1. A Language of Pain
Chapter one
A Language of Pain
Kenji
I reached the rest of my men. All of them were battered, bruised, and coated in blood that wasn’t theirs.
In front of them, Reo kneeled over someone in the center. My Roar’s knuckles were split and stained. His glasses were gone, and a cut sliced across his eyebrow. Yet his spine was straight and his hands methodical as he tortured a huge man lying on the ground.
I took in the other five bound people beyond them.
Good. They kept several alive.
My fingers itched to kill more.
They better have some fucking answers to my questions.
The five assassins were roped and bound to chairs—each one slumped, bloodied, and trembling in the aftershock of failure. But it wasn’t regular rope that held them.
Reo and our men had clearly grabbed whatever was around them. Whips had been used to lash their torsos to the chairs. Coiled floggers wrapped like serpents across their chests.
One man’s arms had been strapped behind him with a braided red shibari rope, the knots tight and expertly placed, biting into the flesh.
Another had his ankles spread and locked to the chair legs with leather cuffs torn straight from a display cross.
A thick O-ring gag had been shoved between a third assassin’s teeth. Blood drooled down from the corners of his mouth.
One man’s face was swollen and purple, and I spotted the broken handle of a riding crop stabbed into his thigh. Blood seeped around the silicone shaft.
Crossing my arms over my chest, I put my view back on my Roar.
The assassin’s left hand was pinned under Reo’s knee. A blade glinted in Reo’s right hand.
“This man. . .” Reo stared at the five assassins and then gestured to the flayed body beside him, flicking blood from his fingertips. “He will be a prelude. A visual aid. Something to set the tone for us. A way for you all to understand my current state of mind.”
Kaoru snickered.
Yoichi and Satoshi went over, lowered to the ground, and held the man still for my Roar.
“Allow me to show you all what I mean.” Reo nodded toward the bound assassins, then turned back to his work with the cold grace of a man performing surgery. His blade kissed the assassin’s cheek and then he sank the sharp edge an inch deep.
The man’s body convulsed, legs kicking uselessly against my Fangs as they held him down.
However, the man did not scream.
He couldn’t.
Reo had already removed his tongue.
But he did go into a full-body seizure of disbelief like his nerves had only just registered that pain on this level was real.
Inch by inch, the steel glided through flesh. The sticky drag of blood-warmed tissue parted beneath Reo’s hand, exposing all that lay under the man’s skin—sinew and blood-slick muscle.
The man bucked hard against my Fangs, but it was useless. There was no escape from their grip or Reo’s knife.
One of the bound men pissed himself.
Another blinked rapidly, trying not to look, but failing.
Reo continued slicing into the man’s cheek. The skin curled away from the blade in a red translucent ribbon and the blade sang wetly with slow, sucking rasps.
Steel slurping up raw meat.
“The human face is remarkable.” Reo leaned in closer and cut more. “A thousand expressions. Smiles. Lies. Prayers. Fear. Hope. Rage. Rich. Poor. Black. White. We all spend so much effort pretending we’re different.”
I gazed at the man’s face. The exposed muscle pulsed wet and twitched with panicked breaths. It was a weeping red canvas of trembling nerves, dripping tissue, and white bone.
Tears spilled from the man’s eyes.
“Peel the skin away, and what’s left?” Reo looked to the bound men as if they would answer.
They just stared back in horror.
For the first time since walking out there, I smiled.
Reo shrugged and returned to slicing. “Once the masks fall, all look the same. And you will find that blood doesn’t mourn. Muscle doesn’t lie. And bones don’t discriminate. You see. It is our souls that carry the hate. Our brains that deceive. Our hearts that envy.”
Once finished, Reo held up the strip of cheek—long, pink, and glistening like butcher’s parchment. It twitched faintly between his fingers. Reo studied it, probably admiring the length and the clean edge. “There we go.”
He slung it to the side.
The strip of skin landed with a damp slap, curling like a bloodied ribbon—pale on one side, slick with gleaming red on the other, still twitching faintly as if it hadn’t accepted its separation yet.
Then, Reo admired his handiwork with a stillness that might have unnerved most people. “What do you all think?”
One of the men shut his eyes as his body shook.
Gently, Reo began to tap the blade against his palm at a rhythmic pace and looked at the five bound assassins. “You see, gentlemen, pain is a language. And I want to talk to you this evening. I am fluent in dialects your bones have never heard.”
The five bound assassins reacted like a chorus of unraveling wills, each breaking—or refusing to—on their own terms.
