Chapter 5 Silas #2
Movement flashed in my peripheral vision, too fast to stop. In half a second, Lena reached for a screwdriver balanced on the edge of a nearby tray. In one swift motion, her arm swung forward, driving the tool into his eye.
Jacob screamed. Shock crossed his face.
Then he was dead.
What. The. Fuck.
Lena’s expression was wild, flickering from rage to grim satisfaction as a breath of relief rushed through her body. Then something shifted. She looked at Jacob’s body, really looked at it, and horror flooded in. Disbelief followed closely behind as the reality settled that she had killed him.
That reaction was typical for most people the first time they killed someone. The shock came first. Then the stunned realization that they had actually gone through with it. That they were actually capable of taking a life, and of the brutal force it required.
Knox and I had long since grown numb to death.
But the memory of our first reaction, our first time seeing death laid across the floor, flashed briefly in my mind.
Two women with empty eyes and twisted necks.
Lena's hands began to shake as she let go of the screwdriver, still buried to the hilt in Jacob’s skull. Her eyes flicked back and forth between Knox and me, wide, fearful, and assessing.
My brother cocked his head, studying her reaction, while I tutted and wrapped a hand around her arm. She shook, trying to tear away from my grasp.
“Lena, Lena, Lena. Now why would you go and do a thing like that?” I said lightly. “We were just beginning to have some fun with Jacob here. All that hard work, days of chipping away to extract intel, straight down the drain!”
“Why did you kill him?” Knox asked, his tone more curious than angry.
The little mute looked down at her bloodstained hands, still trembling with disbelief. Her bewildered expression said everything. She had no idea why she’d done it. Lena had snapped. Something Jacob said or was about to say set her off in a way she couldn’t yet process.
“Well,” I said with a sigh, “now that Jacob has finished spilling his secrets, I guess you’ll have to fill his shoes. Ready to get started?”
She said nothing, her gaze still fixed on her shaking hands.
I used the handsaw to cut through Jacob’s bindings, then shoved him off the chair and let his corpse tumble to the floor in a boneless heap. I dragged his body into the back room, where the Arca cleanup crew would arrive shortly to collect it.
When I returned to the workshop, a frown crossed my face.
Knox had replaced Jacob's blood- and piss-soaked chair in the center of the room with a fresh one. I supposed he wanted to make the little omega more comfortable. Had he ever done anything like that before? Sure, my brother wasn’t as openly cruel as I was, but he was still cold, methodical, always doing his job with precision and never taking unnecessary steps.
Like finding a clean chair.
My eyes flicked from him to the chair questioningly. He shrugged, already guiding the mute toward it and looping a zip tie around her wrists. I leaned back against the wall, ready to watch him work his magic.
He crouched down, bringing himself eye level with her, then pulled a long blade from the holster on his thigh.
“I don’t want to do this, runt,” he said. “Just tell us what you know, and we’ll let you go.”
I wouldn’t have opted for the blade this soon. Our method was to start small, escalating the pain gradually to gauge the threshold of an interrogatee’s resolve.
Knox was going off-script, and I wasn't sure why.
“Just talk,” he said, frustration creeping into his voice.
“Talk!” he barked this time, despite knowing she didn't respond to it.
She just sat there, staring at him. Her hands had stopped shaking now that they were restrained behind her back, and her wide brown eyes had gone flat. Knox lifted the blade, dragging it upward before resting it against her chest, then across the delicate skin of her neck.
“Tell us what you know about Marco’s other omegas,” he said, his voice calmer now.
At first, she didn’t move. Lena sat perfectly still. Then she raised her flat gaze to meet his. Her mouth opened, then closed, and in one swift motion she thrust her neck forward, into the knife.
My brother jerked his hand back just in time to prevent real damage, but a thin line of blood welled and slid down her neck from the shallow cut.
He growled and dropped the knife. It clattered loudly against the concrete, the sound echoing through the basement. Without a word, he turned and stormed up the stairs, slamming the basement door behind him.
“What the fuck, Knox?” I called after him, but his heavy footsteps were already retreating overhead.
I turned back to her. “Well, little mute. Apparently, my brother needs to chat before we get started with you.” I unbound her wrists and guided her toward the cells. “So I’ll stash you right here until he’s ready.”
She didn’t resist. She didn’t react. She just stared ahead, her expression empty.
I suddenly realized I was pissed off. It infuriated me that the omega wasn’t more frightened. That instead of fighting, or begging for her life, she had folded inward.
Someone had broken this woman, badly.
Not just someone. Marco Bellini.
The thought rattled around my skull, threatening to leak pity into places it didn’t belong. No. There was no room for pity in my line of work. Results were what mattered.
We had spent years waiting for Arca to sanction the fall of Marco Belini's empire. Knox and I orchestrated it all from behind the scenes by moving pieces on the board and patiently waiting for our chance at revenge.
