“In a couple of days your senator boss will be under arrest for bribery, and nobody will have time to worry about his loyal dog. You held her down. Your hands did that.”
“She fought. She scratched. She tried to get away, and your strength beat her. Were you proud of that strength, soldier? Thought it gave you the right to break somebody else’s life?”
Alex picked up the hammer and weighed it in his hand. “Strength comes with responsibility. You used it like a club.”
“Today I’m taking that strength away. I’m going to break every bone that gave it to you. You wanted to be a weapon? Fine.”
“You’ll be one. Broken. Useless.” He moved to Arthur’s right arm.
He didn’t swing right away. First he slid a steel rod under the wrist, creating a point of tension. Then he raised the hammer. The blow wasn’t wild or heavy. It was short, exact, and horrifyingly controlled.
There was a wet, ugly crack, like chalk snapping under pressure. The wrist bent at an impossible angle. Arthur’s scream slammed into the basement walls and died there.
“That’s for the bruises on her wrists,” Alex said, moving the rod higher, to the elbow. Another strike. Another crack. The elbow joint shattered, and the arm went limp.
Arthur bucked against the straps, his face purple with pain. Alex didn’t stop. He moved to the shoulder.
Strike. Crack. Then, just as methodically, joint by joint, he destroyed the left arm. “You’ll never hold anyone again,” he said softly, looking at what had once been the arms of a trained fighter.
Arthur wasn’t screaming anymore. He was making the kind of sound wounded animals make. Alex moved to the legs.
He crushed both knees, then both ankles. “You’ll never stand again. You’ll never run again.”
“You’ll crawl for the rest of your life, soldier. That’s all you’re fit for.” He finished.
What lay on the bench barely looked human anymore. A body full of trained muscle had become its own prison. A mind trapped inside a wreck that would never obey it again.
Alex didn’t kill him. He left him alive. In permanent pain, permanent humiliation, permanent helplessness. He removed his gloves and cleaned the tools.
Then he picked up the last photograph. Cody. Twenty years old. The tagalong. The one who didn’t hit and didn’t hold.
The one who stood there filming it on his phone and laughing. “You just watched,” Alex said quietly, staring at the frightened face in the picture. “You liked watching.”
“Fine. Then watching is what you’ll do.” Cody was the weakest link, and he knew it. He wasn’t a predator. He was a scavenger, feeding off what stronger men left behind.
When word about Arthur leaked into the criminal grapevine—a brutal assault, a man turned into a knot of broken bones—Cody understood he was next. Panic hit him hard and cold. He didn’t hide. He ran.
He stuffed some clothes and cash into a backpack and headed for the bus station in the middle of the night, hoping to disappear into the crowd. Another city. Another life. He kept looking over his shoulder, jumping at every sound like a hunted rabbit.
That was where they took him. In the noise and confusion of the terminal. No scene, no violence. A middle-aged man in an ordinary jacket walked up to him, looked him in the eye, and said quietly:
“Alex North asked me to tell you he’s waiting.” Cody’s knees nearly gave out. He could have screamed, called for police, but he knew it wouldn’t matter.
He looked into the man’s eyes and saw the same cold indifference he’d seen in Alex’s on that terrible video. He understood there was no running from this. He went with him without a word, like livestock headed for slaughter.
They brought him to the same basement. He woke up tied to the same chair Wade had sat in. He started crying.
Not bravado, not anger. Just quiet, childish sobbing. “I didn’t do anything,” he babbled when Alex came in.
“I was just there. I never touched her. I’m not guilty.” “Please let me go.”
Alex walked to the bench without a word. This time the white cloth held a different set of tools. A small sharp scalpel, several surgical clamps, a needle and thread, and a roll of wide medical tape.
“Not guilty?”
