The dungeon was quiet.Not the kind of quiet that comforts.The kind that breathes. That spreads like damp through stone.It had an echo now. A pulse.I could feel it in the soles of my boots.Every step I took sounded like it was happening somewhere else, in a dream, or a memory, or a graveyard.Ivan looked smaller than I remembered.Hollowed out. Dehydrated.The bravado was gone.The madness, too.Just a man now. Or close enough.But when I entered, when he heard me,his chin lifted.“Emilie,” he rasped, with that half-broken voice I used to mistake for softness.I didn’t speak.I walked forward.The pistol in my hand felt heavier than I expected.Not because of what it meant.But because of what it no longer did.Redemption. Justice. Balance.None of those things lived here.Not anymore.His eyes meet the gun.He didn’t flinc
The dungeon didn’t smell like blood anymore.It smelled like fear.Fermented. Stale. Masculine. Like a man dying slowly from the inside out.Ivan didn’t lift his head when I entered.He’d learned.The sound of my footsteps,bare, deliberate,was its own kind of violence.I didn’t speak. I didn’t need to.Just the clink of the tray I set down was enough: surgical tape, a flame-blade still glowing orange, water I wouldn’t offer.I circled him.His body twitched with every click of my fingernails against the tray.“Tonight,” I said finally, my voice silk wrapped in glass, “I don’t want screams.”I bound his thighs with surgical tape,tight. So tight his pulse fluttered under the skin.No room to wriggle. No room to run. Just raw exposure.Then I pressed the blade to his shoulder. Not to cut. Just to sear.The skin hissed.He gasped. Then shuddered. But he didn’t scream.“Good
The light above flickered once.Just once.Like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to witness what came next.I didn’t blame it.This room had seen too much.It reeked of rust and rot and resignation, like the air itself had given up a long time ago.Concrete walls swallowed sound.The corners were damp.Every inch of space carried history in blood splatter patterns and peeling paint.It hadn’t changed.Not since the last time I stood here.When it was my son who bled.Not him.Not the man I once trusted to hold us both.Now?He was the one trembling.Ivan’s body sagged in the chair, slumped and sagging like a puppet with half its strings cut.Breath ragged.Muscles slack.Face torn between exhaustion and terror.I hadn’t cut him again. Not yet.Just that one slice across his thigh, deliberate, clean, a promise.
They threw him to the floor like an animal.Chains dragged behind him, rattling like the end of a ghost story.His body hit the concrete with a wet thud,already bruised, already bleeding, already half-dead.Stripped of everything.Clothes.Dignity.Name.Ivan didn’t scream.Didn’t curse.Didn’t even fight.He just… breathed.Barely.His wrists were cuffed behind his back. Ankles chained.Blood streaked down his thigh from some wound I didn’t recognize.One eye was swollen shut, the other glassy, flickering between consciousness and something worse.The chair stood waiting in the center of the room like a throne made for ghosts.Two of Milo’s men hauled him upright,locking his limbs into place like they were assembling furniture.Metal cuffs clicked into bone.His head dropped forward.That was all that was left of him:Bone.
Time slowed the second Ivan raised the gun.He didn’t blink.Didn’t flinch.Just stared at me with a hollow kind of peace. Like this had always been the end of the story and I was the only one still pretending otherwise.“No…” I breathed, stepping forward.Too late. BOOM.The shot rang out like thunder bottled in steel. My scream chased it,but it came second.Always second.My baby jerked once in his arms.A small, startled twitch.Then, Still.No cry.No scream.No reaching arms.Just… stillness.The silence that followed was a kind of death all its own.Not loud.Not dramatic.Just a void that swallowed everything.I ran.I think I screamed again, but I couldn’t hear it.There was a high, ringing sound in my head, like a bomb had gone off inside me.Ivan let go.Arms limp.Gun sliding from his fingers to the floor with a dull, final clatter.He didn’t even kneel.He just… unhooked.I caught the baby before he hit the ground.Warm.Still warm.So small.So warm.I dropped to my knees
The warehouse smelled like old oil and regret.My boots crunched glass as I stepped through the broken entryway, flashlight trembling in my hand. The beam cut across rusted metal, graffiti, dust. And then…I saw him.Ivan.He was sitting on the floor, legs crossed, back against a steel pillar. The baby was cradled in his arms, wrapped in the same blue blanket I’d sewn hours before the due date. His eyes were open. Calm.So was Ivan’s.Like none of this was wrong.Like he wasn’t holding my child inside a goddamn tomb.“Put the gun down,” I said.It wasn’t in his hand yet, but I saw it,on the floor beside him. Within reach. Too close.He didn’t look at me. Just rocked gently, humming something low and tuneless. The kind of sound that would’ve been soothing… if it didn’t feel like a countdown.“He’s hungry,” I said, inching closer, the flashlight shaking in my grip.Ivan smiled, but his eyes stayed locked on the baby. “He’s perfect.”“I know.”He finally looked up.And it nearly broke me