Page 27 of Kazimir

“How did it go?” he asked.

I opened my mouth, then closed it. “Fine,” I said, which was not a word for what had just happened, but it was all I had.

He smiled, like he understood perfectly.

We walked back to my office together. The city was almost gone from the windows, night rolling in. I thought of all the places I’d slept, all the names I’d borrowed, all the times I’d vanished because it was easier than staying. I thought of Kazimir’s voice: You are mine.

For the first time since waking in that park, I wanted to belong to someone.

I sat at my new desk, staring at the blank screen, and waited for the future to find me.

Chapter 8

Kazimir

The quiet after her departure weighed more than the hour preceding it. I sat motionless in my office, every muscle set and cold, the truce I’d forged with my own restlessness fractured by the memory of Devon’s scent lingering in the room. Even now it warred with the smoked sandalwood I’d chosen to erase lesser distractions. Futile. It had always been futile once the Goddess delivered a mate. And Devon—she was not merely delivered, she was flung at my existence like a stone through cathedral glass.

The wall of one-way glass overlooked Obsidian’s main floor, but I’d set the tint to black, preferring the surveillance feeds flickering across my monitor. Nine angles covered the club: bar, stage, lounge, hallways, and the entrance most would never even notice. I rewound to 23:11, where Devon first entered. Her stride was uncertain, but her eyes swept the club’s entrance with a predator’s wariness, cataloging threats. She wore the tailored tan pants and white tank top that fit her form perfectly—strange, how satisfied it made me to see her clothed in my offering. The jacket clung to her body as though it had been cut exactly for her. She looked like she’d dressed in armor for a war she had no wish to fight.

Yet she fought anyway. I traced the cursor over her image, isolating it. Watched as she moved behind Nikolay up the stairs into her new life.

My thumb pressed hard into the edge of the desk, a mindless need to feel pain I could control. The rest—what the world did to Devon Wade—was an affront to kindness. She’d spoken of her first weeks among humans as if recalling someone else’s torment: waking in a park, the bleeding absence of memory, the bureaucratic limbo that saw her shunted from hospital to halfway house to tenements that stank of piss and despair. Her words, halting but precise, had betrayed nothing.

I wanted to peel the skin from their bones. The only reason I hadn’t ordered it done already was that she’d asked me, with humor in her voice, not to. She didn't want to be responsible for their suffering after they had assured hers. She was too good for this world.

Still, she lingered in my club—my territory—where every other supernatural, witch, demon, or otherwise, was catalogued and accounted for. She was an unknown quantity, an anomaly. A riddle wrapped in bruises and bravado. She had scars on her back, described as jagged, that ran like railroad tracks between her shoulder blades. I needed to see them. But I was certain. They were once wings. Torn from her body with deliberate, methodical cruelty.

Honestly, it was a blessing that she had no memory of the act. But I knew. Every vampire recognized the divine energy of a fallen, though most would never dare approach one. In truth, fallen were rare among us. They were spread across continents and did their best to blend into societies where they dwelt.

For twenty-five years I’d denied myself even the memory of wanting. The last time I’d allowed myself to hope, the world had burned. Now, with a single glance, Devon Wade had pressed a thumb to the bruise on my soul and wrenched me awake.

The muscle at the corner of my jaw twitched. I forced myself to play the footage again. At 23:14, Devon met my gaze through the camera. Not possible, but there it was—a flicker, a directness, like she knew I was watching and was daring me to do something about it. She held that gaze for a full three seconds. I counted.

I leaned back in my chair, letting its frame bite into my spine, refusing to show any weakness even to empty furniture. I kept my hands flat on the desk. In another life, I would have prayed. Instead, I calculated.

She was a fallen, yes. But not just any fallen. She’d arrived with no memory, no apparent agenda, and—this was the part I could not let go—no recognition of what she truly was. Fallen angels didn’t simply forget.

It made no sense.

Unless.

I let the theory roll through my mind, gathering momentum like a rockslide: the Goddess had done this. She’d plucked the soul out of some celestial circumstance, stripped of context and memory, and dropped her directly into my path. Why? Because the universe loves jokes. Because fate is a bitch. Because I’d dared, once, to believe myself finished with desire.

I curled my hand into a fist, stifling the urge to punch straight through the desk. Instead, I placed the tip of my pinky against the grain of the wood and traced a spiral. I remembered Lucia, my daughter, as a toddler, tracing her fingers in a similar pattern on the frozen river behind our little dacha. She looked up at me, eyes full of mischief, and said, “Papa, do you think the ice remembers who walks on it?” I’d told her it remembered everything. That’s what made it strong enough to bear our weight.

My own life felt brittle by comparison. Almost a thousand years and I’d never risked fracture, never allowed even a hairline crack to show. But now—now there was something worth breaking for.

I closed my eyes and let the memory of Devon’s laugh echo through the office. She’d laughed once, just once, in my presence, and it was the sort of sound that made the old languages in my head want to resurrect themselves for the sole purpose of describing it. I’d give anything to hear it again.

That was weakness. But I had no interest in strength for its own sake. Not anymore.

When I opened my eyes, the monitor was paused on a frame where Devon was half-turned, looking over her shoulder, lips parted like she’d been about to speak. I stared at the image, trying to decode the question in her eyes. Did she know? Was she waiting for me to tell her? Or had the Goddess chosen her precisely because she would never ask?

Either way, it fell to me to protect her. From the world, from the predators, from herself. From me, if necessary.

And when the world came to tear her apart, I would be the shield that broke first.

I took the service stairs. In Obsidian, every public movement was calculated—especially my own—but the straightest line to the second floor was a narrow stairwell no guest would ever see. On the landing, I paused, listening to the thrum beneath the music. The air was charged, not just with static but something rawer, toothier. Incubus presence, maybe. Siren pheromones, perhaps.