mistaken,” Konstantyn said. “Perhaps it is only similar? The snake is a common enough symbol.”
My brows knitted in thought. Maybe he was right, and they were only similar. I hadn’t had the chance to compare the photograph of Konstantyn’s tattoo with the one on my mother’s arm, and she’d pulled her sleeve down so quickly, I’d only gotten a glimpse of the image, and was mostly relying on childhood memories.
“Tell me about Dante,” I said, pleading with my eyes.
“Dante became like a father to me,” he said quietly.
He’d been close to his mentor, clearly. “What happened between you two?”
“I told you I was Secret Service. Technically, that is a lie.”
I leaned back and he sighed, shaking his head at the flinch that ran through my body.
“I am AWOL,” he clarified, “hence the fake passport I used to get here.”
Some of my muscles unknotted and my elbow propped up again. “You left him? You ran. Why?”
“A year ago, Dante and I were on a mission, deep undercover in Russia. There was a plot to assassinate a senior politician in my country. We tracked down the terrorists to a cabin in a remote forest. Things got messy, and there was a gun fight. We hadn’t counted on the guy who’d gone out to piss in the woods. He ambushed us and Dante took a bullet for me, in the chest.” I watched Konstantyn’s jaw clench as he rubbed at his sternum. “I managed to secure the cabin, and I carried Dante back to the little house on the outskirts of the village where we’d made our base. I expected to be digging him an unmarked grave in the snow that night, but by some miracle, he was still breathing. Any other man should have died.
He was in a bad way though, losing so much blood, and the wound was beyond my abilities. He needed a surgeon, an airlift out of there, but he refused. We weren’t supposed to be across the border, and exposing ourselves would have sparked a major political incident. What was I supposed to do? Just watch him die?”
“What did you do?”
“I gave him a shot of morphine, and then I did what he asked of me. A dying man’s wish, I thought.” He looked up at me with haunted eyes. “He asked me to fetch him a girl from the village. I knew her, a little. She was a pretty one, blonde. The men would whistle at her as she walked the hill from the store and she would smile back with a look that said they couldn’t afford her.”
“She was a prostitute?”
“I don’t know for sure, but when I offered her a fistful of money to come comfort a sick man, she came willingly enough.”
He raked his scalp with both hands and shook his head. “I never should have brought her to his room.”
“What happened?”
“He asked me to leave them alone, so I went for a walk with a bottle of vodka and the stars for company. I gave it some time, freezing my ass off, before I wandered back to the house and went to check on him.” Konstantyn looked right at me with those piercing eyes. “That girl… he had her trussed up, like an animal. He had tortured her. She was already dead when I arrived. There were symbols carved into her skin, like this one,” he said, running a hand down his bandaged abs, “and… body fluids. Dante was naked, bathed in her blood, liked he’d smeared it all over himself. And he was hard, you know?” He glanced into his lap. “Getting off on what he’d done. There was no guilt, no remorse. He strode up to me and wiped his wet hands on my cheeks. He blooded me, like you do after a hunt, and all I could think of was that damn pig my father made me slaughter.”
“But how is that possible? You said he was shot. Where did he find the strength to do all that?”
&nbs
p; “That’s the thing. There was no gunshot wound. Beneath all that congealing blood, his chest was perfect.” Konstantyn scrunched up his face and shook his head in disbelief. “I saw the entry and exit wounds with my own eyes, but afterwards, it was as though he’d never taken that bullet at all.”
That made no sense, I thought. He had to have been mistaken about the bullet wound. But calling bullshit on his story was liable to shut him down, right when I needed to know more.
“What did you do?”
“I left the house. I made my own way back over the border, alone, and so did Dante. I made a report to a superior officer, but it was my word against Dante’s. There was no girl reported missing, no body, no gunshot wound. The whole thing was covered up.” He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “They recommended I get a psychiatric evaluation and take some time out of the field for post traumatic stress.”
“So Dante just went back to work, after killing that girl?”
