Page 3 of Kazimir

I watched videos—always the same genre: adorable puppies, people scaring their friends, cooking videos. I watched until the battery warning blinked on, then I plugged it in across the room, laid back down, and let my head sink into the pillow. My hair smelled faintly like the diner, and I tried not to care.

Sleep took its time arriving. I lay there, staring at the patterns the city lights made on my ceiling, listening to the hum of the fridge and the drip from the showerhead. Eventually, my thoughts went hazy, and I started to drift.

My dreams were not normal dreams.

I was running. Not on a street, but through clouds, or maybe a tunnel of pure light. The world was an endless hallway, every surface lined with faces I almost recognized, mouths opening and closing in silence. The light got brighter, hotter, until I thought my skin would split, and then I woke up gasping, fingers knotted in the fabric of my blanket.

I checked the clock. 5:11 a.m. Not enough sleep to matter. But it was enough to get by.

I rolled out of bed, splashed my face with cold water, made coffee, and sat.

I didn’t have to be at the diner for several hours. This was the worst part of my life. I had hours to just be with myself alone and think of… nothing.

Chapter 2

Kazimir

There is a peculiar ache that grows inside the immortal—an erosion, a scouring-out of purpose, that not even endless novelty can fill. Twenty-five years ago I built Obsidian to prove I still had the will for creation, and every night since I have stalked its marble corridors, certain only of my own unworthiness.

Tonight, the entryway was already full of shadows—slick, shifting things that clung to the hollows of the pillars and bled across the floor like water. Obsidian’s foyer was designed for intimidation and seduction in equal measure. Black marble, the color of deep water at midnight, ran in veined rivers from the doors to the far wall. The veins themselves: not the usual ghostly white, but a phosphor purple that caught the light in angry sparks. The ceiling arched so high it mocked even the oldest cathedrals, and every inch of the vault was studded with crystal, like stars in negative. The chandeliers were not suspended—they hovered, balanced by cunning and a lattice of invisible wire, so that they might seem, at any moment, to come crashing down.

Some nights I hoped they would.

The staff had already begun the night’s performance. The hostess at the door—Amara, was incredibly competent. The dark-skinned beauty had hypnotic eyes and a deep, accented voice that set the stage for every patron who entered.

A whisper of fabric on marble. “Father.”

Nikolay. My middle son always moved as if he could will himself weightless. He stood on the threshold between the foyer and club proper, hands clasped at his back, coat tailored so perfectly it was nearly a second skin. He bowed. Not deeply, not slavishly—just enough to signal respect, to say: I see you and I know the line between us.

“Nikolay.” I offered my arm, and he took it. He was broad—broader than I had ever been—but his warmth was something the centuries had not stripped from him. But make no mistake, he was as much a monster as I was.

“Lucia and Ryder are in Iron Valor until next week,” he said. His accent only surfaced when he was tired or annoyed; tonight, the edges were crisp. “Their last report is favorable. The Supreme Council is still steering clear of them.”

“So far.” I smiled, thin as razor wire. “The Council has never forgiven her for the choice she made. Or him, for surviving it.”

He exhaled slowly, an old habit from when breathing mattered. “They will not dare make Kozlov blood vulnerable ever again. Ryder is ours. He is one of us.”

A memory surfaced: the sound of my daughter’s screams, the realization that they’d stolen her mate away from her. I ground the memory beneath my heel, as I had a thousand times.

“They should be afraid of her. And of me.” I let my voice carry; the staff in the vestibule stilled, waiting for the tremor to pass. “If any of them so much as look too long at my family again, I will wipe out their bloodlines. This I promise.”

Nikolay absorbed the threat without so much as a flicker of surprise. “Shall I escalate surveillance, Father?”

“Not yet. Just catalog who objects most strenuously. There will come a time when we will need leverage.”

He nodded, then hesitated. For a man whose every thought was calculated, this was like shouting. “If I may speak freely?”

I waved a hand. He continued: “The Council is not what it was in the beginning. The old houses have grown desperate. Even a minor provocation could—”

“Desperate men are predictable,” I said. “It is the content, comfortable men I distrust. I do not intend to provoke them. Only to remind them of the cost.”

Nikolay studied my face, searching for the old man beneath the marble and silk. I let him look. He had earned that much.

“And what of the club?” I asked, shifting the subject. “Is Bohdan still indulging every passing whim?”

A smile, genuine, flickered at the corner of his mouth. “He is. And the patrons adore him for it. We are on pace to make more this quarter than in the last three combined. Though the demon delegation from Toronto has been causing… disruption.”

“What kind of disruption?”