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Stomach rumbling, he crawls to the bowl and laps at the water, then moves on to the gruel. As he gobbles the pale liquid with noisy gulps, I take my seat beside Amethyst and enjoy the show.
Father’s pride has dwindled to nothing. It’s a combination of torture, semi-starvation, and facing his sins. Every operative in our organization has had the chance to visit his cell and dole out their own form of retribution. Isabel, Camila, and Jynxson were the first in line, as they had been some of the longest affected by his manipulations.
Amethyst flicks a switch and the projector hums to life, casting an image onto a screen that spans the entire space. It’s footage from a data center deep within the Moirai headquarters.
Father sits back on his haunches, panting like a dog. “What is this?”
“Yesterday was the last Friday of the quarter,” I say through a mouthful of popcorn.
As predicted, he flinches.
“Your debt bondage scheme was a mistake. Instead of making people subservient to the Moirai, it created an entireclass of employees who would do anything to gain their freedom.”
Face paling, his eyes dart between us and the screen. “I don’t understand.”
“The last Friday of the quarter is the only time when the Moirai’s entire management team crawls out from hiding to gather in a single location,” I say, my chest swelling with satisfaction.
“Graduation,” he rasps.
“After the number of graduates I poached over the years, the arena is now so heavily guarded that HQ is virtually empty.”
He turns to me, his eyes widening, his lips trailing streams of gruel. “Xero, what have you done?”
“Maintenance staff on my payroll seeded explosives into the building’s stairwells, elevator shafts, and along the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth floors,” I say, relishing his terror.
“That won’t be enough to destroy it.”
“Which is why we paired up with the Montesano family to deliver a truck full of Mercury nitrovolucite into the Moirai,” I continue.
Panic floods his features, and he shakes his head from side to side. “They wouldn’t…”
“Look.” I point at the screen.
The movie switches to drone footage of a pair of trucks driving past an empty industrial estate and down the long stretch of road that leads to the Moirai headquarters.
On the outside, it looks like an abandoned parking lot, but inside are multiple elevator shafts that lead down to a ten-story basement with three additional secret levels, containing living quarters and servers the management team wants to keep hidden from their assassins.
“Call it off,” Father croaks. “You were supposed to take control of the Moirai, not destroy it. Use poison gas or something that won’t damage the AI servers!”
Annoyance prickles at my skin, and I curl my fists. “You don’t get it. I was never power hungry like you. All I ever wanted was freedom.”
The trucks enter the seemingly deserted parking lot, and the Moirai lowers shutters to the entrance, trapping the Montesano brothers.
Father’s eyes bulge, watching the scene unfold, his knuckles turning white from gripping his knees. Amethyst fast-forwards the footage to where one of the vehicles bursts out and reverses down the road.
Seconds later, the camera shakes as the parking lot implodes. It disappears into a sinkhole, which swallows the surrounding road and buildings. The truck reverses out of the chaos, barely avoiding the expanding chasm.
Father wails, his hands clutching at the sides of his face. “My legacy… You’ve ruined me. Everything I worked for is gone!”
My chest thrums with satisfaction. I smirk at the impossibly large crater that now forms under what was once the largest firm of assassins in the United States. When Father set it up with a rag-tag group of disgraced FBI agents, he expected a dynasty, an empire that would span generations. But now, it’s been reduced to rubble.
The drone zooms in on the carnage, showing twisted pieces of metal and debris that were once the foundation of the Moirai headquarters. The thirteen-story underground basement is now nothing more than an enormous cavity.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” I ask.
His mouth opens and closes. “Hundreds of millions of dollars… years of research!”
Amethyst snorts. “Watching your creation get destroyed is nothing compared to all the lives you and your partners ruined.”
