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I put my hand around his throat. I don’t squeeze. Not yet. I just hold it there so he can feel how easy it would be.

“You didn’t teach him to be a man.” My voice stays quiet. “You taught a little boy that pretty things meant pain, and now I have to teach him otherwise.”

“Who the fuck are you to him?” he croaks through split lips, the words wet and ragged.

“Daddy.”

Confusion first—a genuine blankness in his swollen eyes—then sheer disgust.

Before the bitter laugh forming in his throat escapes, my fist hits his solar plexus. This time, the chair goes backward, its metal legs screeching against the concrete. Steven hits the floor hard, and he screams, a raw, animal sound that echoes off the bare walls.

I let him.

I wait until the echo dies, until his scream dissolves into choked sobs, then I right the chair. Steven’s breathing comes ragged now, each inhale a wet rattle. Blood coats his teeth like cheap red paint. His left eye is beginning to swell shut, the lid purpling.

“You’re fucking sick,” he gasps.

“Maybe.” I wipe my knuckles against my jeans. “But Kamden sleeps through the night now.”

Steven folds as much as the restraints allow, curling inward on himself.

“He eats.”

I grab a handful of his greasy hair and force his head up until our eyes meet.

“He laughs.”

His eyes water from the pain or the shame—I don’t care which.

“And every single time that boy does something soft without apologizing, he loses a little more of what you did to him.”

I let go. His head drops forward as he coughs, strings of bloody saliva dangling from his lips.

I pace away toward a nearby table where various tools lie arranged—a ball-peen hammer, a set of pliers, a blowtorch, a roll of duct tape. Nothing exotic. Nothing I need to describe. Steven sees them, and his gaze fixes there, unable to look away.

“What are you going to do?” he whispers, voice trembling.

I look back over my shoulder. “Whatever I need to.”

“To what?”

“To make sure I never wonder whether you suffered enough.”

Steven starts bargaining then.

People always think there’s a price—money, names, apologies, connections. Granted, sometimes bribery has its place, but very rarely.

I make Steven hurt.

Not quickly, not efficiently. I don’t need information from him, or a confession. I have no professional objective.

All I want is for him to know true fear before he dies.

I want him to understand, for however long I permit him consciousness, that somebody finally came back for that ten-year-old boy.

Somebody finally decided he mattered.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I realize I’m really not doing this for Kamden. I mean, he actively refused to give me Steven’s surname because he knew exactly what I would do with it.