Breakneck set the glass down quietly. The sound barely registered over the music, but the intent behind it did. He turned fully, the shift of his body slow and deliberate, and the room reacted in that subtle way crowds do when they sense something about to snap.
He walked toward the man, each step measured, boots striking warped wood in a steady rhythm. His vest hung open, muscle bunching beneath skin, shadow sharpening the angles of him as he closed the distance.
The man swallowed but held his ground, shoulders squaring, bravado flickering.
“It would be in your best interest to shut the fuck up,” Breakneck said, voice low and restrained.
The man smirked, the expression brittle. “What you going to do about it, Pretty boy?”
Breakneck’s hand moved faster than a blink. One moment the man was standing,
the next he was flat on his back, slammed onto the felt of the pool table, billiard balls scattering like startled prey, the overhead light swaying, casting frantic shadows over the scene.
Breakneck’s hand closed around the man’s throat, pinning him with a weight that felt less like anger and more like inevitability. The man’s breath hitched, a wet choke. His fingers clawed at Breakneck’s forearm, nails scraping skin, but Breakneck didn’t give him an inch. His jaw locked. Everything inside him went flat like the ocean before a storm, the kind of threat generated by the stirring of a powerful mass that didn’t belong to a man losing control. It belonged to a weapon deployed without conscience.
There was nothing there, no anger, no regret, no fear, and no remorse. He was all about those cold zeros, and that was it.
That was far, far worse.
Breakneck’s grip tightened, his forearm an unyielding bar across the man’s windpipe. He watched the man’s face redden, veins rising beneath straining skin, panic setting in with a sharp, animal desperation. The man’s heel drummed against the table leg in frantic, uneven kicks.
Shouts erupted behind them, chairs scraping, boots scuffing against the floor, someone shouting for the bouncer, but Breakneck didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Didn’t hear anything except the slow, pounding pulse under his palm.
He leaned in, voice dropping to a low, guttural whisper meant for the man’s terrified ears alone. “You have no idea who you’re talking to.”
The man gasped, a thin rasp of air barely making it past the crushing pressure of Breakneck’s hold.
Breakneck didn’t loosen his grip. Didn’t soften. He squeezed harder.
It wasn’t until a hand, strong, familiar, shaking with barely contained fear, clamped around Breakneck’s wrist that he felt the world rush back into his body in a disorienting wave.
The man’s voice was a harsh, broken thing, barely audible over the chaos. “Let him go, brother.”
Boomer.
Breakneck didn’t react, his mind still lodged in that empty, echoing place where reaction and identity and conscience had been stripped down to nothing. Boomer stepped closer, positioning himself between Breakneck and the man in a way that made no tactical sense and every emotional sense.
“Let him go,” Boomer repeated, voice catching like it hurt him. “He’s not worth you losing everything. If you kill him, there’s no coming back from that.” His grip tightened. “Don’t throw everything away on this shit.”
Breakneck blinked once. Twice.
The world snapped into brutal, nauseating focus, the blotchy purple of the man’s face, the crowd frozen in horrified silence, the bartender frozen mid-dial on the phone, and Boomer staring at him with an expression Breakneck had never seen before.
Fear. For him. Because of him. Both. What was absent? Judgment.
Breakneck’s fingers slipped open. The man collapsed on the table in a wheezing heap.
Breakneck staggered back, chest heaving, his pulse hammering like artillery fire under his skin. The whiskey churned in his gut. The room tilted, heat pressing in on all sides like a closing fist.
Boomer didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t reprimand him. Didn’t call attention to the circle of witnesses holding their breath.
He just grabbed Breakneck’s vest in a firm, steady grip, pulling him away from the table with a quiet control that made Breakneck feel ten feet tall and utterly, devastatingly small.
“Fuck, kid,” Boomer whispered, something like grief warping the words. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Breakneck had no answer.
He wasn’t sure he had a voice left at all.
