Infernal: Bite The Bullet (12 page)

“That serpent tattoo on your back. She has that
exact image on her arm.”

“No. That’s impossible,” he said, his brow
creasing.

“Why? What does it mean?”

“It’s the insignia of Dante’s elite Armageddon
Force. Only a handful of men have ever earned the right to wear it, and most of
them are dead.”

“Then why does my mother have that same tattoo?”
For a moment, I tried to picture her as some kick-ass Ukrainian special agent,
but the image was beyond ridiculous. It couldn’t be coincidence though, surely.

“You are mistaken,” Konstantyn said. “Perhaps it
is only similar? The snake is a common enough symbol.”

My brows knitted in thought. Maybe he was right,
and they were only similar. I hadn’t had the chance to compare the photograph
of Konstantyn’s tattoo with the one on my mother’s arm, and she’d pulled her
sleeve down so quickly, I’d only gotten a glimpse of the image, and was mostly
relying on childhood memories.

“Tell me about Dante,” I said, pleading with my
eyes.

“Dante became like a father to me,” he said
quietly.

He’d been close to his mentor, clearly. “What
happened between you two?”

“I told you I was Secret Service. Technically,
that is a lie.”

I leaned back and he sighed, shaking his head at
the flinch that ran through my body.

“I am AWOL,” he clarified, “hence the fake
passport I used to get here.”

Some of my muscles unknotted and my elbow propped
up again. “You left him? You ran. Why?”

“A year ago, Dante and I were on a mission, deep
undercover in Russia. There was a plot to assassinate a senior politician in my
country. We tracked down the terrorists to a cabin in a remote forest. Things
got messy, and there was a gun fight. We hadn’t counted on the guy who’d gone
out to piss in the woods. He ambushed us and Dante took a bullet for me, in the
chest.” I watched Konstantyn’s jaw clench as he rubbed at his sternum. “I
managed to secure the cabin, and I carried Dante back to the little house on
the outskirts of the village where we’d made our base. I expected to be digging
him an unmarked grave in the snow that night, but by some miracle, he was still
breathing. Any other man should have died.

He was in a bad way though, losing so much blood,
and the wound was beyond my abilities. He needed a surgeon, an airlift out of
there, but he refused. We weren’t supposed to be across the border, and
exposing ourselves would have sparked a major political incident. What was I
supposed to do? Just watch him die?”

“What did you do?”

“I gave him a shot of morphine, and then I did
what he asked of me. A dying man’s wish, I thought.” He looked up at me with
haunted eyes. “He asked me to fetch him a girl from the village. I knew her, a
little. She was a pretty one, blonde. The men would whistle at her as she
walked the hill from the store and she would smile back with a look that said
they couldn’t afford her.”

“She was a prostitute?”

“I don’t know for sure, but when I offered her a
fistful of money to come comfort a sick man, she came willingly enough.”

He raked his scalp with both hands and shook his
head. “I never should have brought her to his room.”

“What happened?”

“He asked me to leave them alone, so I went for a
walk with a bottle of vodka and the stars for company. I gave it some time,
freezing my ass off, before I wandered back to the house and went to check on
him.” Konstantyn looked right at me with those piercing eyes. “That girl… he
had her trussed up, like an animal. He had tortured her. She was already dead
when I arrived. There were symbols carved into her skin, like this one,” he
said, running a hand down his bandaged abs, “and… body fluids. Dante was naked,
bathed in her blood, liked he’d smeared it all over himself. And he was hard,
you know?” He glanced into his lap. “Getting off on what he’d done. There was
no guilt, no remorse. He strode up to me and wiped his wet hands on my cheeks.
He blooded me, like you do after a hunt, and all I could think of was that damn
pig my father made me slaughter.”

“But how is that possible? You said he was shot.
Where did he find the strength to do all that?”

“That’s the thing. There was no gunshot wound.
Beneath all that congealing blood, his chest was perfect.” Konstantyn scrunched
up his face and shook his head in disbelief. “I saw the entry and exit wounds
with my own eyes, but afterwards, it was as though he’d never taken that bullet
at all.”

