Father.
I hesitate, then accept, keeping my eyes on the road as if distance alone could dull his reach.
“Khai,” he says, voice smooth, almost warm. Too warm. “I just wanted to check in after our… disagreement.”
Casual. Careless. Like he isn’t holding knives behind his back.
“I’m doing just fine,” I reply coolly. “Was that all?”
A soft chuckle hums through the speakers, amused, indulgent. “You’ve seemed a little… distracted lately.”
The pause that follows is deliberate. Heavy. He wants me to feel it.
“Have I?” I say. “I hadn’t noticed.”
My patience is threadbare now, stretched thin enough to snap. He doesn’t rise to it. He never does.
“Becareful what you anchor yourself to, Khai,” he says, the warmth gone, his tone sharpening into something quiet and absolute. “Attachments have a way of becoming leverage.”
The line goes dead before I can respond.
For a moment, I can’t breathe.
Cold floods my chest, draining the blood from my face as my hands tighten on the steering wheel, knuckles bleaching white. The road blurs, not because I can’t see, but because I can see too clearly.
He didn’t say a name.
He didn’t have to.
This wasn’t concern. It wasn’t advice.
It was a reminder.
A leash pulled tight.
And somewhere out there, something precious has just stepped into his line of sight.
I don’t go home.
The night isn’t finished with me yet, and neither am I.
I turn off toward a bar rotting on the edge of the city, the kind of place the world forgets on purpose. Inside, the air is foul, cheap whiskey, sweat, sex, desperation ground into the floor. My boots stick with every step as if the building itself wants to keep me here.
I order a whiskey I don’t taste.
And then I see him.
Same face. Same careless slouch. The man who thought he could put his hands on what was mine and live long enough to laugh about it. I told him I wouldn’t forget. I told him I would find him.
I always keep my promises.
I stay where I am, watching him drink himself stupid. One glass for me. Five for him. Time drags. My patience sharpens. Eventually, hepeels himself off the stool and staggers for the door, blind to the fact that death just stood up behind him.
Good.
Outside, the alley swallows him whole. He turns his back, careless, exposed. That’s when I move.
I grab him and drive him forward hard enough to rattle the brick, the sound ugly and final. He screams. I don’t let him. I force him quiet, force him still, force him to understand.
