Page 95 of Honey Cut
He’s out.
I spend too long looking at him like this. The sheer length of him, the heavy muscles at rest. The sleepy cock, which lolls to the side, lovely and with thick, dark curls around it. Even his pose is unconsciously graceful, and I think of Renaissance paintings, of frescoes, of statues. The beautiful, unclothed hero at rest. I can’t trust that he won’t wake up while I’m gone, but feeding the spare tablet to him in his sleep is ill-advised. If he wakes up while I’m doing it, if he’s taken something else that I don’t know about that’s making him this tired…
I’ll just need to make sure I’m gone before he wakes up. I’ll leave a note so he won’t worry and alert Mark. And maybe he’ll sleep as long as I need him to anyway. We did have a hell of a night.
I cover him with a blanket, dump the coffee, and get ready to end a man’s life.
thirty-six
ISOLDE
Dusk comes,Tristan is still asleep, and I am making my way to the club in the dark.
I don’t like wigs or hats or scarves while I work, and yet my hair is too distinctive not to hide, so I’ve dyed it dark with a temporary dye that will wash out with a few rinses. I’m in black pants, black boots, and a long-sleeved black shirt, my knife strapped to my thigh and hidden by the black trench coat I wear. I stay in the shadows when I can, but I make sure to keep my demeanor light and casual when I cross streets and squares. Belgrade is a night city, crowded and thrumming with people craving music, drugs, sex, and it’s best to blend in rather than to skulk. Here, my saint’s clothes just look like edgy club-wear, like I’m going to twist my body to EDM and drink black-light-reactive drinks until I’m dizzy.
I don’t go in through the front of the club this time. I approach from the back and stop in the shadows across from the same door Andrea was standing outside when I overheard her phone call. It doesn’t take long for the door to swing open—a lanky employee taking a bag of trash to a dumpster—and as he disappears back inside, I move forward silently, quickly, and catch the closing door with my boot. And then I slip into the club and pull on a pair of latex gloves.
There is no security back here in the staff hallway, and the VIP area itself is not surveilled by camera—I assume because the clientele would prefer not to have what they do committed to video. No, the bulk of the security comes from muscle, from hired guns.
In some ways easier to deal with than electronic surveillance, and in other ways much, much worse.
I drop my hand to my knife and breathe my usual prayer to St. Michael. I spent the afternoon stretching and praying and mentally rehearsing this. It will be fast and direct. No one bats an eye when a violent person meets a violent end, and so it’s a relief not to have to stage anything elaborate, to do this in the simplest way.
Blade, blood, done.
I duck my head as I take the stairs two at a time, emerging through the door to the VIP balcony and into a world of lights and music. It’s disorienting after the brightly lit staff staircase, but I’m ready for that too, waiting patiently for my eyes to adjust so I can see the way to the booth Kulov occupied last time. Predictably, there are three men in suits in front of it.
The men are giants; the suits are cheap.
All the other booths are unguarded.
I wish this were the movies. I wish I had some special gadget—a dart gun, a tiny gas cannister—that would take out the guards without killing them. I doubt they are good people, but there’s a cheapness to their deaths that depresses me.
I cannot keep myself hidden for long up here, so I don’t try. I approach the booth at a stride, confirming for myself as I draw my knife that I see Kulov and another man’s shoulder.
Drobny. Perfect.
One of the security guards steps in front of me, not seeing the knife until it’s too late. By the time he falls, clutching uselessly at his bleeding throat, I’ve done the same to the man behind him. The third has managed to pull out his gun, but I’m too close for it to do him any good. I slice up at his wrist, sweeping the blade all the way through the motion, and then I bring the point of my knife back down into the place where his neck joins his shoulder. It sinks into him until I hit bone. I jerk the knife free.
He drops and I step forward to the table, disappointment like an arrow to the gut when I see that the second man in the booth isn’t Drobny.
Fuck.
He must be at his safe house after all.
The strange man and Kulov are both fumbling for their own guns now, their clumsiness explained by the cocaine dust and empty vodka bottles on the table. I’m irritated, upset, and regretful as I slit the throat of the man I don’t recognize and then stab my knife through Kulov’s hand and pin it to the table.
He screams, but it doesn’t matter. The club is too loud for screams. And the lights are too erratic, too blinding, for anyone to make sense of what’s happened up here. Four slowly cooling bodies right above them and the half a thousand people just below are none the wiser.
“Where’s the safe house?” I demand in English. “Where’s Drobny?”
Kulov is trying to get his gun with his other hand now, and I can’t have that. I yank my knife free and drive it into his stomach.
His eyes go round, his shoulders jerk forward. The fear in his face is childish and pathetically confused. It’s the same for so many like him. You maim and murder for long enough, and it gets easy to mistake your cruelty for invulnerability. For immortality. You forget that even the apex predators become carrion after long enough.
“Where is Drobny?” I ask again. I don’t have to twist the knife much to make him scream. “Tell me!”
He’s babbling in Slovak now, trying to paw at me with his punctured hand. Blood is everywhere—the real reason why black clothes are so useful, aside from blending into the shadows.
