I’ve got mine.
And yet here I am… Parked in this goddamn truck, white-knuckling the steering wheel like it's the only thing anchoring me to this reality.
The abandoned warehouse stares back at me, silent, rotting, familiar.
Devils’ business.
Dash brought the initiates here earlier for their little baptism-by-fire. I should be out there, watching, gathering intel, pulling strings. But I’m not. Not yet.
Because my mind’s dragging me somewhere else.
Back to the dark.
Back tohim.
The past doesn’t just haunt, ithollows. And every time I think about what my father did to me, I feel that pit open up inside me again. That same concrete room. That same fucking light. That silence between screams.
He sent me away like a rabid dog. Locked me in a foreign hell and called it a lesson. And I let him.
That’s what eats me alive.
I didn’t fight.
Didn’t spit in his face and tell him to rot in the empire of lies he built on my back.
I was still just a kid.
But I’m not anymore.
Now I’ve got the plan. The power. The rage. And I didn’t come home to play fucking catch-up.
My palms sweat against the leather, vision blurring as bile rises like it knows the truth I’m still choking down, I lost time. Years. People. Her.
And for what?
For silence.
Breathing deep, I force air into my lungs like it might quiet the storm in my head. A trick I taught myself when the walls started closing in. Breathe in. Count to four. Lie to yourself.
It doesn’t work.
Because the ache never left. It just changed shape.
And somewhere between what could’ve been and what’s about to happen. I remind myself… It was exile or death.
And no one decides when I die.
Not him.
Not anymore.
Refocusing my attention, the haze clears. The bodies don’t.
I watch as the clean-up crew moves through the warehouse like they’ve done this a hundred times before. Fluid. Efficient. Cold.
One by one, they drag the corpses across the concrete, dumping them into the pit like rotting meat. No prayers. No last rites. Just silence and gasoline.
Moments later, Kyran steps forward, new blood, still shiny around the edges, but there’s something sharp in him. A quiet hunger.
