Scott-Evans glances at him. “Enlighten me.”
“I think you’re too selfish to do it,” Titan suggests. “You’re too selfish to kill yourself.”
Scott-Evans laughs sharply. “That’s rich.”
“You like the attention too much,” Titan continues. “You like being watched. You like knowing you’re still controlling the room.”
The smile falters. Just a fraction.
“You wouldn’t rob yourself of the chance to talk,” Titan adds. “To explain. To be remembered.”
Silence stretches. Scott-Evans exhales slowly. The gun trembles for the first time.
“You think you know me,” he whispers.
“I do,” Titan replies. “I’ve met plenty of animals like you.”
For a long moment, nothing happens.
Then Scott-Evans lowers the gun.
Not all the way, but just enough to lower his guard.
It doesn’t feellike Scott-Evans ever expected to walk out of this alive.
That realization settles over me slowly, the way cold does when you’ve been standing in it too long. By the time we’re finished with him, he’s been stripped of every illusion that once protected him—his arrogance peeled away first, then his posture, then the lazy confidence men like him wear like armor. The kind that assumes the world will always bend before it breaks them.
Now, he hangs.
Wrists bound above his head, rope biting deep into flesh already turning an angry shade of red. His boots barely skim the concrete, toes scraping just enough to remind him how close relief is without ever allowing it. His weight drags his shoulders down, forcing them toward eventual failure. Toward honesty. Or dislocation.
The smell of fear hasn’t reached him yet. Not fully. But it’s coming.
Titan circles him in silence.
Slow. Methodical. Predator patience.
Scott-Evans watches him through lowered lashes, tracking every movement without turning his head. He’s wearing a mask—tight, practiced, smug even now. Emotions locked away behind a façade of bored indifference, like this is just another inconvenience. Another consequence he’ll endure and outlast.
It was too easy to drag him into the cabin. Too easy to string him up and leave him dangling like meat.
Almost as if he wanted this. Almost as if pain is the only thing that has ever made him feel anything.
I step closer, invading what little space he has left. Close enough that he has to tilt his head back to meet my gaze, throat exposed, jaw clenched tight. I study him—not with anger, not even disgust—but curiosity.
What kind of person doesn’t flinch when punishment finally comes due?
“I’m going to take from you,” I tell him quietly. “The same way you took from those girls. From their choices. From their bodies. Their futures.”
His lips curl, just slightly.
“Do your worst,” he spits.
It’s almost a dare. And for the first time, I see it clearly—the crack in the mask. Not fear. Expectation. Like he’s been waiting for this moment his whole life.
We don’t rush it. Rushing is for men who need absolution.
Pain only works when it’s measured—when it arrives in waves instead of all at once. When the body has time to understand what’s happening and the mind has nowhere left to hide.
