Page 5 of Kazimir

I left her to it and scanned for my final staff check-in. Yuri, the shadow. He was so good at his job I sometimes forgot he was even here—until he wanted to be noticed.

I found him standing by the craps table, eyes on the wolves. He was dressed like a church undertaker—black suit, tie, gloves—but his attention was absolute. The wolves were getting lucky, laughter rolling up from their throats as the dice bounced. Yuri nodded once, acknowledging me, and went back to his work.

I could feel the pulse of the club through my soles. It was an organism, alive and hungry. I had built it that way: every pleasure accounted for, every risk balanced against a greater order. Obsidian was more than neutral ground. It was the place where everyone’s vice had a price, and every debt could be paid.

For a moment, I envied them—the way their hungers were simple, their joys unburdened by memory. But then I remembered what I was, and where I was going.

I headed for the stairs. The night was young, but already I could sense the dark heart of it beating faster.

I mounted the steps, one hand tracing the iron rail, and left the world of the living for my sanctuary above.

I reached the landing and let the shadows take me. It was an old habit, one I’d perfected before the world was mapped and every secret had a price tag. For the length of a heartbeat, I dissolved—bone, sinew, blood, and sin, all unmade. Then I reassembled in my office.

My sanctuary.

The office was a study in overcompensation. Walls paneled with raw black walnut. Shelves lined with relics: a first-edition Newton, a sword hilt crusted with jewels and dried blood, a collection of religious icons from five continents. The desk, three centuries old, imported from a monastery where the monks had all vanished one winter. The leather chair behind it was massive, throne-like, but I never sat unless forced.

The only modern luxury was the glass wall. It dominated the far side of the office—ten feet high, twenty feet wide, a single pane of polar-tinted, one-way glass that overlooked the club. From here, I could see everything: the dance floor, the bars, and the writhing pulse of humanity that filled every corner. Tonight, as always, the club was full. Tables packed, booths overflowing, the center stage alive with undulating bodies. The air shimmered with sweat and pheromones. Even through glass, I could feel the hunger of it.

I turned away from the view. There was a liquor cabinet in the corner, stocked with the best whisky and vodka humanity could produce. Above it, on a shelf, decanters of blood—each labeled, each vintage tested and catalogued by my own hand. I poured none. I did not need it, not yet.

Instead, I crossed to the window, hands behind my back. I stood and watched as the pleasure engine I’d built did what it did best. On the stage, a pair of vampires performed for the crowd, their limbs entwined, each feeding from the other’s wrist with theatrical abandon. In a private booth, a wolf shifter slid his hand up the thigh of a not quite human woman, her pleasure as naked as her skin. Near the bar, a demon found a pretty target—a witch, in leather and lace, her teeth bared in either defiance or invitation.

All around, life went on. Life I had curated and regulated, life I could have any night I chose. But it was a painting behind glass, and I was its only true audience.

The city stretched beyond the club, but I rarely left these walls anymore. Philadelphia was a fine city for predators and ghosts; it never asked uncomfortable questions, and it buried its secrets in layers thick enough to last centuries. Sometimes, in the small hours, I missed Moscow’s brutal clarity, the way winter sharpened everything, made you honest. But nostalgia was another vice, and I had enough already.

Below, the private playrooms were filling up. That was where the real secrets happened. Where debts were paid in flesh or feeling. I had made sure the rooms were soundproofed and shielded from magic, so nothing could leak in or out. Except to me. Discretion was the only thing more valuable than blood.

A tap on the office door. I did not answer. It was a code between me and the staff: if I wanted company, I would open it. If not, I was to be left in peace.

I turned back to the desk and let the silence fill me. For a moment, the weight of it almost crushed my ribs.

It had been twenty-five years since Luba’s death, and not a night went by that I did not replay it—frame by frame, like a reel of film stuck on a single, terrible loop. She had been fierce and fearless, and I loved her for both. But she was never my mate. There was always that distance, that gap I could never close, no matter how I tried. Her murder was a wound I would never heal, a debt I could never pay.

So I built Obsidian. I filled it with every pleasure, every vice, every flavor of sin, and locked myself behind its glass wall. My kingdom. My cell.

I glanced down at the floor again. A young vampire—a fledgling, barely turned—was making a spectacle on the dance floor. He fed sloppily from the wrist of a human, blood dribbling down her forearm, her face a rictus of ecstasy and pain. The bouncers watched but did not intervene. It was not a violation, not yet.

The glass vibrated slightly as the bass from the sound system hit a resonant frequency. It felt like a heartbeat, slow and thunderous. I pressed my palm to the window and imagined, for a moment, that I was on the other side.

I was not.

I let my hand fall, and walked to the desk. I considered the decanter, the glass, the promise of oblivion they offered. I turned away from it.

I stood there for a long time, watching the club’s orgy of life, my pulse slow and steady as stone. I would not move. I would not drink. I would not indulge.

I would watch.

And that would be enough. For tonight.

Chapter 3

Devon

If you asked a local, they’d swear that in Philadelphia, it only rained to screw up your plans. They’d be right, in a small, sticky way. The sky that morning was a mouthful of teeth—yellowy and thick—and the rain was less a gentle soak than an endless, spit-flecked argument with the world. I timed my exit from the apartment to avoid seeing the building’s other tenants. I was good at that. What I wasn’t good at was using the umbrella I’d bought from the dollar store, which was meant for toddlers, or maybe some breed of hairless dog.

The umbrella flipped inside out on the second block and became a conversation piece for the wind. I crumpled it against my chest and hunched my head into the cold, letting the downpour sheet my hair against my face and soak the collar of my too-thin jacket. I could have run, but running was a way to be noticed, and my goal was always the opposite. So I kept my pace, measuring the distance by the color of the puddles—oily iridescence in the crosswalks, sulfur yellow near the curb, bruised blue under the traffic lights.