Page 35 of Black Castle

“I believe you have something to tell me.” Zev turns to the bloodied 25-year-old soldier, his arched brow raised expectantly.

“I don’t know anything,” he utters the same phrase he has been repeating since he got here. Zev supposes they haven’t quite made any progress at all. And this alone riles him up. So what has he been sitting here for five minutes for?

Anger sparks like wildfire in his chest, fury that makes his head swim with discord.

Five minutes isn’t just a chance, it’s a promise, an oath so sacred. Yet he has failed to realize it. And now there is an enchanting whisper tucked in the air between them. Death.

Zev is going to kill this man before him. And he is going to enjoy the five minutes of it.

“Very well then.” His hand drifts toward the table on his left, fingers grazing the cool surface before settling on a round tray of gleaming instruments—scalpels, daggers, scissors, a cutlass, an axe, and other sharp metals, each reflecting the dim light.

Today, Zev feels like scissors.

He selects a pair etched with the emblem of the Bratva—a python’s head, its fangs bared in a silent warning.

The soldier chokes out a gasp, pure terror settling in the depth of his eyes. And seeing the fear and the horror in those brown eyes plants euphoria in Zev’s veins, his fingers trembling with the new level of power unlocked.

If the soldier is truly innocent, Zev doesn’t care anymore. Because now, he wants blood. He has been starving for it for weeks, craving the helpless cry of agony, the satisfying sound of metal slicing through flesh, all the while locked away in Lucan’s shadow. But today, he is getting all of it. His hunger will be satiated.

Positioning himself behind his new prey, Zev’s fingers gently curl under the man’s chin, titling his head to bare the flesh on his neck to him.

“I guess this is goodbye.”

“Please—” before the word can have a chance to be heard by another ear, a continuous squelching sound of metal piercing through flesh echoes in the room as Zev repeatedly drives the scissors into his jugular.

The man gurgles as blood oozes in waves from the miscellaneous holes on his neck. And he grapples for air, his frail hands thaw relentlessly at his own neck, desperate for a chance to save himself from the death glaring at him.

It takes nearly five minutes indeed, just as Zev has prophesied, for the man to hit the floor.

And as he hovers over the paling body of his former soldier, not a sliver of regret dares to tug at his conscience, and rather, a twisted smile lifts the corner of his lips, power surging through his veins, watching the faint tremor in the man’s fingers as life leaves him finally.

“You’re wrong again, preacher,” he murmurs, the scissors hitting the floor with a loud clatter. “Destiny has no role to play in their deaths. They died only because I wanted them to die. I am higher than any so-called destiny.”

A year ago at St. Joseph’s cathedral—the Raskovic family’s sacred ground—Zev stands beneath the vaulted ceilings, air thick with incense and whispered prayers. It’s Eugene Raskovic’s burial, the man who has raised Zev and his twin brother, Lucan. The man they have both called father for over twenty years.

Father Thomas stands at the pulpit, solemn and unwavering, his voice echoing through the cavernous church.

“Eugene Raskovic died because it was written in his destiny,” Father Thomas proclaims. “All who perish do so at destiny’s decree.”

But Zev remembers vividly. He remembers the gurgle of a severed throat, the warmth of blood spilling over his hands, the final rattling breath as Eugene Raskovic’s life seeps away on the cold office floor.

Destiny he says?

Who is she? This nameless, faceless thing they so willingly bow to? Did she hold the blade with him that night? Did she whisper in Eugene Raskovic’s ears as Zev carved the old man’s fate into his flesh?

No.

Only Zev played god that night. And yet Father Thomas credited his work to some unseen force, absolving the guilty with the poetry of fate.

Maybe if Father Thomas sees this soldier now—and the countless other men whose lives he has taken in the past—he will credit it to destiny again. Fucking destiny.

But it is not destiny. Never that faceless, nonexistent entity.

It’s Zev.

Has always been Zev. Because when it comes to your life, Zev won’t leave it to destiny or fate. He would be fate. He will be destiny, the devil, even God—whatever it will take to decide how your story ends.

An ominous breeze circles around the dead soldier’s body; death, who has come to collect another soul, the second one he will be collecting in this room today. And this won’t be the last. A hunger has been awoken. Zev won’t stop until mangled bodies lie around, eyes hollow, fingers splintered, the city painted with their blood.

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