He didn’t even get a chance to yell. One quick shot to the gut folded him in half, gasping for air. The second man slapped a rag over his face, soaked in chloroform.
Three seconds later his limp body was already in the back of the van. Fast, quiet, professional, no extra noise. Alex was behind the wheel.
He didn’t look back. He just pressed the gas and disappeared into the night. Wade woke up in a cold, damp basement.
His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like bile and fear. He was strapped to a metal chair, wrists and ankles cinched tight with steel clamps. Directly across from him, on another chair, sat Alex.
He wasn’t looking at Wade. He was calmly turning a pair of pliers in his hands. Ordinary pliers, but under the weak light of a single bulb they looked ugly enough.
“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” Wade started, but his voice cracked into a panicked squeal.
“My father—” he tried again. Alex slowly raised his eyes. Empty, dead still, like a frozen lake.
“You did a lot of talking that night, son,” he said in a flat voice with no emotion in it. “You told my daughter not to scream because nobody was going to hear her anyway.” He set the pliers down and picked up another tool.
Dental forceps. “Seems fair that now you learn what silence feels like. I’m going to make sure nobody hears you either.”
“Ever,” Alex said quietly. Wade’s face changed fast, from smug confidence to plain animal terror. He jerked against the restraints, but the steel bit deeper into his wrists and ankles, turning the chair into a rack.
“You… you can’t do this,” he shrieked, his voice breaking high. “Do you know who my father is? He’ll bury you.”
Alex didn’t blink. He slowly pulled on a pair of thin rubber gloves. The snap of latex in the basement sounded louder than a gunshot.
“Your father isn’t coming,” Alex said in the same even tone, like he was commenting on the weather. “Nobody’s finding you here. Nobody’s hearing you. Those were your rules when you dragged her into that car, remember?”
He stepped close enough for Wade to feel the cold coming off him. “She begged. She cried. You laughed.”
Alex leaned in until his empty eyes were inches from Wade’s face. “You told her, ‘Relax, you might even like it.’ Now it’s your turn to endure something.”
Wade thrashed, shaking his head, his eyes darting around the room for help that wasn’t there. A muffled, terrified sound came out of his throat. Alex locked one hand around his jaw and brought the forceps toward his mouth.
“Open.” It wasn’t a request. It was a sentence. Wade clenched his teeth so hard his jaw creaked.
Alex didn’t wrestle with him. He set the forceps down, picked up a flathead screwdriver, slid the tip between Wade’s teeth, and gave it one short hard twist. There was a sickening crack.
One front tooth split, and Wade’s mouth flew open in a soundless cry of pain. In the same second Alex tossed the screwdriver aside and took up the forceps again. He worked without hatred, with the detached care of a butcher breaking down meat.
Click. One hard pull. The first tooth, red with blood, hit the concrete floor.
Wade screamed, but the scream broke off as Alex moved to the second without pause. This wasn’t a beating. It was dismantling. A cold, systematic destruction of the thing Wade prized most.
That polished smile. That easy mouth he used to mock, command, and humiliate. Alex wasn’t just pulling teeth. He was stripping away the swagger, the status, the voice.
One after another. Bone cracking, choked howls, the smell of blood and fear filling the basement. Wade blacked out, came to with another burst of pain, then dropped back into darkness.
Alex paid no attention. He just kept doing the job. When it was over, the place where that expensive smile had been was a torn, bloody ruin.
Wade’s face had swollen into something barely recognizable. He hung in the restraints like a broken puppet, blood and saliva running from his mouth. But Alex wasn’t done.
He had promised silence. Total silence. He picked up another pair of pliers, this time long and narrow.
He pushed them into the bloody mess of Wade’s mouth, found what he wanted, and yanked hard. His tongue. He dropped the twitching piece of flesh beside the pile of teeth.
The sentence had been carried out. The punishment fit the crime. The man who made others scream would never make another sound.
Alex peeled off the gloves and tossed them into a bucket. He unclamped the restraints, and Wade’s unconscious body dropped to the floor like a sack. He didn’t kill him…
