Chapter 57
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Aric
The warehouse sits at the edge of the docks. The kind of place where screams don’t carry, and blood washes away with the tide.
I stop the car and get out.
Nikos is already here, leaning against a black SUV.
Hyun-seok stands apart from the others, hands in his pockets.
And Alexei watches me approach with those winter-storm eyes.
We’ve never been close. But he understands something the others don’t—what it is to have a thing torn out of you and keep walking around the hole it leaves. What that does to a man.
I stop in front of them, and no one says a word.
Tassilo emerges from the warehouse entrance, looks at me, and nods.
Ready.
I start walking, and they follow.
Inside, three men hang from chains in the center of the room, arms wrenched over their heads, feet barely brushing the concrete. Tassilo’s hours are already written on them.
“Two more we caught running,” he says at my shoulder. “Men are still working the area.”
The hanging men turn their faces toward the sound of my steps.
“We didn’t know who she was. We were just following orders. The target was you, not her. She got in the way. We didn’t mean to—”
I don’t respond, just keep walking.
“Please, we didn’t plan it. We have rules. Standards. We don’t—”
I’m close enough now to see the tears streaming down the man’s face.
“I have a family. I have kids. Please. We already told everything. The intermediaries. The dead drops. The encrypted channels—”
I stop. Three feet away. And I look at him. At the face of the man who shot my wife. Who killed my unborn child. The others spread out behind me, The Gods, my men.
“Boss.” Tassilo’s tone is low. “They claim they don’t know who hired them. Cut-outs. Encrypted relays. Standard for work like this.”
I lift a hand, and he goes quiet.
The man is still going—still crying, still bargaining, offering me names he doesn’t have and a future he won’t see.
I reach into my pocket instead. The cigarette feels foreign between my fingers. I don’t smoke. Never have. The taste reminds me of my father. Of the way he used to blow smoke in my face when I was a child, watching me flinch, testing to see if I’d break.
I never broke. Not for him. Not for anyone.
Until tonight.
I scream and cry and fall to my knees. Defeated. Destroyed. Torn apart into pieces. But that’s inside me. Those are the parts that no one will ever see.
Because on the outside, I show none of it. Outside, I’m the embodiment of control everyone takes me for.
I place the cigarette between my lips, and reach for the lighter.
I flick it, and the flame catches. I draw, and the taste floods my mouth—bitter, acrid, the taste of childhood, the taste of everything I swore I would never become.
Then I exhale, and the smoke curls between the man who killed my child and me.
I take another drag.
The shooter is still talking. Still begging. The words wash over me like water. Truth is, I don’t even hear them because Kirill’s voice is louder.
I’m sorry, Aric.
Tassilo appears at my side, the canister I ordered him to bring on my way here in his hands. He doesn’t speak or ask, just waits. Like the rest.
I nod, giving him signal, and the accelerant splashes across the shooters’ bodies. The smell is sharp and chemical. The smell of endings.
“No—please—we’ll tell you everything we know—” the middle one shouts, thrashing against the chains. “We don’t know the name! We never knew it! That’s the truth, that’s God’s own truth, we were paid through cut-outs, we never—please—”
The other men start screaming too. Begging. Offering everything they have—money, information, their mothers, their children, their souls.
I don’t hear them. I hear Ayanna’s laugh, the one she only gives when she forgets to be composed.
I hear her voice in the darkness of our bedroom, soft and sleep-warm, saying my name like it means something.
I hear her heartbeat against my chest. And beneath it—beneath everything—I hear the heartbeat I’ll never know.
The one that stopped before I ever got to hear it.
I hear Ayanna’s cries when she finds out what was taken from her.
“Aric—” Nikos’s voice reaches me from behind, reminding me of their presence.
They must be wondering what’s going through my mind right now. I’m the one who’s always controlled. Calculated. The cold Viking. But there’s nothing controlled about what’s happening inside me. Nothing calculated about the way I’m unraveling.
The three shooters watch me like I’m something to pray to. I feel their eyes as a physical weight. Waiting. Praying what comes next is not what they think.
They won’t see me break.
I take one last drag of the cigarette.
They won’t see the damage they’ve done.
I let the cigarette fall.
They’ll only—
“Burn.”
The flames catch instantly. Orange and red and ravenous, spreading across their bodies like living things, like something that’s been waiting for permission to devour. The screaming fills the warehouse. Fills the night. Fills every empty space inside me that used to hold something human.
And I stand there, watching, as the men who put a bullet through my wife and killed my child burn to death three feet in front of me.
Their skin blackens. Blisters. Splits. The smell of burning bodies is sickening.
No one speaks behind me, but I feel them watching me.
They’re seeing something they’ve never seen before.
Something that existed beneath the control, the calculation, the careful mask I’ve worn my entire life.
Something savage. Something that doesn’t care about rules or consequences or the version of myself I’ve spent twenty-eight years constructing.
People think I’m cold. Controlled. I’ve always been fire. I just learned to carry it without burning down the room.
And now?
Someone almost took my wife from me. They took my unborn child from me.
So the room burns.