Page 100 of Inevitable Endings
“I’m starting to wonder if they’re the same person.”
Chapter 45
Crawl out of Hell
Aslanov
The chair beneath me wobbles, its wooden legs uneven against the cold, bloodstained concrete. The noose bites into my throat, thick and rough, each shallow breath making the fibers scratch against my skin. My hands are cuffed behind my back, shoulders burning from the forced position. The room stinks of sweat, blood, and something else, something rotten, like flesh left too long in the dark.
A single light swings above me, flickering, casting jagged shadows against the walls. The air is thick, oppressive. The kind of silence that only comes before death.
A guard stands beside me, his fingers tapping lazily against the back of the chair. His gloved hand rests there like a vulture waiting for its prey to drop. His voice is calm, indifferent. “After this,” he murmurs, almost thoughtful, “we’ll dissolve you in acid. Clean and neat.”
I breathe in through my nose, slow and steady. I don’t flinch. I don’t look at him. Fear is a weakness, and I refuse to die weak.
I was always meant to end this way.
Dangling from a rope, hands bound, body broken.
A monster’s death.
The fibers of the noose bite into my skin, but it doesn’t matter. The sting is nothing compared to the weight I’ve carried my entire life. Blood. Violence. A legacy carved in the marrow of mybones before I was even old enough to understand what I was becoming. I was raised to be cruel, sharpened into a weapon, molded into something inhuman. And now, this is where it has led me.
Maybe this is justice. Maybe this is what monsters like me deserve.
I close my eyes for a moment, breathing in the scent of blood and rot that clings to the air. There is no peace in this death, but there is finality. An ending to something that was never meant to last. I’ve killed, tortured, destroyed. The hands that now hang limply behind my back have spilled more lives than I can count, each one staining deeper, sinking further into my skin. I used to tell myself it didn’t matter—that I had no choice. That I was born into this life, and you do what you must to survive.
But in the end, all I did was exist.
I neverlived.
Not in the way that mattered.
I have never felt the warmth of the morning sun without blood already drying on my knuckles. Never stood in a quiet field, breathing in fresh air without the weight of death clinging to my shadow. I have never known a touch that wasn’t tainted with power, control, destruction.
Except for her.
The one thing—the only thing—that ever made me feel human.
A cruel joke, really. That the universe would grant me a glimpse of something pure, something I could never hold. A spark of warmth in a life that has been nothing but cold steel and jagged edges. A reminder of everything I will never have.
I won’t see her again.
That thought alone cuts deeper than any blade ever has.
I wonder if she will even care. If she will think of me when I am gone. If she will feel relief or nothing at all. I wonder if she always knew I was doomed, if she saw the ruin in me long beforeI did.
I do not pray. I do not beg.
What is there to ask for? Salvation? Forgiveness?
Monsters don’t get redemption.
That’s how my world works.
Men like me are born in blood and end in silence.
It is not tragedy. It is not injustice. It is simply the way of things. A cycle that turns, endless, swallowing us whole. I have seen it a hundred times before, watched men crawl toward their deaths, clawing at the floor, whispering prayers to gods who never listened. I did not pity them. I did not think of them once they were gone.