One, older and cocky, sneered through a swollen lip and refused to flinch. He sat upright despite the ropes digging into his flesh, pretending the sight of the flayed man beside Reo bored him.
But the twitch in his jaw betrayed that front—he wasn’t untouched, just trying not to be the first to fold.
Next to him, another sat trembling, eyes glassy with terror. He couldn’t even meet Reo’s gaze. He just kept staring at the blade like it might leap toward him on its own. Sweat streamed down his face and his knees were shaking so hard the cuffs rattled.
Hmmm. I may start with him. He’s too scared to remain quiet.
The third sat eerily still with his face blank, not defiant, not afraid—just somewhere far away. He stared past the violence, as if detached from the room, breathing in slow, resigned counts. A soldier who’d already made peace with death.
The fourth was pure fire—snarling around his gag, spitting blood to the floor, rage boiling in his eyes. He leaned into the floggers lashing him to the chair, daring Reo to come closer.
Number four will be a problem for my Roar.
I could already see it in his eyes. He wouldn’t beg. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t stop until someone killed him.
I gestured to Yoichi. “We will keep that one alive tonight. You’re in charge of him.”
Number four stopped snarling and watched us.
Yoichi nodded. “He’ll be safe with me, Kenji.”
“Excellent. I want him to spend time in my bamboo room.”
The fourth man froze in horror. His snarling ceased mid-growl. His body, once straining against the floggers in wild defiance, suddenly sagged.
Sweat burst down his temples as all that bravado vanished and rage turned to pleading panic.
I winked at him.
Number four had definitely heard of my bamboo room.
Many spoke of the low-lit greenhouse in the back of my compound. Beautiful, at first glance—glass walls, green stalks swaying in shallow water, a koi pond outside the sliding door.
But inside, the bamboo grew fast and sharp.
Because I fed it blood.
And heat.
And screams.
The method was old.
We stripped the traitors naked and bound them above shallow, fertilized soil. And then we placed sharpened bamboo shoots beneath their body—angled just right.
Bamboo, under the right conditions, grew up to an inch every ninety minutes.
That didn’t sound like much.
Until it pierced the skin.
Then it became a slow, agonizing invasion. Roots into flesh. Stalks splitting muscle. Sharp tips forcing their way through stomachs, lungs, groins, until the bamboo didn’t just grow under them.
It grew through them.
Their own bodies became trellises.
Many times the screams lasted for days.
And when death finally took them, the bamboo still stood, tall and red-tipped, a garden of agony cultivated by patience.
Now. . .that fourth man watched me with pleading eyes. Then, he began to shake his head over and over while mumbling under the gag.
“Aww. Now he wants to talk.” I stepped closer. “But, it is too late for that.”
Yoichi chuckled behind me. “He’ll make the bamboo bloom nicely.”
“Water him well.” I directed my view to the last assassin—man number five.
Tears lined his lashes, his chest heaved, and his hands twitched behind the red shibari rope. He couldn’t stop shaking. His eyes bounced between the flayed man, Reo, and me.
He’s ripe to talk right now. This one will give us tons of information.
Not to be outdone, Reo took his knife and plunged the blade straight into the hollow of the peeled man’s throat.
The man's eyes bulged. His legs kicked once, twice. A wet, gurgling rasp burst from the ruined voice box as blood exploded upward in a thick, arterial spray.
Reo wiped the blade clean across his own thigh, painting a long red streak down the fabric. Next, he rose, and his voice came out low. “Let me be clear. . .”
He went over to the bound and then gestured to the twitching corpse now slumped in blood. “That wasn’t punishment. That was a punctuation. A full stop at the end of a sentence I no longer wanted to read. Do not bore me this evening.”
He walked slowly past each man, letting the tip of his knife trail across their restraints—light enough to make them flinch, heavy enough to remind them it could all end here.
“You think silence is strength?” Reo paused. “It’s not. Silence is an invitation for me to get creative.”
He stopped in front of the still-shaking final man—the one bound with the red shibari rope, eyes wide and glistening with the sting of panic. “I want names.”
The man whimpered.
Reo crouched low until their faces were nearly level. His voice dropped into something intimate.
“You see, this blade and I. . .we’ve danced with lungs. Serenaded kidneys. I’ve kissed spines with it. But I would much rather hear your voice than your bones tonight.” He tilted his head. “One name, and I will let you keep your fingers. Two names, and maybe even your tongue. Lie to me. . .”
He pressed the flat of the blade against the man’s cheek. “I’ll make your soul bleed first.”
They all stirred.