“Umhmm.”
“Damn.”
“A few weeks later, Dante came to see me. He confessed to me that he had an inoperable brain tumour, and that the doctors had given him only three months to live. He said he wasn’t ready to die yet, that he needed my help, to find another girl.”
“What?” I gaped, moving to sit beside the man who looked broken on my couch. “He’s insane.”
Konstantyn nodded and fell back, his arms limp on his knees, like he’d given up fighting. “He is sick, and desperate. This girl would provide a cure, his said, for his broken body. I am a soldier, Neva. I have seen many things, many atrocities. But that day, I saw horror. I looked into the madness in my friend’s eyes, and I was truly afraid. I asked him if he knew what he’d done back there in the house. He said this was only the beginning, that soon I would understand fully. We argued. I refused to be any part of it. As I walked out the door, he told me I could never leave, that the tattoo on my back meant I belonged to him, for eternity.”
“So that’s when you ran?”
He nodded. “I packed a bag that night and I made myself disappear. He’d taught me well.”
No shit. I hated the niggle that wondered what other things he’d been taught. His revulsion was honest but... “You didn’t turn him in?”
“I tried. I reported him anonymously to the higher authorities, but Dante knows more secrets about them and their families than they do themselves. His contacts go right to the top. Even if I had direct evidence, nobody would be willing to blow the whistle on him.” He exhaled. “I should have killed him when I had the chance. But the man was my friend, he’d taken that bullet for me. I was so fucked in my head, between the psychiatrists and the weird shit that went on in that room...” He was breathing hard.
“Where did you go?” I asked, attempting to derail the panic building in Konstantyn’s eyes.
“I travelled around Europe, keeping a low profile, hacking into police files, tracking Dante’s activities as best I could. I had nothing but a trail of missing persons and rumours, but then I got lucky. A tip-off led me to an encrypted website called Gilles de Rais. It is the work of a satanic cult that gets off on torturing young men and women during ritualised sex.”
A cult? The word leapt out at me, along with an image of my mother ranting about demons at Daniel’s funeral, and that tattoo on her arm that I was no longer so convinced was different from Lazarenko’s. “A nurse at the forensic unit told me my mother had escaped from a cult, before I was born.”
“She’s locked up?”
“Yeah. For ripping out a man’s throat with her teeth. She maintains he was a demon.” My laughter was caustic. “That’s how she earned herself an indefinite stay in the secure psych unit. But that’s bullshit, right? Demons don’t exist.”
“Right. Bullshit,” Konstantyn said, but there was a flicker of uncertainty in his voice. “But there’s more. Dante goes by the surname Barron. In the fourteen-hundreds, Gilles de Rais was using alchemy and torturing young children, in an attempt to summon a demon named Barron.”
My eyes widened. “Okay, but you don’t actually think this Dante guy is anything but a sick human being, right? And this whole thing is some group psychosis led by a crazy man with a brain tumour who thinks killing innocent people will somehow cure him.”
Konstantyn dropped his head in his hands and scrubbed at his scalp. I knew what was on his mind: that miraculously healed gunshot wound. But he was mistaken about that. Any other line of thought, and we’d be buying into the crazy too.
“These people are very real,” Konstantyn said, finally looking up at me. “It’s all on there, on video, the gang rapes, the brutality. You saw the stills. Dante is involved, he has to be. The similarities to what I witnessed with the Russian girl are too close to be denied. The site is highly sophisticated. The files are encrypted, the abusers use pseudonyms, and they’re always masked in the video footage. The whole operation stinks of money. Dante has been busy, I mean really busy.”
I’d seen the photographs, my imagination was filling in the gaps, with one very familiar face.
“Daniel?” I choked out, my stomach a churning pit of acid.
He nodded slowly, his eyes full of agonised pity. “I’m sorry, Neva.”
“They have to be stopped,” I said, choking out the words.
“I followed them here. They’ve been moving across Europe, and now I believe they’ve based themselves in London.”
