Chapter 100 - 0100: I Want Elena

Chapter 100: Chapter 0100: I Want Elena

Jaxx’s Point Of View

The storm didn’t just break in that alley, it consumed everything. The heavy drizzle of Lagos rain had turned into a steady, suffocating downpour, slicking the damp concrete and turning the blood pooling beneath Graham into a dark, dilute red ribbon.

The orchestra inside the venue was nothing but a hollow, pulsing bass line bleeding through the concrete, entirely disconnected from the primal execution happening out in the dark.

I let the gun hover an inch off his forehead, watching the sweat and blood roll into his eyes.

He laughed then... a raw, throttled thing that didn’t reach his eyes. A sound so thin and broken it sounded like wet gravel grinding under a boot.

"You won’t," Graham choked out, his chest heaving under the weight of his torn tuxedo jacket. He tried to pull his bloodied chin up, trying desperately to find a shred of that arrogance that usually carried him through boardroom meetings. "You won’t pull it. You’re all talk, Jaxx. You’re a fucking coward playing dress-up."

I let the silence sit heavy between us, like a wet wool curtain. He expected the dramatic halting moment, the moral hesitation, the long-winded speech where the bad guy stays his hand.

What he didn’t expect... what his soft, corporate brain couldn’t possibly fathom, was that I’d already decided the play before I even unholstered the steel. His surprise wasn’t a turning point. It was just seasoning.

"You really think I need to prove anything to you, Graham?" I murmured.

Fingers steady, devoid of even the slightest tremor, I raised the pistol with deliberate, agonizing slowness so he could study every detail... the matte-black finish, the solid angle of my wrist, the exact point where the heavy barrel lined up directly with his left temple.

His pupils shrank into pinpricks, the whites of his eyes turning glassy and bloodshot. He swallowed hard. The sound was a desperate, wet rattle in his throat that ought to have felt like a victory for him, a sign he was still breathing. It wasn’t.

"Do it," he snarled, because even on his knees, with his face beaten into a pulp, he could still taste bravado. "Do it then! Make my night, you bastard!"

I smiled then. Not wide. Not pretty. Just a dark, toxic tilt of my lips that cut clean through the night.

"With pleasure."

BANG.

The shot cracked through the alleyway, exploding louder than he expected, louder than the night needed. The shockwave tore through the confined space, echoing off the damp brick walls like a localized thunderclap.

Graham’s head jerked violently; his entire body flinched with a spastic, pathetic jolt, as if the air itself had punched him. Gravel spat outward from the concrete beneath us. The bullet didn’t touch his skin... it tracked up and over his left ear by a fraction of an inch, punching a clean, jagged hole straight through the rusted industrial dumpster behind him.

A cloud of ancient dust and gray smoke puffed outward, settling over us like the world deciding to pretend the violence was nothing.

Graham’s expression completely dissolved.

First came the sheer, paralyzed shock... his breath hitching, his mouth hung open in a frozen scream that never made a sound. Then came the raw, stupid, pathetic relief as his brain realized the bullet hadn’t blown his skull open. But in less than a second, that relief snapped into pure horror as the actual realization hit him:

It hadn’t been a miss. It had been meant for him, and I had simply chosen to spare him the lead.

The sick little thrill that bloomed in my chest was animal and immediate. I let it spread slow, let it color my face, let him look up and see the absolute, terrifying dark satisfaction shining in my eyes. His eyes widened into frightened, white-ringed moons.

"You bastard!!"

I leaned down, crouching until my breath ghosted over his ear, whispering so close he could taste the metallic tang of his own blood on the air between us.

"You felt that, didn’t you?" I said, each word a precise, razor-sharp cut. "The air freezing over. The sound. The entire world pausing just to watch you wait for death."

He coughed, a wet splatter of pink froth hitting his knee, and then he gasped out a laugh without a single drop of humor... a broken, static sound like a dying radio.

"Lucky shot," he breathed, his teeth stained crimson as he tried to pull his signature sneer back together. "Fucking... lucky..."

"It wasn’t a mistake, Graham." My voice dropped into velvet edged with ice. "It was a lesson. I don’t miss. Ever."

He looked at me like a man trying to read the weather from a burning sky. For a heartbeat, the polished executive was gone, replaced entirely by a terrified animal driven by primal panic. He scraped his hands blindly against his torn collar, trying to scramble backward on his knees, trying to put even a single foot of distance between my shadow and his skin.

But his hands were shaking so violently his fingernails clicked uselessly against the wet concrete.