Plus, there were other omegas who needed our help. Recovering them was essential to destabilize the criminal organization responsible for the highest volume of omega trafficking in the region. Responsible for murdering helpless women.
One woman in particular came to mind.
After five years in captivity, Lena had answers.
And she was going to give them to us.
I left her locked in an empty cell and killed the lights, giving her time to rest and consider her options, while I went in search of Knox.
All that interrogating had worked up a hell of a thirst, so I grabbed two beers, one for me and one for my brother.
He wasn’t inside. I found him slouched on the stoop outside our residence, hands laced through his hair. The city hummed loudly around us, lights bright against the night sky.
“What’s got you in a twist?” I asked casually, sitting beside him and passing him a beer.
He growled.
“You’re really this worked up over interrogating the girl?” I said. “We’ve interrogated women before. It’s never been an issue. What’s going on? You want to game plan?”
“No. No game plan.”
“What do you mean, 'no game plan?'” I snapped. “She just killed the only intel source we had in custody! We barely got our hands on him. If any more of Marco's crew go missing it’ll alert him; send him into hiding. Open mouths will close fast. We have a job to do.”
“You saw what I saw,” he said, turning to me.
“What? Her stunt with the knife?”
“She leaned into it, Silas,” he said. “She wanted to die. You can’t fake fear and instinct. We both know that.”
I said nothing, staring into the dark hollow at the top of my beer.
“That woman is broken,” he continued, quieter now. “And the depth of it is only just becoming clear. Whatever Jacob was about to tell us, it was bad.”
“So what? You feel sorry for her?” I asked. “Is that what this is?”
“It has nothing to do with pity. Think about it, Silas. You can’t break what’s already broken. There’s nothing we can do to her that hasn’t already been done!”
“And?” I shot back. “If we refuse to interrogate her, Command will find another unit who won’t hesitate, and we’ll be pulled from this case.
The case we orchestrated and dropped ourselves right in the middle of!
Then those omegas? We may never recover them…
” I took a drink. “I know you don’t enjoy this part of the job the way I do, but there are other reasons you do it. ”
He snorted.
“You help people,” I continued. “This helps people in the end. It keeps the really fucked-up men away from good, helpless citizens in Falcon City. People like Mom.”
He sighed. “Think about why we’re doing this. How far we’ve come. We’re so close to revenge, and now Command wants the same thing we do. Marco Bellini, dead.”
He took a long pull from his beer, staring out into the night.
“She won’t talk,” he said, shaking his head. “Not like this.”
“Then use that brain of yours,” I said. “Tell me what we do.”
He sat in silence for a while, sipping his drink. Knox was always the thoughtful twin, watching, waiting, learning. Our interrogees revealed themselves in every twitch, every expression, every sound. He figured out the leverage, and I applied the pressure. We made a good team.
“If she’s too broken to break,” he said finally, “we'll rebuild her.”
I choked and nearly spit out my beer. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“It means exactly that. We have time. We'll clean her up and get her comfortable. Treat her like a human instead of the animal Marco's treated her like for years. Once she feels better, we explain that we’re trying to help the other omegas. That we’re trying to take Marco down.”
I shook my head. “She’s fucked up in the head, Knox. You and I are not psychiatrists, and we’re not trained for that. We don’t rebuild people. We break them.”
He turned to me then, eyes hard. “And that’s the problem. Whatever Marco did to her stripped away more than fear. It killed her instincts. Specifically, self-preservation. Even her response to dominance.”
His jaw tightened as he continued, “She didn’t react to the alpha bark, Silas. It's unheard of! She leaned into the blade. He didn’t just break her. He hollowed her out. Turned her into a shell that doesn’t even care about survival anymore.”
“I know you think I'm a bleeding heart, but this isn't about pity, it's about leverage,” he said, eyes hardening. “A different kind. You can’t threaten to kill someone who already wants to die.”
The words sat heavy between us.
“General Green said any resource we needed was available,” Knox went on.
“So let's use them. We'll assign her protected informant status and enroll her in the Witness Protection Program.
I'll contact a psychologist from the Omega Training Center, and you can arrange a safe house to stash her in. If what Jacob said about Lena being the favorite is true, Marco will come looking for her. Maybe we can even force him to make a mistake or lure him out.”
I stared out into the darkness, jaw clenched.
Rebuilding instead of breaking?
Trust instead of fear?
It went against every instinct I had.
But I knew Knox was right. For once, my tools wouldn’t work.
“Fine,” I said at last. “I can take it to the general. I’ll lay out the change in tactics and see how much leash he’s willing to give us.”
Knox nodded, like he’d known I would agree.
“I’ll handle it in the morning,” I added. “But if this fails, we go back to doing things my way.”
He didn’t argue.
Below us, locked in the cells, Lena waited. And for the first time since this job began, I had the uneasy sense that she wasn’t the one about to be tested.
We were.