Page 192 of Inevitable Endings
That’s a kind of loyalty I understand.
I appreciate him, he has been there for her while I couldn’t be.
He’ll be at the south entrance, guarding the exit point. He’ll be the first to move if anything goes sideways. I told him he’d only move on my signal. He told me to go fuck myself and that he’d know before I did if something went wrong.
Malik and Sawyer go back farther than I expected.
Military pasts. Different blood, same war.
Malik in Istanbul, a cold sniper, low-profile ghost. The kind you forget is in the room until someone’s throat opens.
Sawyer in Afghanistan. A medic with blood on his boots and steady hands. They met during a multinational op; siege extraction, held out for 72 hours in a blown-out compound with six men and no food. They kept each other breathing. Then never spoke again.
Until now.
Some threads don’t break.
I light a cigarette with steady hands.
Not because I need it.
Because I always do before a massacre.
I drag it slow. Exhale slower. The smoke coils through the basement like a specter, like something ancient preparing to feed.
There are Russian methods. Techniques born in frozen cells and carried in whispers. Torture designed not to kill, but to preserve pain. Keep it alive in the bones. They peel men apart without ever spilling blood. Make you scream without sound. You walk out of those rooms, but you leave something behind. And you never get it back.
Lorenzo won’t get that mercy.
I ash the cigarette on the concrete floor. Press it out with my boot. Watch it die.
I will take his body apart piece by piece, but I will leave his soul awake.That’s the difference. That’s the punishment.
I will whisper things in his ear; old things, things I learned in black cells beneath Moscow, in prisons that don’t appear on maps. Places where no one screams, because screaming was taken from them. Where men are kept alive only to be taught how to die slowly.
And I listened.
I remembered.
I made every unholy technique my own.
There are things you can do to a man with wire, salt, and silence.
Things that don’t break bones—but faith.
He won’t bleed.
He’ll leak memory. Thought. Sanity.
He’ll forget who he is.
And right before the end, I’ll remind him.
I’ll show him her face. Isabella’s. And I’ll whisper her name as I make my final cut, just deep enough that he never forgets that he lost to her.
Not to me.
And then, I will move on.
