I watch from across the room with my knee on the shorter guard's back and my stomach turning. Not from the violence—I’ve seen my father’s men do some heinous things over the years. What turns my stomach is the precision. The patience. Zero isn't raging. He isn't lost in it. He's present for every second, every snap, every sound, cataloging the damage with the clinical attention of a man building something. A monument. A message.
Each finger deliberate. Each one answered for. The index finger that pointed at Max and said number seventeen. The thumb that dragged across Max's lower lip. Every bone in both hands, broken individually, with the careful spacing of a man who wants each one to register as its own event.
The guard passes out after the seventh finger. Zero slaps him awake. Waits for his eyes to focus. Continues.
I look away. I can watch—that's the problem. I can watch and I recognize what I'm seeing. The thing inside Zero that makes this possible, the cold patient surgical thing—I felt it in the facility. When I stood up through the sedatives and closed my hands around a guard's throat. When I slammed a man's head into a concrete wall and watched the blood pool and didn't feel anything exceptgood.
We're the same. Zero and I. Same cloth, same father, same capacity. The difference is he's always known it. Made peace with it years ago.
I'm still pretending it isn't there.
The shorter guard under my knee is whimpering. He's been lying still since I put him down—smart enough to know that what's happening to his partner is a preview.
I haul him up by the back of his neck. Push him into a kitchen chair. He sits. Shaking. His cheek is swelling where it hit the floor. His eyes dart to his partner—on his knees in front of Zero, both hands destroyed, sobbing quietly into his own chest.
"You know who I am," I say.
He nods. Fast. Desperate.
"Then you know what's coming."
I don't draw it out. Zero has his way. I have mine. Efficient. Final.
I work his face first—the jaw that smirked, the mouth that saidboss's cameras caught the whole show,the eyes that looked at Max like he was something to consume. My fists are steady and precise and each impact is a sentence in a language I don't enjoy speaking but speak fluently.
He goes down after the fourth hit. I let him fall. Stand over him. My knuckles are split and bleeding. His face is a mess of blood and swelling. He's breathing—ragged, wet, but breathing. Conscious. Looking up at me through one eye that's already closing.
"Remember this," I say. "Every morning. Every time you look in a mirror. Remember why."
Zero finishes a few minutes after I do. He stands up from the shaved-head guard and looks at his own hands—bloody to the wrists, the knuckles raw, his fingers steady as stone.
He flexes them once. Twice. Like he's testing whether they still work the way they're supposed to.
The guard is on the floor. Both hands broken. Face battered. Alive. Breathing. He'll use those hands again eventually—months from now, after pins and physical therapy and pain that no prison sentence could replicate. Every morning he reaches for a coffee cup and can't grip it, he'll remember.
Zero wanted that. Not death. Death is too fast, too final. Zero deals in daily. The lesson you relearn every time you try to button your shirt and can't.
We leave the apartment as fast and as casual as we arrived. Down the stairs. Into the car. The cold air hits my face and I breathe it in—deep, hungry, clearing the smell of blood and sweat and fear from my lungs.
Zero drives.
The city slides past the windows. Streetlights casting orange bars across the dashboard, then gone, then back. The car smells like copper. Like us.
My hands ache. I flex them on my thighs. The blood is drying—going tacky, dark, tightening the skin across my knuckles. Zero's hands on the steering wheel look the same.
We match.
Neither of us speaks for a long time. There's nothing to say about what we just did that needs saying. It was necessary. It's done. The silence echoes that certainty.
Until I break it.
“Zero,” I murmur. "I need to tell you something."
Zero doesn't look at me. His eyes stay on the road. His jaw is relaxed—more relaxed than I've seen it in weeks.
"And I'm telling you because I'm not going to hide it or pretend, and because I'd rather you hear it from me than figure it out on your own."
His hands shift on the wheel. The only acknowledgment. He's listening.
