by Gaja J. Kos
A part of me wanted to run after him. Offer him whatever consolation or anger relief he needed.
But the ICRA side was adamant I should stay here. Work the case like any other, where emotions didn’t get in the way.
If Demyan had trouble separating the two, it was that much more important I kept a cool head if we wanted to see this solved.
After sniffing around the corpse and its immediate surroundings for fifteen minutes, the team arrived on location.
The team. Plus Mads.
I supposed I’d be lying to myself if I claimed I hadn’t expected him to drive over. But knowing that I hadn’t called him directly helped ease some of the guilt about going behind Demyan’s back. I motioned to Tilda’s witchy assistant I knew by sight but not by name that she could take the body away, then walked over to Mads.
“What happened?” His gaze drifted to the werewolf’s blood-smeared face, then the lovely blend of urine and shit staining his pants. As far as ways to go went, this was not a pretty one.
I sighed and motioned Mads to follow me to the side where we wouldn’t get in the way when Tilda’s assistant rolled out the body bag. Mads spared one last look at the dead wolf, his chest a solid wall of unmoving muscle hinting he didn’t want to inhale any of the foul air.
It was only once we reached the far end of the freshly cordoned-off perimeter that he sucked in a deep breath, brown eyes hard on mine.
There was no need for him to repeat the question.
I braced one shoulder against the crumbling stucco and crossed one ankle over the other. “Morozov and I were tracking down all possible connections to the two attacks these past few days. Lobanov over there was a great possibility, but nearly impossible to pin down. My contact at the PD tipped me off where I might find him since they’d been investigating him as a possible culprit in a series of high-end B&Es—mostly human crew, which is why he hadn’t fallen on our radar earlier. Demyan and I came here, but the moment the asshole saw us, he poisoned himself.”
“Demyan?” Mads arched a dark brown eyebrow.
“Fuck.”
I hadn’t meant for that to slip out.
“Yeah, you’ve been doing a lot of that lately, haven’t you.” He shot me a knowing look. “His office isn’t exactly soundproof and, let’s face it, the way you both smell after the other, you might as well be living together.”
We weren’t, though he was right on every other count.
When I grappled for something to say—and kept failing like my damn brain consisted of only air—Mads intervened. “You do realize that the team had bets going on when this would happen?”
“What?”
Mads chuckled, then motioned to me. “You and the boss. It was only a matter of time before you stopped acting like you weren’t interested.”
I wasn’t entirely sure whether to be pissed or amused, so I asked the next thing that came to my mind. “Who won?”
“Uwe,” he said dryly.
I did laugh then. Clearly, Mr. Gossip Brigade was nothing short of a sore loser.
Then again, given how he liked to hoard unverified intel about the personal lives of nearly everyone around him like a magazine you flipped through while sitting at the hairdresser’s, I figured it must have sucked, passing the Gossip Crown to someone else. At least temporarily.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “And what was your bet?”
When Mads didn’t answer, I arched one eyebrow—then lightly punched him in the arm. “Spill.”
“That party you went to. For your sister’s comeback.”
The memory sent a nice little current of heat rushing through me. While nothing had happened between Demyan and me then, the event had definitely been a pivoting point in our relationship. He’d gone with me as my plus one, and we actually had fun together. Off duty, no work. It was then that I first caught a true glimpse of the man beneath the agent.
And fuck, I’d fallen for him hard.
“Does it help if I say you weren’t that far off the mark?”
Mads’s dry and definitely not amused look said it all.
I chuckled, then watched the team load Lobanov’s body into the van to rush it off to Tilda. I pushed off the wall. “You have any more questions about the case, or is my sex life all the info you wanted?”
Mads sent me another dry look, though his lips twitched as he pulled a pad from his coat pocket. The one thing all of us at Violent Crimes had in common besides our ruthless nature was that we were all just a little old-school. No fancy tablets. Pen and paper all the way.
Of course, the fact that with the situations we often found ourselves in while on duty, the Agency would need to shell out a shitton of money for all the broken gadgets had they given them to us certainly played a role.
“Walk me through it.”
I did. I started with the attack on Demyan—what I’d learned after I reclaimed the case. The more intimate details I kept to myself since Mads didn’t need to know much beyond the fact that someone from Russia with ties to Demyan’s former pack—the pack he’d helped put out of commission—had it in for our boss. I laid out the rough plan, the bodies we kept leaving behind without either one of us even touching them.
By the time I was done, a frown had creased Mads’s forehead. “That’s some fucking loyalty going on right there.”
“What do you mean?” I cocked my head to the side. “You think they’re doing this to protect their ringleader?”
Mads rubbed his chin and flipped the pad closed with one hand like it was a Zippo. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? A bunch of rough, tough weres wouldn’t fear dealing with ICRA enough to take their lives. I mean, sure, incarceration is the worst kind of punishment for our kind, but still… This feels different.”
“Like they’re protecting someone,” I echoed my former statement, though there was no question in it this time.