I shook my head and forced away the tears that brimmed. “You haven’t gone to the police? Interpol? They can’t all be corrupt, surely?”
“I can’t risk it.”
“Why not?” Lives were at stake. My brother might not have died, if only Konstantyn had acted sooner.
“I know now that the tip-off came from Dante himself. He wants me back in the fold. Within minutes of decoding that website, I got word that my sister had been reported missing, in London. I spoke with my mother who told me Mariya was lured to London with an offer she couldn’t refuse: a visa, a job, an opportunity to escape our father.” Konstantyn’s brows knit in a hard frown. “I wasn’t there to protect her, and now Dante has taken my sister as collateral, to ensure my full cooperation.”
“Damn.” I exhaled and leant back, my shoulder brushing his. “So that’s why you’re here, to find your sister.”
“Yes. She was working as a hostess at Infernal when she disappeared. Your brother worked there too, and he was sent there by the studio.”
Shit. “I’m sorry if I blew your cover.”
He smiled my apology off and bumped my shoulder. “You did me a favour.”
Hard to believe, given the beating he’d taken. My eyes drifted down to the gauze covering his chest and guilt was a lance to my conscience.
He tipped my chin up with a finger and an accented tut. “This was not your doing, Neva. I used my real name. I wasn’t hiding, merely hoping to draw Dante out.”
Still, I met his eyes and hoped he saw the apology, even if he didn’t think he needed one. “You wanted to be found,” I said.
He inclined his head. “It is my only chance to save my sister.”
“Is that why you danced at the club?”
His jaw tightened when he nodded. “Yes. But the club, and the dance studio are only fronts for something much bigger. Now Dante knows I’m here, he will be coming for me, and that is why I must leave.”
I exhaled and rested my shoulder to the back of the couch, trying to get comfortable when I felt like I should be running too. If Oliver Dalton was the dirty cop Konstantyn said he was, then the police were everywhere, had access to everything, including my apartment. Would they be coming for me next? Paranoia crept under my skin, making me question everything.
“Hold up,” I said. “If you wanted Dante to find you, why did you escape from Dalton’s men?”
“I had to secure the evidence I gathered. If I get out of this alive, that evidence will prove my innocence. But I don’t believe for a moment that I escaped.”
“What do
you mean?” I asked, frowning.
“I mean Dante let me go.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Have you ever watched a cat play with a mouse, Neva?”
I nodded.
“It will let its prey believe it is free, only to prolong the enjoyment of the hunt. That is Dante. He plays with me, because he can. He has my sister, and I have no choice.”
“What happens when he finds you, or you find him?” The wounds still oozing through his bandages told me exactly what the outcome would be, and this time, no amount of gauze and iodine would put him back together again.
“Whatever he decides will happen. He holds the ace.” Konstantyn’s tone was defeated and it angered me.
I balled up my fist against his knee and his eyes snapped to mine with a frown.
“So you’re just going to give yourself up to him?” For as much as this man was hunting for his family, I wanted justice for mine. I was in this so deep, the mud was sticking to my legs and threatening to drag me down, but I couldn’t do it on my own.
“I’m sorry, Neva. You need to let it go.”
I glared at him, my heart knifed through with the agony of helpless denial. There had to be a way.
He twisted the blade. “Daniel is dead. Mariya lives.”
“How can you be sure?” I countered.
His chest inflated on a deep breath but it was like he’d gone to stone, rigid and impenetrable. “He wants me, not her. Dante is insane, that doesn’t make him an idiot. He won’t kill what he can trade.” He looked so robotic, I wanted to smack him.
I settled for trying not to cry at the bleak outlook instead.
Konstantyn sighed at me, with pity in that green-speckled gaze. “Don’t throw your life away on revenge. There is no justice when it comes to powerful men. You can still get away from this. Save yourself.”
No. I can’t.
I looked up at him, praying the tears didn’t fall. Angry and determined, I was not going to let him shut me out. “Could you walk away? If it was Mariya he’d killed?”
