I stand still for a moment, letting my eyes adjust, letting him listen to the silence. His breathing is ragged, panicked, wet withsnot and terror. I can hear the scrape of his good knee as he tries to push himself backward. Up until now, my every move was determined by seconds, minutes—speed. Now, I have all the time in the fucking world.
I reach into my coat and find the small, flat tin I always carry. No mirror’s needed for this part. I’ve done this so many times the movements are burned into my bones.
Two fingers scoop the thick white greasepaint, and I pull the buff down so it pools around my throat. I drag the paint across my forehead, down the bridge of my nose, over my cheeks in long, deliberate strokes. Then the black, thick, oily, permanent. I smear it around my eyes in wide, jagged circles, then slash it down my cheeks and across my mouth, until the lower half of my face is a grinning void. Fingertips drag over the skin that doesn’t feel right, smearing black paint along flesh I barely remember as mine. It smells like old wax and gun oil and every kill I’ve ever taken.
When I finish, I’m no longer Reth. I’m the thing that wears his skin. The man in the white and black face paint. The one who doesn’t feel. Who doesn’t remember.
I reach down and flick the old wall switch, and a single bare bulb buzzes to life overhead, throwing harsh white light across the stone room.
Marek’s eyes lock on my face, and the color drains from his skin so fast it looks like someone pulled a plug. The painted white and black—the jagged circles around my eyes, the void-black slash across my mouth—hits him like a nightmare stepping out of the dark. His lips tremble, and I’m pretty sure he forgets how to breathe.
“Please…” The word cracks out of him, wet and broken. “Please, God, whatever they’re paying you…I have money. I have houses. I have girls. Anything. Just… just don’t?—”
I don’t speak. I shift and step on his broken leg, grinding the heel of my boot into the shattered joint until the scream rips out of him like fabric ripping at the seams. While he’s convulsing, I pull the thin steel wire from my pocket.
The air is laden with violence as I wrap the wire around his wrists first, cinching it viciously tight until the metal bites deep into the skin and cuts off circulation. Then I thread it through the ring by the wall and yank hard. His arms stretch above his head at a brutal angle, and a satisfying chill runs down my spine when I hear his shoulders pop out of joint with sickening cracks. It’s not screams grating out of his throat; it’s a high-pitched whine that climbs the stone walls and echoes off the concrete.
His ankles get the same treatment. I loop the wire through the second ring and pull until his legs are forced wide apart, the shattered one twisting at an obscene angle. The wire saws into his flesh, blood already welling up around the metal.
His eyes roll backward, seconds from passing out, but I slap his face hard then dig my fingers painfully deep into his cheeks, his lips puckering. “I need you awake for this,” I say with an even tone.
“Please, please, please…” More spit, more pleas, “I’ll do anything. Just don’t kill me.”
There’s no need for me to respond. This fucker knows as well as I do his breaths are numbered, and I’m making the last few mine.
Spread-eagled on the filthy floor like a specimen ready for dissection, his screams ring out. The amount of pain he’s incarries through his cries, his curses, but I feel nothing. I give him another two seconds of whimpering before I drive the karambit through his left palm and listen to the way his teeth gnash from the sudden, animal jolt. The blood fans out beneath his hand, not arterial, just viscous and thick, and I watch it pool.
I straighten, step over him, my feet planted on either side of his torso as I pull out my phone. When a motherfucker’s name is typed in red, Valeria wants visuals. Unfortunately for her, I didn’t have time for setting up the stage for her, so pictures will have to do.
The flash splits like lightning across his ugly face as I take one picture after the other, zooming in on his bloody hand, his broken leg, and this is just the beginning.
“Who the fuck are you?” he grits out between labored breaths. “Why are you doing this? Who sent you?”
There’s no need for him to know any of those answers, so I don’t give it.
Slipping my phone into the back pocket of my jeans, I crouch over him and grab the front of his expensive shirt with both hands. The fabric is soft, high-quality. I rip it open in one savage motion, buttons scattering across the concrete like teeth. The cold air hits his chest…and the world tilts.
“What the…” I stumble back, a split-second of vertigo, a violent wave of nausea. “What the fuck is this?”
The crow stares up at me. Wings spread wide, beak buried in the chest of a human figure, tearing into it. Below it, in old Gothic script:Never Forget.
For one endless, suffocating second, I am not in this basement. I’m there… in the room, dark, damp, the same stink of dust and fear. Marek’s weight is crushing me into the concrete floor. His breath is hot and sour against my ear as he pins my wrists above my head with one meaty hand.
“Shhh, quiet now, little bird,” he whispers, voice thick with that same smug laugh. “You’re doing so good. Just like the others.”
Pain rips through me—sharp, tearing, endless. I bite my lip until it bleeds so I don’t scream, but he likes that. He laughs again, low and wet, and presses harder, deeper, like he’s trying to break something inside me that will never heal.
“See? You’re made for this. My perfect little crow.”
The memory doesn’t slam into me.
It devours me.
My hand starts to shake so violently the blade nearly slips from my fingers. Not from fear. From a rage so pure and ancient it has no name—a black, bottomless thing that has been waiting in the dark for an eternity and finally found its way home.
Marek is still screaming, but I no longer hear him. All I see is the crow on his chest. Every thought is trapped in that room. A boy…with no way out.
Everything inside me rips apart at once—a violent, wet fracture straight through the center of my skull. The painted white and black on my face suddenly feels alive, tightening like a second skin that’s about to split open and let the real monster out.
