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“Noa.” She is playing into my soft side by lowering her voice and making it very sweet. But I’m not buying. “There is glass all over the floor. I’ll hurt myself.” Her tone is so convincing it would have worked on me in the past. Her trying to plead with me only makes my determination to see this through to the end grow. How dare she still try to manipulate me? Time to teach her a lesson.

She notices I am about to do something. “What are you…” I don’t give her a chance to respond as I shoot her again. This bullet leaves a flesh wound right below the previous one. Her breathing is so loud that it’s making me enraged. Lana is probably withering because of the pain she is experiencing. And it’s a relief that I can say it’s not my fucking problem.

“It’s going to be really hard to crawl to me if I shoot your other arm as well.”

“You are going to pay for this.” I yawn at her pathetic attempt to intimidate me.

“My sweet Lana,” I crook my finger and motion for her to come to me. “I couldn’t give two shits about you. Start crawling.”

“Or. What.” I’m getting on her nerves as she is gritting her teeth.

“Or your brain matter will be meshed with the other ones scattered around us.” She is a professional hitwoman and can read people. So it’s not a surprise that she knows that I’m not fucking around. Her sole reason to survive this is that she stays alive long enough to make me suffer.

I hope she fucking does because then she’ll see I’m unbreakable.

Lana plants her hands and knees on the floor, and the first thing I hear is the tiniest crack of glass beneath her hands. I close my eyes and inhale the air around us, finally realizing what’s going to get me out of this depressing train of thought: her suffering.

For the first couple of seconds, my eyes are only trained on her limbs. Her fingers are getting coated with blood, and it’s a sight to be seen. Every time she lifts her knees, I can spot tiny shards of glass lodged into them. After she’s done, I have to kiss the ground she crawled on as it’s bringing me so much delight right now.

The seconds are passing by, and Lana is not showing it, but she’s in agony. Her lips are pursed, and her eyes are narrowed. She might have lied about her feelings, but she can’t lie herself out of this one. When I look at her, I don’t feel one ounce of sympathy; but I do feel regret. I regret that I haven’t done this sooner.

“Once I am there,” her voice is hushed and venomous, “you’ll see what the word wrath really feels like.”

“That would be so much more convincing if you weren’t crawling on broken glass.” My response makes her grunt, and I shrug. It hasn’t rung with her that I truly don’t give a shit anymore. Betrayal is not forgivable, and she certainly won’t forgive me for this.

Oh well.

She is looking straight ahead of me, which makes her concentration on the shards of glass beneath her weaken—time to use that to my advantage. I spot a wounded look and talk in a patronizing tone.

“You are really hurt, right?” She nods at me while still crawling. Good, she is almost…

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

There.

This bitch just dug the palm of her hand into a big piece of glass, and it cut her pretty deep. The bleeding is instant, but so is her reflex to want to check on her hand.

“Ah, ah, ah,” I shoot right by her ear to get her attention, and I got it. “Did I say to stop crawling?” She puts her hands right where they belong: the fucking floor. The glass has fallen out of her hand, but the gushes of blood continue pouring down her hand. The smell of blood is instant—metallic. The moment has come: she is finally on her knees, hands before me. Then she does something incredibly stupidL she tries to get up. I place the butt of the rifle on the top of her head and push her back down on the floor.

“I didn’t fucking give you permission to stand up.” I’m pretty sure I didn’t. “Your gaze is going to stay focused on the floor. Nod if you understand.”

She does.

Good.

Then she starts to speak in that cold tone she used in that basement. “You tried so hard to be your mommy’s son, but you failed. You are definitely Dario’s son.”

Fuck this.

The rifle gets tossed onto the floor, and I grab my machete. I make my way behind her, not caring if I’m stepping on glass myself, and I forcefully yank her upwards by grabbing her hair. Her body is centimeters away from the floor.

The price for bringing up my mother is death, if you ask me.

I look dead ahead of me because I can’t stand to look at her. Because if I do, it feels like I would collapse onto the floor myself. What Lana said might have been hurtful; it also masked a semblance of the truth. What if I am turning into my father? Sometimes you have to be the villain to get your point across.

“You are going to get that pretty little knife of yours, right now.” Lana listens to my command and reaches for a knife in her pocket with her bloody hand. “Now you are going to cut through your pants, so your pussy is exposed.”

“Excuse me?” Her defiance only tells me that she is eager to die. Why else would she question everything I tell her to do? I let go of her hair and reach for my machete, and quickly make a shallow cut on the back of her neck. Enough to make it bleed, not sufficient to kill her.