Wildblood

Chapter 28

28

Kai

The chair was too comfortable. Kai seesawed on the edge, seeking a more familiar sensation—a rough plastic lip digging into his thigh, a wobble from a bent leg. But the armchair was a bearhug of soft cushions and round corners—the antithesis to the harsh lines and splintering bar stools he called home.

“Well, this is unusual.”

Dr. Hristina Kruni? sat across from him in her throne, the backrest wider and taller than any piece of furniture had right to be. She crossed her legs and rhythmically tapped her foot against the table leg in front of her, her hands clasped over a pad of paper backed by a clipboard.

“What’s unusual?” asked Kai, stiffer than a bottle of back-alley moonshine. It’d barely been a few days since he’d gotten her number and done the intake forms with Miya’s help. He’d hoped for a little more leeway, but apparently, the woman worked fast.

Her mouth twitched into an uneasy smile. “I don’t usually get mobsters in my practice.”

Kai narrowed his eyes. “I’m not a mobster.”

What kind of a therapist opened with that ? Wasn’t she supposed to blather on about safe spaces and free expression? Then again, she seemed about as welcoming as a shark maw—a portrait of icy professionalism: dark hair carefully arranged in a neat bun, thick-rimmed glasses that half obscured her brows, and a sharp navy blue pantsuit that matched the Ivy League frame encasing her PhD diploma.

Her eyebrows raised a fraction. “Really.” The word held no inflection. “What are you then?”

Kai considered how to respond, how to make sense of it for her. He could tell her what he’d told Miya—that he was a wolf in sheep’s skin—but that seemed a trite half-truth, a crutch he leaned on when he had no interest in justifying his choices. Would she believe him if he told her he was the reincarnation of a dead god no one knew the name of? That the god had a brother who’d followed him across lifetimes as a vengeful spirit made of bottomless spite? Or would she write him off as delusional? Kai’s childhood therapist thought the demon tormenting him was a PTSD-related hallucination. He’d railed against the diagnosis, his conviction hinging on a flimsy distinction between literal and figurative haunting. Even if the medical explanation of his experience was wrong, his therapist was right in all the ways that mattered. Angry apparitions aside, he was still fucked up, and that made those forces louder, stronger, more insistent. The ghost left him, but he stayed haunted. A pair of phantom horns in the ass.

And that was why he was here…or so he kept reminding himself.

“I’m…a fighter.”

“A fighter,” she repeated flatly.

“I fight for a living,” he clarified.

“So, you define yourself by your profession?”

Shifting in the chair, he finally leaned back. “Wouldn’t call it a profession.”

“Then?”

“Just something I do for money.” He paused, then added, “I’m good at it.”

“Do you like it?” she asked, and Kai was surprised to hear genuine intrigue in the question.

“Well enough.” It wasn’t a lie, though he’d prefer a real challenge to a performative dance. Zverev had been the first, and now, he was itching for a rematch.

It was the doctor’s turn to shift. She tilted her head, her eyes sparking with curiosity. “Mr. Donovan?—”

“Kai,” he interjected, the formality making his skin crawl.

“Kai,” she amended with a polite smile. “Normally, I see the intimate partners of individuals in your line of work. Perhaps you’re not a mobster, but you’re still involved with the mob, are you not?”

He opened his mouth to protest, then clapped it shut. “Yes.”

“And you don’t like that,” she observed.

“No.”

She hummed after a respectable pause. “Organized crime…it draws quite a few possessive personalities.”

Kai inhaled slowly, rubbing his palms along his thighs. “I don’t like it when people stake a claim to me. I’ve tried to stay out of it—stick to fighting and taking my cut—but that’s not why I’m here.”

The sound of a pen scratching against paper. “If the mob isn’t the issue, then what is?”

“Someone I care about…” he trailed off, every thought dying before it could gestate into words. “Usually it’s fine between us, but sometimes, when shit gets to me, I do things I regret.”

“You value this relationship.” She tapped the tip of her pen on the pad. “Girlfriend?”

“Sure.” A tacit acknowledgment.

Hristina Kruni? didn’t ask for elaboration. “Did she ask you to come here?”

Grumbling, Kai cast his gaze to the wall, agitated by her precision. “Yes. Offered to come with me too, but I said no.”

“Interesting. Why’d you turn her down?”

