Adrian backs up, dragging Bianca with him. "Stay back! I'll?—"
I don't stop, don't even slow down.
He fumbles at his belt and pulls out something I can't make out immediately, but a second later I see it's a knife. Four-inch blade. Street trash weapon for a street trash man.
"I said stay back!"
I'm close enough now to see the sweat on his face, the fear in his eyes, the way his hands won't stop shaking even as he swings the knife. It's wild and desperate, showing zero technique—not that I expected something better from a man who gambles away what he can't afford to lose.
I catch his wrist and twist, feel bones grind against each other. He screams.
The knife's still in his hand, so I break his wrist properly this time. The snap is clean and beautiful in its finality, and his fingers go limp while the knife clatters to the concrete.
But he's still standing, still between me and Bianca, so I break his knee.
My boot connects with the side of his leg and the joint gives with a sickening pop. He collapses sideways with a sound that's half scream, half sob.
Bianca stumbles away from him, free finally, hands still bound but moving. Marco catches her and I see him start working on the zip ties, so I turn my full attention back to Adrian.
He's crawling now, dragging his shattered leg behind him, reaching for Bianca with his one good hand like he has any right to touch her after what he's done.
"Bianca—please—" His voice breaks. "Please. I did everything for you. Everything. I paid for your mother. I kept you safe. I gave you stability. You owe me?—"
"I owe you nothing." Her voice cuts through his begging like glass.
He stops and looks up at her, blood running from his nose and tears mixing with sweat on his face.
"You were never my savior, Adrian. You were my prison." She steps closer and Marco tries to pull her back but she shakes him off, needs to say this, needs him to hear it. "You sabotaged my mother's care to keep me desperate. You deliberately let her suffer—let me think I couldn't afford to save her—just so I'd stay trapped with you. You used my fear to control me, used my love for her as a weapon, and then you sold me to pay your debts like I was furniture you didn't need anymore. And now you think I owe you?"
"I love you?—"
"You don't know what love is." Her voice is steady now, cold and final, every word a blade. "Love doesn't manipulate. What you feel isn't love, Adrian. It's obsession. It's possession. It's the sick need to own something you were never good enough to earn. And I'm done being something you think you own."
"Bianca, please?—"
"I feel nothing for you but disgust." She crouches down, gets eye level with him, wants him to see her face when she says this. "And I'm sorry. So sorry that I ever convinced myself I loved a person with a soul as ugly and twisted as yours, that I wasted three years of my life trying to make something work with someone so fundamentally broken. The only good thing you gave me was your debt to pay, because it introduced me to Dante."
The words hit him harder than my fists ever could.
I see it—the moment something breaks inside him that can't be fixed, that was maybe always broken.
His good hand fumbles and finds the knife, fingers closing around the handle with the desperate strength of a man who has nothing left to lose.
"If I can't have you—" He lunges.
Fast. Faster than a man with a broken knee should be able to move.
The blade arcs toward Bianca's throat but I intercept, my body between them, my arm up. The knife slices across my forearm in a shallow cut that barely registers through the adrenaline flooding my system.
Then I have him—one hand around his throat, the other grabbing the wrist with the knife.
The fight is brief and brutal.
He slashes wildly, catches my ribs. The cut burns but doesn't slow me. I twist his wrist until the knife falls again, but this time I don't stop with his wrist. I drive my fist into his face once, twice. His nose breaks and blood sprays across both of us. He tries to fight back, manages a weak punch to my jaw that I barely feel.
Another punch. His cheekbone cracks. His eye socket caves. He's making sounds now—wet gurgling noises that barely sound human—but I hit him again and again and again. My knuckles split. His blood mixes with mine.
Somewhere behind me, Bianca is screaming, telling me to stop, that it's done, that it's over.