That made no sense, I thought. He had to have been
mistaken about the bullet wound. But calling bullshit on his story was liable
to shut him down, right when I needed to know more.

“What did you do?”

“I left the house. I made my own way back over the
border, alone, and so did Dante. I made a report to a superior officer, but it
was my word against Dante’s. There was no girl reported missing, no body, no
gunshot wound. The whole thing was covered up.” He made a disgusted sound in
his throat. “They recommended I get a psychiatric evaluation and take some time
out of the field for post traumatic stress.”

“So Dante just went back to work, after killing
that girl?”

“Umhmm.”

“Damn.”

“A few weeks later, Dante came to see me. He
confessed to me that he had an inoperable brain tumour, and that the doctors
had given him only three months to live. He said he wasn’t ready to die yet,
that he needed my help, to find another girl.”

“What?” I gaped, moving to sit beside the man who
looked broken on my couch. “He’s insane.”

Konstantyn nodded and fell back, his arms limp on
his knees, like he’d given up fighting. “He is sick, and desperate. This girl
would provide a cure, his said, for his broken body. I am a soldier, Neva. I
have seen many things, many atrocities. But that day, I saw horror. I looked
into the madness in my friend’s eyes, and I was truly afraid. I asked him if he
knew what he’d done back there in the house. He said this was only the
beginning, that soon I would understand fully. We argued. I refused to be any
part of it. As I walked out the door, he told me I could never leave, that the
tattoo on my back meant I belonged to him, for eternity.”

“So that’s when you ran?”

He nodded. “I packed a bag that night and I made
myself disappear. He’d taught me well.”

No shit. I hated the niggle that wondered what
other things he’d been taught. His revulsion was honest but... “You didn’t turn
him in?”

“I tried. I reported him anonymously to the higher
authorities, but Dante knows more secrets about them and their families than
they do themselves. His contacts go right to the top. Even if I had direct
evidence, nobody would be willing to blow the whistle on him.” He exhaled. “I
should have killed him when I had the chance. But the man was my friend, he’d
taken that bullet for me. I was so fucked in my head, between the psychiatrists
and the weird shit that went on in that room...” He was breathing hard.

“Where did you go?” I asked, attempting to derail
the panic building in Konstantyn’s eyes.

“I travelled around Europe, keeping a low profile,
hacking into police files, tracking Dante’s activities as best I could. I had
nothing but a trail of missing persons and rumours, but then I got lucky. A
tip-off led me to an encrypted website called Gilles de Rais. It is the work of
a satanic cult that gets off on torturing young men and women during ritualised
sex.”

A cult? The word leapt out at me, along with an image
of my mother ranting about demons at Daniel’s funeral, and that tattoo on her
arm that I was no longer so convinced was different from Lazarenko’s. “A nurse
at the forensic unit told me my mother had escaped from a cult, before I was
born.”

“She’s locked up?”

“Yeah. For ripping out a man’s throat with her
teeth. She maintains he was a demon.” My laughter was caustic. “That’s how she
earned herself an indefinite stay in the secure psych unit. But that’s
bullshit, right? Demons don’t exist.”

“Right. Bullshit,” Konstantyn said, but there was
a flicker of uncertainty in his voice. “But there’s more. Dante goes by the
surname Barron. In the fourteen-hundreds, Gilles de Rais was using alchemy and
torturing young children, in an attempt to summon a demon named Barron.”

My eyes widened. “Okay, but you don’t actually
think this Dante guy is anything but a sick human being, right? And this whole
thing is some group psychosis led by a crazy man with a brain tumour who thinks
killing innocent people will somehow cure him.”

Konstantyn dropped his head in his hands and
scrubbed at his scalp. I knew what was on his mind: that miraculously healed
gunshot wound. But he was mistaken about that. Any other line of thought, and
we’d be buying into the crazy too.

“These people are very real,” Konstantyn said,
finally looking up at me. “It’s all on there, on video, the gang rapes, the
brutality. You saw the stills. Dante is involved, he has to be. The
similarities to what I witnessed with the Russian girl are too close to be
denied. The site is highly sophisticated. The files are encrypted, the abusers
use pseudonyms, and they’re always masked in the video footage. The whole
operation stinks of money. Dante has been busy, I mean really busy.”