Kai wracked his brain for a response. He didn’t want Miya seeing him like this—awkward, prickly, raw. He didn’t know what kind of darkness this little experiment would draw out of him—what he might become excavating the bleakest parts of himself. The shape of his own shadow was a goddamn enigma, and he was terrified that once he traced its contours, he’d find himself staring at a monster. “I didn’t think it would help.”

He heard a soft exhale—a barely suppressed chuckle—and faced the doctor.

She set aside the clipboard, clasped her knee with both palms, and leaned forward. “What is it that you value most? If you had to pick one thing that matters to you above all else, what would it be?”

He should’ve picked Miya. A better person would’ve. But Kai wasn’t better , and although Miya was his whole world, the question of value clipped his tongue short of speaking her name. Yes, Miya was everything to him, and her importance was precisely what’d molded her into a wedge that fit perfectly—painfully—between him and his singular desire to live unfettered, carefree, reckless. In the end, there was one thing Kai Donovan valued more than the bonds that gave his life meaning. “Doing whatever the fuck I want.”

“So, your independence?” she rephrased the sentiment.

He grunted as he chewed on a nail—a begrudging admission.

She peered at him as though she could crack through his fa?ade with her will alone. “And do you think you should be allowed to do whatever the fuck you want?”

Sighing, Kai dropped his hand to the armrest. “No.”

Hristina Kruni?’s iron gaze was a fishhook in his temple. After an unbearable pause, she relented, releasing him from her pointed hold. She sat back with a curt nod and smiled. “That must be frustrating.”

Kai had never been one to tire easily. He’d once evaded three cop cruisers for an entire evening, bar hopping his way through a dozen brawls before going home with one of the losers’ girlfriends just to spite him. He’d been twenty-one then—an unscrupulous asshole with a hard-on for delinquency. After Alice died when he was sixteen, he trekked from Granite Falls, Washington to British Columbia on foot, stopping at every major town to steal food, clothes, and start shit for no other reason than to allay his own grief. He’d fought and fucked his way to Black Hollow—a zit lost in the temperate rainforests a couple hundred miles northwest of Vancouver. Miya’s hometown. He’d lurked there for ten years before they met, and at the time, he genuinely believed nothing could be more exhausting than making space for another person next to his demons.

He was wrong.

After his first therapy session with Dr. Kruni?, he wanted to lie on a cold floor and stare at the ceiling. People yammered on about how validating therapy was, but Kai felt like a deflated tricycle tire after running over a mastiff turd. He wasn’t merely tired; he was aggravated from having his secrets wrenched out of the figurative closet and splayed out in front of him. Glancing at them wasn’t enough; no, he had to scrutinize them. Study them like artifacts until he could extract some hackneyed meaning from his pain.

Kruni? didn’t care for his abrasive deflections. She’d caught on to his fatal flaw within minutes—that rabid ache for unconditional freedom he couldn’t seem to smother no matter how hard he tried. He’d learned to be selfless when the stakes outsized his ego, but in the daily drudgery of domestic kinship, it was daunting. There were so many opportunities to fail.

Feeling brittle as a sliver of dry bark, Kai nearly snapped when his phone buzzed in his jacket pocket. He reached for the device and found it tangled with his hand wraps. Miya must’ve slipped them in to make sure he wouldn’t forget them for his next fight. Resenting the coil of guilt in his stomach, Kai swiped over the cracked phone screen. It was Sergei, too chicken shit to call after the incident from the other night.

I’ve got a lead.

The message was followed by a series of brief elaborations.

Someone willing to talk.

Woman named Lidia.

Meet her tonight at Terry’s. 9PM.

Kai shot off a quick reply, then opened his conversation with Miya.

I’m working was the last thing he’d sent her—a fucking lie he’d spun while going after the forgery. This time, he told her exactly what he was up to.

She responded immediately, the words on the screen spurring a strangled whine. Miya wanted to come with him to Terry’s. She needed a say in how they dealt with Caelan’s conundrum, and he was in no position to refuse. Miya told him everything Caelan had divulged; the least he could do was reciprocate. He wasn’t thrilled about bringing her into the underworld, but he trusted her to hold her own.

Reluctantly, he agreed, though disquiet clung to his shoulders—too-long fingers and too-long nails scraping against his skull like a phantom itch. Kai ignored it. He knew that if he scratched, he’d only come away bloodied and unsatisfied.