Chapter 18 #2
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 in carries 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.
My breath stops. My heart stutters once, twice, then slams against my ribs like it’s trying to escape the memory that just clawed its way back in.
The boy I was screams inside my skull.
Fourteen years old. Skin slick with sweat and tears. Begging. Breaking. The weight of Marek’s body pinning me down while he laughed and took what he wanted, piece by piece, until there was nothing left but silence and shame.
I feel it all again—the tearing, the helplessness, the way he whispered “my perfect little crow” like it was a gift. I remember him because…he was the first. It was the most pain I’ve ever felt in my life.
The painted face on my skin cracks. Something inside me rips wide open.
And the thing that crawls out of the fracture isn’t Reth anymore.
It’s something older. Something that has been waiting in the dark for thirteen years, feeding on every scream I swallowed, every night I woke up tasting blood and shame.
It smiles behind the black slash of my mouth.
I drop the karambit; the scream that rips out of me isn’t human.
Reality becomes a void, and I’m on him before I know I’ve moved, fists slamming into his face with every ounce of buried rot he and so many after him had caused.
Bone crunches under my knuckles. Blood sprays across the white paint on my cheek.
I hit him again. And again. And again. His nose flattens.
Teeth crack. I’m snarling, spit flying, the black slash of my mouth stretched wide like a wound.
“Look at me!” I roar, grabbing his hair and wrenching his head forward so hard something in his neck pops. “Look at me, you sick fuck!”
His eyes are swollen slits, blood pouring down his face, but I force them open with my thumbs, digging one into the socket until he’s screaming and thrashing against the wires.
“Who the fuck am I? Tell me! Look at my fucking face and tell me who I am!”
He can’t answer. He can only gurgle and sob, body convulsing in agony, blood gushing out of his one eye, piss soaking through his trousers and pooling beneath him. The pain has fried his brain.
For one heartbeat, the rabid thing inside me pulls back just enough for me to see it. He has no fucking clue who I am. The boy he broke is nothing but a forgotten toy to him.
He doesn’t remember. But I do.
I. Fucking. Do.
Something inside my chest goes very, very still.
I release his head. It thuds back against the concrete, and I step over him, drop down, and straddle his chest, my knees pinning his shoulders to the floor.
The wires cut deeper into his wrists as his arms strain uselessly above his head.
I lean down until my painted face is inches from his ruined one, until all he can see is the black void of my eyes and the jagged grin of my mouth.
“I’m the boy you killed,” I whisper, voice soft, almost tender. “And now I’m taking back what’s owed… you sick fuck.”
I reach for the karambit, teeth biting into my bottom lip, and press the tip just outside the edge of the crow’s wing, the blade meeting flesh with cold, intimate precision.
Marek’s chest heaves, ribs straining against the open wound I haven’t even started yet.
His good eye is wide, glassy with terror, the other swollen shut and weeping red.
He’s whimpering now, a high, broken sound that vibrates in my bones.
It’s violence that feels like peace over water, like the calm that comes once you’ve accepted your fate, no matter how grotesque.
I don’t speak again. I start cutting.
The first incision is slow, deliberate, a perfect outline around the tattoo.
The skin parts like wet silk under the blade, blood blooming immediately, thick and dark.
Marek’s scream is guttural, animal, tearing from his throat in raw bursts that echo off the stone walls and die in the dark.
His body convulses, the wires biting deeper into his wrists and ankles, fresh blood welling up around the metal in bright rivulets. I ignore it.
I hook the blade under the edge of the skin and peel.
The sound is wet and obscene—a slow, ripping tear, like pulling fat from raw meat.
The crow’s wing lifts in one long, ragged strip, the inked feathers stretching and distorting as the flesh separates from muscle.
Marek’s back arches off the floor, spine bowing so hard I wonder if his vertebrae crack.
God, I hope it does. His mouth opens in a silent howl, throat working around nothing but air and blood.
I keep going. I have to. Violence is a compulsion, a scab that demands picking even as the wound spreads.
The beak comes next. I carve around it, fingers sinking into the warm, slippery meat to hold the skin taut. The face peels away last, and the skin comes free, and the warm, wet flap curls against my palm like a dead thing still trying to breathe.
For one heartbeat, I feel the boy I was screaming inside my chest—small, broken, finally holding the monster’s mark in his own shaking hands. And beneath the rage, something colder settles in, the sick, hollow satisfaction of knowing I just tore a piece of my hell out of his body and made it mine.
The scream that breaks out of me is like vomit of hot glass and broken teeth. It’s a sound I’ve never heard before.
Marek jerks violently beneath me, his head bobbing as he chokes on air and blood and evil.
Then… nothing. His body goes still, his cries suddenly quiet.
“No.” I slap his face, wait for a reaction, but there’s none. “No!” I hit him again, and again. “Wake the fuck up!” My voice is shredded, barely human. “Wake the fuck up! I’m not done! I’m not fucking done with you!”
His head lolls to the side, one eye glassy and empty, the ruined face slack. No flinch. No breath. No more screams.
“No! No! No! No!” I slam the karambit deep into his chest. “Wake up! Wake the fuck up!” The rage doesn’t boil.
It implodes. Turns inward like a black hole sucking everything into itself.
With both hands, I hack the blade downward, feel it tear through flesh, scraping bone, and I don’t stop until his insides are pulp and on the concrete like something rotten, just like the boy who had his humanity turned inside out, left for a life that’s crueler than death.
My chest heaves. My hands shake so hard the blade slips from my fingers and clatters to the floor. I’m still straddling his corpse, knees in the blood and piss and gore, the painted mask on my face feeling like it’s melting off.
The phone in my pocket vibrates. I feel it even though reality is something I’ve lost the moment I laid eyes on that crow. I glance at the piece of hacked-off skin on the floor, my phone still vibrating. My mind’s a haze, my movements aren’t even mine as I reach for the phone and put it on speaker.
“Nazareth, are you there?” Valeria’s voice oozes through the line, but I say nothing, just staring at the bird. “Sometimes,” she continues, “reminders of the past are the best way to guide a stray back home.”
The words land like a bullet in the back of my skull. Everything clicks into place with sickening clarity, my ribs cracking into place around the truth.
She knew. Valeria fucking knew.
She knew exactly who Marek was to me when I didn’t even remember his face. She had kept that name, that face, that fucking tattoo locked away like a loaded gun, waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger. She sent me here on purpose. Not just to kill him. To remind me who I am. What I am.
She wanted me to lose the tiny, fragile piece of humanity I had clawed back the moment I first laid eyes on Sophia.
The part that had started to believe I could be something more than this monster.
The part that had started to want. She wanted it gone.
She wanted me hollow again. Empty. Obedient. Hers.
Sophia’s face flashes behind my eyes, flushed cheeks, parted lips, the way she looked at me in the hallway like I was something worth wanting.
The memory should bring peace. It doesn’t.
It brings pain so sharp it steals the air from my lungs.
Because she’s part of my world now. Because I dragged her into this hell. Because Valeria made sure of it.
All because of me.
I climb off Marek’s dead body, legs numb, boots slipping in the blood. My hand goes to my pocket, and I find the little metal box. White powder. Oblivion. It’s been years since I took a line. It’s also been years since the dead fucker on the floor tore my soul out of my body.
I tap out a thick line on the back of my blood-soaked hand, and without pausing to think about what this means, I bring it to my nose and inhale hard.
The burn explodes behind my eyes. The world tilts again.
And everything goes white.