“Peter, stop! Please!” Felix wails, his pride evaporated into a puddle of cowardice. “It was business! Just business!”
“Business?” Peter roars, his face inches from Felix’s, his spit flecking the man’s bloody skin. “She is my soul! She is the only reason the sun comes up! And you treated her like a manifest line item?”
Peter grabs a handful of Felix’s hair and slams his face into the control panel. The emergency lights flicker, strobing over the violence. Peter pulls him back and drives a knee into Felix’s ribs. I hear the snap of the cage, the air whistling out of Felix’s lungs in a bloody wheeze.
Peter isn’t done. He’s spiralling, his movements jagged and obsessive. He reaches down, grabbing the jagged piece of the broken elevator gate—a shard of sharp, industrial steel.
“I remember when we were kids,” Peter whispers, his voice suddenly, terrifyingly quiet as he presses the shardagainst Felix’s thigh. “I remember when I thought you were the only person in the world who had my back. I would have died for you, Felix.”
He plunges the steel into Felix’s leg, twisting it slow. Felix’s howl is a jagged rip in the dark.
“Now,” Peter says, leaning his weight into the shard, watching the blood soak through Felix’s expensive trousers. “I’m going to watch you bleed out in the dark, and I’m going to make sure the last thing you see is the man you betrayed taking back what’s his.”
Peter turns his head slightly, his eyes finding mine on the floor. The murderous vacuum in his gaze softens for a fraction of a second, a flicker of the husband I know peeking through the monster he’s become.
“Don’t look, Wendy,” he breathes, even as he reaches out to snap Felix’s other wrist. “Close your eyes, darling. I’m almost finished with the trash.”
Above us, Hook’s boots thud on the floor of the hallway. He looks down through the hatch, his surgical steel hook glinting in the tactical light. He watches the carnage for a beat, his face a mask of dark, bored approval.
“He’s getting a bit messy, isn’t he?” Hook calls down, his voice silken with wit. “I told him the leather was a bitch to clean.”
Peter doesn’t look at Hook. He doesn’t look at anything but the man who used to share his bread and now shares his nightmares.
“Look at me, Felix,” Peter commands, his voice a gravelly, haunted rasp.
Felix tries to lift his head, his face a pulpy, unrecognisable mask of purple hematomas and shattered bone.He gurgles, a thick bubble of crimson foam bursting on his lips. Peter reaches down and grabs the heavy brass paperweight that had fallen from the desk earlier, its edges sharp and unforgiving.
He doesn’t use a gun. A bullet is too clean. A bullet is a mercy Felix doesn’t deserve.
Peter brings the brass down on Felix’s kneecap. The sound of the patella exploding is like a gunshot muffled by wet velvet. Felix’s mouth opens in a silent, agonising O, his lungs failing to find the air to scream. Peter does it again. And again. He’s unmaking him, turning the man into a collection of broken parts.
“This is for the powder,” Peter snarls, slamming the brass into Felix’s shoulder. Crack. “This is for the cage.” Crack. The elevator is a slaughterhouse. Blood is everywhere—splattered across the brushed steel walls, pooling in the grooves of the floor, soaking into the knees of Peter’s tactical pants. It smells of copper and bowels and the cold, metallic tang of death.
With a final, guttural roar of pure grief, Peter drops the brass. He reaches out with his bare hands, grabbing Felix’s head, and with a sickening, wet thud, he slams the man’s skull into the corner of the elevator frame. Once. Twice. On the third hit, there’s a sound like a melon dropping on pavement.
Felix’s body goes limp. His eyes stay open, staring at nothing, the light in them extinguished by the weight of a husband’s vengeance. Peter stands over him, his chest heaving, his hands dripping red, looking like a demon born from the very darkness Felix tried to hide us in.
The silence that follows is deafening.
Peter turns slowly. The rage in his eyes is still there,simmering beneath the surface, but as his gaze lands on me—naked, shivering, and covered in the residue of my own ruin—the monster shatters.
The brass weight clatters to the floor.
“Wendy,” he breathes, his voice breaking.
The clarity hits me like a physical blow. The cocaine is still screaming in my veins, but the reality of the blood on his face and the body at his feet breaks the last of my composure. I don’t see the hero. I see the man who wasn’t there when the needle went in. I see the man who let the world take me.
“You left me!” I shriek, the sound torn from the deepest part of my lungs. I try to crawl away from him, my limbs tangling on the cold metal. “You let him! You weren’t there! I waited and I waited and he… he put his hands… he put the white… Peter, you left me!”
The sob that rips out of me is a jagged, ugly thing. I’m shaking so hard I can’t breathe, the trauma of the last few hours finally collapsing on top of me.
Peter doesn’t hesitate. He doesn’t apologise with words; he moves. He crosses the small space in a single stride and scoops me up into his arms. He doesn’t care that I’m naked. He doesn’t care that he’s covered in the blood of his “brother.” He just pulls me against his chest, crushing me to the Kevlar and the heat of his skin.
“I know,” he sobs into my hair, his own tears tracking lines through the blood on his cheeks. “I know, darling. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. I’ve got you. I’ve got you and I’m never letting go again.
He tucks my head under his chin, shielding me from the sight of Felix’s corpse. He’s shaking as much as I am, his grip so tight italmost hurts, but I need it. I need to feel the bone-crushing reality of him.
Above us, Hook clears his throat, his silhouette still framed by the hatch.