I’d seen the photographs, my imagination was
filling in the gaps, with one very familiar face.

“Daniel?” I choked out, my stomach a churning pit
of acid.

He nodded slowly, his eyes full of agonised pity.
“I’m sorry, Neva.”

“They have to be stopped,” I said, choking out the
words.

“I followed them here. They’ve been moving across
Europe, and now I believe they’ve based themselves in London.”

I shook my head and forced away the tears that
brimmed. “You haven’t gone to the police? Interpol? They can’t all be corrupt,
surely?”

“I can’t risk it.”

“Why not?” Lives were at stake. My brother might
not have died, if only Konstantyn had acted sooner.

“I know now that the tip-off came from Dante
himself. He wants me back in the fold. Within minutes of decoding that website,
I got word that my sister had been reported missing, in London. I spoke with my
mother who told me Mariya was lured to London with an offer she couldn’t
refuse: a visa, a job, an opportunity to escape our father.” Konstantyn’s brows
knit in a hard frown. “I wasn’t there to protect her, and now Dante has taken
my sister as collateral, to ensure my full cooperation.”

“Damn.” I exhaled and leant back, my shoulder
brushing his. “So that’s why you’re here, to find your sister.”

“Yes. She was working as a hostess at Infernal
when she disappeared. Your brother worked there too, and he was sent there by
the studio.”

Shit
. “I’m sorry if I blew your cover.”

He smiled my apology off and bumped my shoulder.
“You did me a favour.”

Hard to believe, given the beating he’d taken. My
eyes drifted down to the gauze covering his chest and guilt was a lance to my
conscience.

He tipped my chin up with a finger and an accented
tut. “This was not your doing, Neva. I used my real name. I wasn’t hiding,
merely hoping to draw Dante out.”

Still, I met his eyes and hoped he saw the
apology, even if he didn’t think he needed one. “You wanted to be found,” I
said.

He inclined his head. “It is my only chance to
save my sister.”

“Is that why you danced at the club?”

His jaw tightened when he nodded. “Yes. But the
club, and the dance studio are only fronts for something much bigger. Now Dante
knows I’m here, he will be coming for me, and that is why I must leave.”

I exhaled and rested my shoulder to the back of
the couch, trying to get comfortable when I felt like I should be running too.
If Oliver Dalton was the dirty cop Konstantyn said he was, then the police were
everywhere, had access to everything, including my apartment. Would they be
coming for me next? Paranoia crept under my skin, making me question
everything.

“Hold up,” I said. “If you wanted Dante to find
you, why did you escape from Dalton’s men?”

“I had to secure the evidence I gathered. If I get
out of this alive, that evidence will prove my innocence. But I don’t believe
for a moment that I escaped.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, frowning.

“I mean Dante let me go.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Have you ever watched a cat play with a mouse,
Neva?”

I nodded.

“It will let its prey believe it is free, only to
prolong the enjoyment of the hunt. That is Dante. He plays with me, because he
can. He has my sister, and I have no choice.”

“What happens when he finds you, or you find him?”
The wounds still oozing through his bandages told me exactly what the outcome
would be, and this time, no amount of gauze and iodine would put him back
together again.

“Whatever he decides will happen. He holds the
ace.” Konstantyn’s tone was defeated and it angered me.

I balled up my fist against his knee and his eyes
snapped to mine with a frown.  

“So you’re just going to give yourself up to him?”
For as much as this man was hunting for his family, I wanted justice for mine.
I was in this so deep, the mud was sticking to my legs and threatening to drag
me down, but I couldn’t do it on my own.

“I’m sorry, Neva. You need to let it go.”

I glared at him, my heart knifed through with the
agony of helpless denial. There had to be a way.

He twisted the blade. “Daniel is dead. Mariya
lives.”

“How can you be sure?” I countered.

His chest inflated on a deep breath but it was
like he’d gone to stone, rigid and impenetrable. “He wants me, not her. Dante
is insane, that doesn’t make him an idiot. He won’t kill what he can trade.” He
looked so robotic, I wanted to smack him.

I settled for trying not to cry at the bleak
outlook instead.