VIKTOR
The concrete was a slab of ice against my spine.
Blood, hot and insistent, soaked through my shirt, a sticky tide spreading across my ribs. The knife had bitten deep. Not a killing blow. Not yet. But a ruinous one. A grind of agony with every breath, every heartbeat.
I stared at a sky I couldn't see. Smoke choked the heavens, a rolling, black plague blotting out the stars. The car was a pyre. Flames devoured the twisted skeleton, roaring their victory. The heat baked my skin from twenty feet away.
Kairen.
The name was a shard of glass in my mind.
He was in that car.
I saw him climb in.
I watched it pull away.
I witnessed it become hell.
But my gut, a coiled, ancient thing, twisted in revolt. A wrongness. A splinter in the logic of the moment. I'd stood over too many bodies, orchestrated too many ends, to not smell a lie when it was burning in front of me.
I needed to see bones. I needed to see teeth.
Footsteps. Heavy. Deliberate. Crunching on debris.