In all fairness, the thought had crossed my mind once or twice before, but I filed it away in a plausible-but-not-necessarily-true mental folder. The wolves, while linked to Demyan’s former pack, struck me more as lone agents than part of an organization. Suicide to escape interrogation and not the punishment for their crimes seemed a bit drastic in that light. Then again, if we were dealing with the same group of people who had no qualms hiring a bunch of hitmen to attack civvies then shooting them in cold blood so they couldn’t rat their employer or employers out…
Yeah, Mads’s theory wasn’t farfetched at all.
“Where is Morozov, anyway?” he asked.
“He needed to cool off,” I said, opting for the truth. “If you have everything you need, I’d like to go track the man down.”
“Sure.”
With a quick squeeze of his upper arm to let him know how much I appreciated his assistance, I took off in the direction I’d seen Demyan take. Enough time had gone by to scatter his scent and fill the street with a whole bunch of new ones, none particularly appealing, but I managed to find that single, faint thread that would lead me to him. I zigzagged through several districts, some on the come up, but mostly ones that had been left untouched since the War. Munich had poured a lot of money into rebuilding, but a city as large as this one, there were bound to be areas left to die. My job, as fate would have it, usually led right to them.
Just as I cleared a long street with a single stripped car sitting on the curb and a bunch of boarded-up storefronts adorning the buildings’ facades, the scent of blood prickled my nostrils.
I frowned, then cast a quick look around the intersection.
The traffic light above was dark, and no sounds drifted through the mild night. There wasn’t a single light on in any of the buildings, though by the scent of it, someone had been cooking drugs nearby. The human variety. But whoever it was, they were long gone, with just the smell lingering like a personal signature.
It wasn’t the one that interested me right now, though.
Determining the area was truly clear, I slunk into the street running southward. More boa
rded-up stores greeted the eye. I focused on one painted several shades of graffiti three doors down.
I sucked in deeply.
That was the one all right.
I kept close to the wall and prowled forward.
Two doors.
One.
Demyan’s scent increased as I approached one of the gaps in the wood.
But so did the blood.
A slap that could only come from a fist crunching a nose pulsed from the room.
I’d waited long enough.
I barged into the abandoned store, then stopped dead in my tracks.
Demyan stood in the center of a space. All glorious height and impressive muscles, he cut a figure in the dim light like one of the characters from my younger brother’s Noir action comics. He shook off the blood trickling from his knuckles, then glanced back up—
At the werewolf, bound and strung from the ceiling, head dangling upside down.
Chapter Fifteen
Demyan’s head whipped around as I sucked in a sharp breath.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he growled.
All I did was arch an eyebrow and then asked dryly, “And why is that?”
I knew he was reeling, fucking pissed with the events that kept crashing into his life. But that didn’t mean he could just renege on our deal.
Or boss me around.
Right now, standing in the dark, dusty shop with only the glow light he’d thrown on the floor serving as illumination and a werewolf tied to the ceiling like a particularly meaty piñata, he wasn’t Senior Agent Morozov. He wasn’t the head of Violent Crimes with the authority to send me running like a good little subordinate. I padded forward, ignoring the werewolf who kept glancing between the two of us—observing me as if I was his ticket out. Tough luck, buddy. Though most of all, he just seemed thrilled to witness a confrontation.
Amusement slithered through me.
I doubted the kind Demyan and I would share matched the one he had in mind.
“Leave, Greta.”
I lifted my chin. “No.”
Right as Demyan’s teeth clenched, I brought out my claws and flicked them up. The sharp tips clicked together. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the werewolf’s expression change. I walked around him in a slow, predatory circle, evading the blood that had started to pool on the floor beneath his head.
“Another link?” I asked simply and met Demyan’s gaze.
A tick worked in his jaw and his green-speckled brown eyes were just as hard, but he squeezed out a fairly even, “Yes.”
When he didn’t divulge more, I prompted him with another arched brow.
“I smelled him—on Lobanov. Then caught his scent on the wind when I went to cool down.”
“Some cooldown,” I commented and motioned to the strung-up were with my claws.
Briefly, dark mirth flirted with Demyan’s eyes. Progress.
“And no poison,” I observed. “No knife to the throat. Gun to the temples. Interesting.”
As I circled around the werewolf again, Demyan’s tense body unlocked. With every step he took, circling the bastard in the other direction, he transitioned into the hunter I’d wanted him to be. The rigidness, the reservations—they uncurled from him and dissipated in the air. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
“Have you learned anything yet?” I trailed a claw across the werewolf’s abdomen.
His muscles contracted, and a thin line of crimson manifested on his white skin.
Demyan’s rough voice all but purred danger. “Nothing but silence. And a few grunts.”
Our captive shot daggers as Demyan came into his line of sight, but with the way he was strung, the expression really didn’t have the desired effect. My lips quirked up. Shame. Such a waste of a menacing face.
A cold smile stretched the corners of my mouth. “Then let’s get started, shall we?”
The werewolf began to protest, jerking and twitching as he spewed unproductive shit in Russian, but Demyan stuffed a dirty rag into his mouth, effectively silencing him.
