Page 5

And they’re wrong about that too.

I’m not empty. I’m just too fucking loud.

There’s a noise in my head, you see. A murderous beat, the one my father tuned me to, the one that made me his favorite weapon. It’s always been there. A low, grinding roar, like a machine left running in an empty room. Like the sea heard from inside a shell. Except the sea doesn’t demand anything, and this does. It demands and it takes. It has demanded since I was small enough to hide under a table and watch what grown men will do to one another for money. My father called it strength. He drove it into me, beat by beat, until there was almost no line left in me between the noise and the man.

Almost.

He left me one… the code.

But here’s the joke that none of them get and most likely never will. The guards, the wardens, the men who hood me and drop their eyes and pray the chains will hold. The same man who made me a monster is the one who handed me the single rule that keeps me from being only that.

Kill with reason.

I’ve killed. Plenty, at that. But I won’t be handing you a number, because I’m the only man alive who has it. It was never going to be on file anywhere either. I made damn sure of that. There’s no record of me at all, and certainly none before the night they finally caught me for the one piece of work they could prove was mine, and even that came with a blank where my name should sit. And that’s the part that should really frighten them, if any of them were clever enough to fear the right thing, that was.

Because they think they know what I am, but they have no idea. They know a sliver of it. They know the beatings I can deliver, the brutality and the biting. They know the pain I can withstand and the raw strength of my endurance. If they knew the rest, what these hands had actually done, and to who, the hood would be the very least of their worries.

But every one of them earned it. Rivals. Traitors. The kind of men who like to hurt things that can’t hurt them back. Those… now those I take apart nice and slow and I sleep as peaceful as the grave after.

Never the innocent, though. Never.

It’s a small, cheap thing to hang what’s left of a soul on. I knew that, but regardless, it’s the only thing I own. The day I put my hands on someone who did nothing to earn it is the day I’m no better than the cowards I hunt for sport. It’s also the only line I have left, and the noise has never once pushed me over it.

The ones who do earn it, though?

Well, that’s when I let the demon off its chain and let it feed.

This gray morning had something else planned. Within the hour I’d meet the one thing that would make the demon purr, and the law I’d kept my whole life would not survive her.

So, fuck the code.

Usually, they move a new man from the van to the block with four guards and inside of twenty minutes. Locked gates the whole way, sure, but routine. I knew that because I had heard one of them say it, muttering to the man next to him that eleven of them for one prisoner was overkill.

He would spend the rest of that morning revising the estimate.

Because for me, they threw eleven men at the job of moving me and it took them the better part of an hour. And still, they didn’t manage it clean. I could have killed any one of them. That’s the truth they never quite believed, even while I proved it. But there’s no sport in a man just doing his job, and my code doesn’t waste real blood on the undeserving. So, I don’t kill guards.

I just get… well… bored.

And a bored man in chains is a very dangerous kind of quiet. So, when the first hand closed too hard on the back of my neck, a small cruelty, a man showing off for the others, I decided I could use the workout.

Chained. Hooded. Half-blind behind the mesh.

And I still put every last one of them on the floor.

Fucking amateurs.

The details don’t matter. A waist chain is a weapon, if you’re patient. A man’s own weight will fold him, if you know where to lean. By the time they had the numbers to pin me, bodies stacked on bodies, a knee grinding my face into the concrete, the corridor behind us looked like the aftermath of something with teeth.

Not one of them dead, though. Worth remembering, the next time somebody tells you what I am. Bruised and broken in the places that heal quietly, but still breathing, every one of them… yeah, I did that. But then, I like to keep my accounts clean. It’s only the lesser men, the ones playing at being big, who need to exaggerate a fight.

Can’t stand fucking liars.

Which is why I will also admit to the moment I went down. One of them caught my brow with a baton in the melee, coming down high and hard, the hit causing the blood to pour down my face and into my eye.

Yeah, I let them have me after that. Not because they’d won. But because I’d made my point, and a point made twice is just noise.

So, they took me to the infirmary in the end. Because I was leaking, and because some dead-eyed suited asshole who ran this place had decided the ghost with no name was worth too much to bleed out on his nice clean floor.