I let him try. I stayed crouched, letting him feel the space open and close, letting him taste his absolute impotence as he realized he couldn’t move an inch without my permission.

"You’re trembling," I observed, my tone carrying the clinical cruelty of a scientist cataloguing a dying specimen. "Afraid, big brother?"

"Shut up," he spat, but the command was so weak, so broken, it fell apart before it even left his lips.

I holstered the gun slowly, making a dramatic, deliberate show of the motion. The heavy metallic click of the iron locking back into the leather was a punctuation mark at the end of his death sentence.

My thumb brushed the smooth handle, and he watched the movement as if it were a dark magic trick he couldn’t comprehend.

The utter smallness of him made the smirk on my face widen. Not for joy—more for the absolute purity of the moment: Graham Sinclair, reduced to a trembling creature who feared a piece of metal he had zero power over.

"You wanted drama when you followed me out here," I said, the words soft, cold, and dripping with mockery. "You wanted to yell, to make a scene, to make everything public. Now you know how a public execution feels."

Graham tried to speak, tried to summon another razor-sharp insult from his vast vocabulary of corporate insults, but the words slurred together. Blood bubbled at his split lip, red and obscene against his pale skin. He swallowed it down like a man forced to eat a ruined meal out of sheer, foolish pride.

"Now," I said, and that single word carried a dark amusement that tasted almost tender, "you have fueled my interest."

He glared up at me through a rapidly swelling left eye, furious, brittle, and entirely shattered.

"What do you want, Jaxx?" he rasped, his voice trembling. "What the fuck do you actually want? Money? A seat on the board? What?!"

I crouched a fraction lower, bringing my face perfectly level with his ruined features.

"I want Elena," I said plainly.

No flourish. No dramatic rise in my voice. No pleading. Only the raw, exact hunger that had lived behind my ribs for years.

"I want her," I whispered, "and I’m going to have her."

His mouth opened wide, looking like he might literally vomit blood and bile onto the pavement. He scrambled internally, trying to find an angle, some reserve of bruised bravado, some legal contract or moral boundary to throw in my face.

"You... she... she’ll never..." Graham stuttered, his voice pitching high and pathetic. "She’s loyal to me! She’s my wife! She’ll never look at a filthy bastard like you!"

"But that’s the entire point, isn’t it?" I interrupted, my voice ridiculously gentle, almost mockingly sweet. "She’s never been yours to lose, Graham. She was never anyone’s to claim like a trophy or a line item on your balance sheet. She’s hers. And right now... she’s a question you were never smart enough to solve."

"What are you saying?!" he spat, blood spraying onto his lapels. "You think you can just come back? You’ll just take her? You’ll steal her away from my house?!"

I swallowed a low, dark laugh that rolled in the back of my throat.

"No," I said, letting the word hang in the freezing air like a fog. "I won’t steal. Stealing implies it wasn’t meant to be mine. I’ll just take."

He barked something that sounded like a desperate plea and a hollow threat braided together. "If you touch her... if your filthy hands so much as brush her skin..."

"If you dare interfere..." I allowed the exact echo of his earlier threat to hang in the air, tasting it, turning his own words against him like a rusty blade.

Then I leaned forward until the space between our faces was completely gone... every single inch of me radiating a quiet, absolute promise of unbearable pain. My voice went very small, very soft, and dangerously clear.

Graham’s laugh was a broken, rattling thing. He coughed, wiping at his bloody mouth uselessly with the back of his trembling hand, as if he could scrub the horrific truth directly off his skin. He spat a dark clot onto the asphalt.

"You... what the hell are you saying?"

Slowly, without breaking eye contact, I slid the cold barrel of the unholstered gun right back up under my own chin, letting the dark metal kiss the underside of my jaw. The motion was intimate, sickeningly smooth... a private, deadly ritual. To an outsider watching from afar, it would look like absolute madness. To anyone who actually knew me, it was pure theatre... an display of unhinged control that dared the entire world to move a muscle.

"No, no. You misunderstand me, big brother," I corrected him, savoring each individual syllable like it was sweet candy on my tongue. "I want you to interfere."

Graham’s breath caught in his throat.

"I want you to try," I purred, my thumb resting over the hammer. "Because if you make a move... which I would absolutely love for you to do... the next bullet won’t be fired into the air, Graham. It won’t be a performance to scare you."

I let my index finger ghost over the trigger guard, the casualness of the movement driving the horror deeper into his eyes.

"It’ll be buried," I whispered, leaning close enough for him to hear the sharp intake of my breath, "deep inside your fucking skull."