Wildblood

Chapter 60

60

Pyotr didn’t bother reaching for his gun. Instead, he kicked it toward Kai, the weapon skidding to a stop at his toes. Kai stared down at the revolver, its gilt doing nothing to blunt the heat of sickness tingling along his spine.

“Not going down swinging?” Kai asked, his eyes still glued to the firearm.

“I’d rather not look like a fool.” Pyotr straightened out his collar, still fixated on some pretense of decorum. “At this distance, the odds of a headshot are miniscule, and anything less will only make you more savage. I’d prefer a clean death.”

A smirk crawled up the side of Kai’s face. That Pyotr presumed to negotiate anything was evidence of his hubris. Kai picked up the weapon, weighing it in his hand. “Looks valuable.” He traced the ornate embellishments etched into the metal. Perhaps he’d get Sergei to pawn it once they were out of here—compensation for his… services .

“It’s worth more than your whole life,” Pyotr sneered. “Come on, then. Get it over with, boy.”

Kai arched a brow as he glanced up at the mobster. Despite being two decades younger, he wasn’t half as childish. “Up to the bitter end, you can’t help yourself, can you?” He stalked closer, unhurried as he scored Pyotr with a seething glare. “You think insulting me is going to make your death less humiliating, old man?”

Pyotr’s jaw tightened. “A bullet to the head is as dignified as it gets in this business.”

Kai’s smirk widened into something wicked. He pushed out the cylinder and ejected each bullet. They cascaded from his palm, chiming as they ricocheted off the floor. Then, he tossed aside the gun. “Who said this would be dignified?”

Another languid advance, and Pyotr finally faltered. “What, then?” He nodded to Kai’s belt where he kept his hunting knife. “You plan on slitting me open from navel to throat?”

Kai chuckled darkly, then unsheathed the knife only to place it on the desk next to his wallet. “No.”

A beat of silence passed, a moment of suspension as Pyotr waited for some elaboration—some clue to his fate. When none came, he straightened his jacket and swallowed.

Kai relished the slow creep of fear on the mobster’s face. “Groom all you want. You’ll scream just the same.”

Determined to confront his demise head on, Pyotr tilted his chin, likely thumbing through every grisly method of execution he’d employed during his illustrious career. Kai doubted that Pyotr’s lackluster imagination could conjure what he had in mind.

“You should know something before we get started,” said Kai, gleefully omitting what, exactly, he meant by get started . “You’re a fuck up of a father. I don’t know why you chose to adopt a kid, but you could’ve given her a family, a good life.”

Indignation seized Pyotr’s expression, and he threw his hands out. “I was keeping her safe.”

“From what?” Kai challenged. “Your kid hated her life before it was ever in danger. The shit you thought you were protecting her from only showed up because you were an asshole.” Pyotr had trapped his daughter in his warped version of reality, and her desire for freedom manifested the fetch. “Caelan was her way out, and you were going to destroy that too. Your daughter asked for death, and you decided you’d kill someone to keep her in a position that makes her want to die.”

“The forgery is an abomination,” Pyotr ground out. “An affliction on my home. That she would take my daughter’s place?—”

“Caelan was never a forgery,” Kai cut him off. “She’s just another person—a random life in a sea of accidents.”

“That thing isn’t supposed to exist.”

“And half your men are spunk breaking through an expired condom,” Kai told him. “No one is supposed to exist. We just do.”

Pyotr tsk ed. “Such a nihilist.”

Kai shrugged, meandering close enough to push the mobster back a step. “Nihilism ain’t so bad, old man. It just means you get to decide what matters.”

“As if anything matters to a man like you,” Pyotr mocked. “All you do is kill and destroy. I built an empire, made myself a god in this city, and seized what I was owed to forge the life I deserved.”

Kai stared down the meat sack gloating in the corner of a tattered room. If this was what Pyotr called an empire, it was an empire of gutters—bloody, shit-stained, and sodden with decay.

“No one’s owed life.” The wolf flashed a baleful grin. “But even gods die.”

A snarl ripped through Kai as something in his spine snapped, and his chin jerked down. Baring his teeth, he rolled his neck to the side, elongated canines digging into his lower lip. Yelping like a hare, Pyotr tried jumping away, but his back was against the wall.

The god of gutters should’ve kept his gun.

A familiar prickle sent a shudder through Kai, his skin searing. His knees and elbows bent out of place, and every joint in his hand dislodged, bones shrinking and fusing into paws. He splintered with pain he knew he’d never adapt to, yet the sound of a blubbering god was nothing short of succulent to a predator’s ears. His clothes shed away, and black fur sprouted over naked flesh, his body quaking as a series of feral growls clipped his throat. His jaw unhinged and pushed forward, making space for a growing tongue. Saliva hung from sharpened fangs as Kai’s heavy breaths fogged the air—the sound purely animal—and his tail lashed free of his vertebrae.

Eyes rimmed with crimson rose to greet the architect of Caelan’s suffering. Pyotr slid down the wall, gasping helplessly as he stared at the wolf. Rivulets of sweat poured down his face, his mind fracturing from what he’d witnessed. But Kai had no interest in Pyotr’s comprehension; he wanted to rip him open—to see what this self-proclaimed god was made of. Charcoal lips skinned back over a gleaming white cage, muzzle rippling into a beastly rictus that promised carnage.

Kai descended on Pyotr like a calamity. Ravenous, he tore at that shoulder wound first, remaking every puncture and gash from the night in the park. Savaging Pyotr twice over, Kai repaid him for the gunshot wounds that’d nearly leveled him. An eye for an eye as it were, and Pyotr seemed the Old Testament type. Kai let him scream—let him thrash and kick under the weight of hell itself. When the mobster clawed at the wolf’s mane, Kai bit his fingers clean off, blood spewing from the joints, disappearing in his dark fur. The dismembered nubs dropped to Pyotr’s chest, and Kai wound back to drink in his prey. He wondered if Pyotr still thought himself a god, or if pain reminded him that he was a lump of spoiled meat. When Pyotr dared a gander at his executioner, Kai knew he wouldn’t see a boy.

The stygian wolf was a harbinger of ruin, a thing of ravage.

As another wail curdled in Pyotr’s chest, Kai locked his maw around the man’s throat and wrenched. Pyotr’s scream faded into a pathetic gargle as blood flooded his mouth, bubbling over his lips. Scarlet dribbled down his chin and stippled Kai’s muzzle as he continued to rend the life from Pyotr’s body, sawing through cartilage and muscle until he clamped down on the bony cord he’d been mining for. With a violent twist, Kai severed the god from his empire, his legacy a crimson puddle spattered across the floor. He released his hold, and Pyotr’s head trundled from the rest of him, his mouth agape, his soulless eyes trained on the wolf. In the end, he was just as brittle as the others.

Withdrawing from the mangled heap, Kai left his mark in the gore. Let them think it was a rabid dog. Bracing for another brutal transition, he coaxed the wolf into its den and surrendered to the agony that shaped him back into a man. When his fur receded and his naked limbs stretched across the tarnished floor, he rasped for breath and struggled to right himself, then fumbled for his discarded jeans. Once he remembered how his legs worked and stuffed them into his pants correctly, he snatched his hunting knife and wallet from the desk. Scooping the gilded revolver and the six stray bullets from the floor, he staggered out of the office, stepping over the corpses as he went. Once he reached the basement door, he leaned against the frame until the world stopped spinning, and the iron faded from his tongue. Divinity tasted like shit.

Kai thumped down the stairs to retrieve Sergei, making sure he saw the bodies on his way out.