It’s padded. Layered. Stained in places where varnish doesn’t explain the color.
And it’s not made for darts.
It’s made for knives.
The surface is soft enough to take them. There are grooves, slashes from practice. Dried lines that were once wet and red. And in the center, where a bullseye would normally go, there’s a small red heart.
He brushes a speck of dust off it.
“I didn’t have this heart on it before,” he says, turning back to me. “That’s new.”
His eyes sharpen for a moment, cutting through the fog of his preparations. Locking onto me.
“What do you think of it?” he asks.
I don’t respond. I’m trying not to show anything. The rope on my left wrist is finally starting to give. Just barely. It’s cutting into my skin like a glass shard, but it’s moving. I can’t afford to let him provoke me. Not now.
But he’s fucking persistant, this guy.
“Is it too cliché? I heard black hearts are trending these days,” he muses, tilting his head like he’s open to feedback.
The rope bites deeper. I keep going.
He turns back toward the target and chuckles softly. “Personally, I think red’s a classic. It fits the moment.”
He walks over to the small box he brought in earlier and opens it.
Out comes the first knife.
My fucking god.
My fingers slip a little. Too slick. I still them, breathing slowly through the fire pulsing up my arm.
He tosses the knife once. Catches it. Then hurls it with terrifying ease at the board. It lands—dead center, embedded right through the heart.
“Mark my words, Cassian,” he whispers. “It’s going to be such a beautiful night.”
I stare at the knife, the way it trembles slightly in the wood, and wonder how many times he’s driven it into a person. How many people bled from that blade. And how many times he wanted to do it again. How often he imagined Sabine standing right where it landed.
I’ve known a few men who got off on killing. No one talks about it in the military, but it happens. The moment you realize someone in your unit enjoys it, not out of duty or survival, but because they want to see what spills out when a body breaks—it changes you. You start sleeping with one eye open.
You start watching for the same thing in others.
I see it in him now.
Looking for beauty in someone else’s pain.
Getting high on the power.
Loving the moment the light fades from someone’s eyes.
And he wants me to see it happen. He wants me to watch him do that to my sister.
No.
No.
That’s not going to happen.
