I turned in that direction.
A man in his thirties—bare-chested, soaked in blood and piss—was dragging himself across the stone floor like a slug through slaughter. His body left a smeared trail of filth.
“P-please. Please. I didn’t know. They lied to me. I am just the driver. I swear. . .”
A driver made it to this level? How is that possible?
One leg shook behind him, not fully broken, but ruined beyond use. The other arm shook under his weight, wrist wobbling, the elbow locking, muscles misfiring from fear and pain.
But it was his other hand—his right—that drew my eye.
Clenched tight.
Too tight.
Blood crusted his knuckles. Callused skin. Scar tissue rode the ridge of each finger like armor. I’d seen hands like that cave in skulls in back-alley rings and drive steel into ribcages with laughter.
He was no driver.
He was a man who fought for money, for blood, or for the sheer joy of breaking bones. And now he reached for my bare ankle with that same filthy hand.
I stepped back.
“I have a daughter.” His lips trembled. Snot bubbled from his nose. “I-I didn’t shoot anyone. My daughter is only—”
“If you want to save her, give me names. Now.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything.”
“Wrong answer.” I stepped forward and brought my barefoot down on his sternum. Bone to bone. The crack that echoed around us was beautiful.
He folded like rotted paper, spine slamming into stone. “Argh!”
That’s when I saw it.
His right hand, the one he’d kept clenched—wasn’t shaking from pain. It was holding a knife. He hadn’t been begging. He’d been waiting to stab me with it.
A killer is always a killer to the end.
I snatched the knife from his hand. “Was this for me?”
“I-I didn’t—”
“Don’t waste your breath” I used his blade on him.
The first slice was an arc through air, clean and brutal. It took off his left ear like it was never meant to be there.
He howled and his hand shot to the side of his head as blood sprayed the wall.
Fast, I grabbed a fistful of his hair—wet, greasy, slick with blood—and yanked his head back so hard his spine popped.
He thrashed and spat. “No! No! Please!!”
I didn’t answer. Didn’t blink. Didn’t waste words on liars. I drove the blade up beneath his jaw. The steel pierced the soft spot behind his chin and kept going—through tongue, through palate, through sin and intention.
A second later, my Eyes were next to me, watching and silently waiting.
His scream turned into a wet, gurgling rattle as the blade pushed higher, until the tip of it punched through the nasal cavity.