“When you’re willing to talk,” he drawled, “just signal.”
We both knew he wouldn’t. Not until we were already deep in our element.
And in the meantime, the rag would contain his screams.
Perhaps a bit unnecessary in a neighborhood such as this one, but while I was all for loud party atmospheres, I also enjoyed working in peace. I cracked my neck, then approached him from behind while Demyan took position in the front. As much as I itched to act, this was his capture. His torture to perform.
I wouldn’t dare get in the way of that.
But I could assist.
Demyan fanned his bloodstained claws. “The longer you refuse to answer, gavno, the less of you there will remain. Now…”
He pressed the tips of his claws to the werewolf’s groin. “Who from Zavrazhin’s old pack set this up?”
The man laughed, the sound muffled by the dirty rag.
“Who?” Demyan’s claws sank through the fabric of his pants. A fresh hint of blood stained the air.
Still, the werewolf showed no signs of speaking.
Demyan met my gaze. I touched my own claws to the were’s kidney.
Then pressed.
His flesh gave little resistance. Blood warmed my fingertips as I buried my claws deep inside, then retracted them—only to position my hand on the other side. A soft current of fear filled the space, but despite his body’s response, the werewolf held his silence.
A rip cut through the air.
The rag suppressed the howl that would have torn free from the were’s throat as Demyan shredded his balls.
We waited.
The werewolf thrashed, blood gushing down his torso and throat. The pool of crimson on the ground spread.
My natural predatory instincts swooned at the helpless, wounded prey we’d reduced him to, but I remained on the sidelines—just like Demyan—and waited for the wave of agony to let him loose from its grip. His healing kicked in, suppressing the blood flow and knitting together the shredded flesh.
Demyan placed his clawed hand upon the were’s still mending wound. “Ready to talk yet?”
Standing behind him, I didn’t see the scum’s response, but whatever he’d done must have signaled his affirmative because Demyan crouched and brought his face within inches of the man’s.
“If you scream when I remove this, I don’t give a shit if the whole of Munich comes running,” he growled, elongated canines on display. “I’ll rip your cock straight off and fucking feed it to you. Understand?”
Chapter Sixteen
I believed him.
And so did the werewolf.
So when Demyan removed the rag, the man let out no sound. Not even a growl, though it was clear it had been an effort to restrain himself. As I circled around to stand by Demyan’s side, the were’s hoarse voice carefully spilled into the silence.
“Tolya Nikolaev. The new alpha.” He coughed, the wheeze from his lungs hinting Demyan had done more than just the visible damage I’d seen when I got here. Severe one, too, if his healing capabilities hadn’t smoothed over the injury yet. “He gathered us. Called for retribution.”
Demyan and I had figured as much, that it had been the way he’d all but wiped out his old pack that had prompted this whole ordeal.
Still, it struck me as odd, given how traditionally organized they used to be, at least, if they weren’t any longer, that the alpha would order a hit instead of overseeing it himself. But maybe that was just the new times talking.
Or caution.
Demyan wasn’t the kind of person you got into a confrontation with and expect to walk away alive.
“Why now?” he demanded.
But whether the werewolf ignored him or was simply too caught up in what he wanted to say, he didn’t answer Demyan’s question. “You ruined us. We all had family in the pack. Family we depended on to survive. You know how it is in the Komi Republic, Diak Pavlov. Or have you forgo
tten?”
“The War changed things.”
If looks could kill, Demyan and I would both be lying in a pool of our blood right now.
“By the time we recovered…” The werewolf spat blood on the floor—quite a feat, given he was hanging upside down. “Recovered. I don’t know why I even used that word.”
He shifted into Russian, talking hard and fast—and, judging by the sharp edge Demyan’s features had gained, none of what he said was pleasant. I caught a word every now and then, but it was mostly profanities, with a couple of deaths and hunteds thrown in.
“He was a cold-blooded, sadistic egomaniac,” Demyan growled. His former alpha, I suspected. Zavrazhin. “He used all of us. The loved ones you claimed you and your group had in the pack. He was a fucking manipulative abuser who wouldn’t have blinked at slitting all of your throats if it meant getting the pack to do his bidding.”
I didn’t know what I expected after the outburst, what reaction my mind wired up as the proper one. A shrug definitely wasn’t it.
“Be that as it may,” the were said, once again shifting into German, “Tolya Nikolaev wants your head for what you did to his cousin.”
Demyan snorted. “The only head that will roll will be his.”
Something stirred at the back of my mind. I glanced at Demyan, but he was too focused on the were to pay me any attention.
I touched his arms lightly, asking to let me in.
“What are you not telling us?” I pressed. Demyan grew tense beside me. “The attack on Morozov failed—and those werewolves weren’t exactly rookies. Especially Aleksei Valanovic. Your pack member, right?”
The were’s jaw clenched.
“So if they were unable to bring Morozov in, alive or dead, despite the trap you laid out, despite running our department ragged to isolate him…” I lowered myself into a crouch and cocked my head to the side, meeting the were’s eyes. “You must have another plan.”