Chapter 30 - 0030: I’ll Sign It

Chapter 30: Chapter 0030: I’ll Sign It

Jaxx’s Point Of View

The rust on the pliers caught the glare of the hanging bulb, casting a jagged shadow across the concrete floor. Dust motes drifted lazily through the beam of light, indifferent to the terror unfolding beneath them, as though the room itself had grown weary of what it had witnessed too many times before. It had seen men break in every conceivable way, and it would see many more before its walls finally crumbled.

Dalton was shaking so hard the iron teeth of the dentist’s chair rattled against the floorboards. Sweat poured down his temples, washing clean tracks through the dried grime and blood on his pale face. His lungs hitch-hiked on every shallow, terrified breath, each one sounding like it might be his last, and each one somehow finding a way to continue anyway.

Somewhere beneath the terror, some animal part of him kept fighting for the next inhale, even as the rest of him seemed to be giving up.

"Please," Dalton begged, his chin quivering, his eyes darting frantically between the Montblanc pen and the rusty tool in my hands. "Please... Boss, give me a minute. Just give me a minute to think. I have... my kids, Boss. My daughter..."

His voice cracked on the word daughter, and for a moment something almost human flickered across his ruined face before fear swallowed it whole again. I watched that flicker die out like a match in wind, and felt nothing where I once might have felt something.

There had been a time, long ago, when a man’s tears might have meant something to me, when the mention of a child could have stayed my hand. That time belonged to someone else now, a version of myself I barely remembered and didn’t miss.

I stepped into his space, slow and smooth, the heavy leather of my boots silent against the floor. I pulled a thin, razor-sharp pocketknife from my vest, flicked the blade open with a soft click, and slid the flat side of the steel gently across his cheekbone, right down to the corner of his trembling mouth.

He flinched like a man already burned, his whole body recoiling from a touch that hadn’t even broken skin yet. The anticipation of pain, I’d long ago learned, could be sharper than the pain itself.

"That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear from you, Dalton," I murmured, my voice smooth, almost affectionate. I let the cold edge press just enough to bead a tiny drop of dark red on his skin. "That’s not you making a choice. Make a choice and let’s get this over with."

Dalton swallowed hard, his throat bobbing against the restraint, but his jaw locked. He just stared at the wall, blubbering silently, paralyzed by his own pathetic fear. I could see the war behind his eyes... loyalty to whoever he thought he was protecting battling against the animal instinct screaming at him to survive.

It was almost admirable, that loyalty. Almost. Men like Dalton always believed their silence meant something, that it counted for more than the flesh they were about to lose. They were always wrong.

The easy, charming smile vanished from my face.

I stood up straight, unbuttoning the cuffs of my crisp white shirt and rolling them twice up my forearms, exposing the dark ink creeping down my wrists. The gesture was slow, deliberate... a ritual he’d surely seen before, and one that never ended well for the man in the chair.

I let the silence stretch, let him marinate in the anticipation, because sometimes the waiting broke a man faster than the pain itself. Silence had its own kind of cruelty, and I had grown fluent in speaking it.

"I guess I have been too lenient these past months," I said, my voice flattening into a quiet, icy chill that made the air in the basement feel ten degrees colder. "And you feel like you can do as you please around me."

Dalton’s head snapped up, panic flashing wild in his eyes as he shook his head violently. "No, Boss..."

Before the words could fully leave his mouth, I drew the suppressed SIG Sauer from my shoulder holster and fired two quick shots straight down.

SUP. SUP.

The heavy rounds tore straight through his thighs - left, then right. The sound was almost gentle compared to what followed.

Dalton’s throat tore open on a deafening, wet shriek that echoed off the damp concrete walls like an animal being slaughtered. His legs jerked wildly inside the heavy zip-ties, his boots kicking against the floor as blood instantly saturated the denim, pooling onto the floorboards in dark, spreading blooms.

The smell hit next, copper and salt thick enough to taste, and somewhere above us I imagined the muffled world going on as though nothing at all was happening beneath its feet. Cars passing, people laughing, someone ordering coffee... all of it continuing in blissful ignorance of the horror unfolding just beneath the pavement.

"You could have made this easier for the both of us," I said, resting my hands casually on my hips, watching him writhe. A slow, dark grin spread back across my lips, my eyes glinting with a sharp, lethal heat. "You always loved it rough, right, Dalton?"

Dalton was in full-blown tears, his chest heaving, hysterically blubbering incoherently as he squeezed his eyes shut, as though refusing to see the world might make the pain recede. "God... oh God, Boss, stop, please, please..."

"Don’t call God into this, Danny. He wasn’t there when you decided to go against him, don’t involve Him in this."

I turned to the small coal braziers sitting on the iron workbench behind me. I reached down, my fingers wrapping around the cool wooden handle of a heavy brand iron that had been sitting in the white-hot embers for twenty minutes.

The square metal tip glowed a bright, angry orange-white in the dim room, radiating waves of thick, suffocating heat that warped the air around it, and for a moment I simply admired the color of it, the way fire could turn something as dull as iron into something almost beautiful.

There was an artistry to it, if one knew how to look, a strange communion between destruction and creation that few men ever bothered to appreciate.

I turned back to him, carrying the glowing iron casually at my side like a walking stick, as unhurried as a man out for an evening stroll.

Dalton’s eyes snapped open. When he saw the orange light reflecting in my eyes, his face drained of every last drop of color. He began thrashing against the cast-iron frame of the chair so violently the heavy metal legs scraped across the floor with a terrifying, metallic screech, as if some primal part of him still believed escape was possible.

There was something almost pitiable in that thrashing, a body refusing to accept what the mind already understood as inevitable. I almost admired the stubbornness of it, that last flare of hope burning uselessly against the certainty of what was coming.

"What’s your choice, Dalton?" I asked, stepping right into his line of sight, the heat from the tip fanning against the side of his neck.

"I’m begging you! Boss, please! I have money, I have..."

I let out a soft, dramatic sigh. "Wrong answer, Danny boy."

I pressed the glowing iron straight against the open bullet wound on his right thigh.

A horrific sizzle filled the room, instantly followed by a thick plume of gray, acrid smoke that smelled of scorched cotton and burning flesh. Dalton’s body went completely rigid, his back arching off the chair so hard the leather straps groaned under the strain.

His scream didn’t even sound human... it was a raw, rattling screech that cut short as his lungs ran completely out of air, his eyes rolling back until only the whites showed. For one suspended moment, the whole basement seemed to hold its breath alongside him, the silence afterward somehow louder than the scream that preceded it.

His limbs shook uncontrollably against the restraints, the iron chair dancing an inch across the floorboards, the sound scraping at something deep in my chest that I’d long since learned to ignore.

I had buried that part of myself years ago, and still it twitched occasionally, like a phantom limb reminding me it once existed. I wondered, distantly, if it would ever fully die, or if I was doomed to carry its ghost forever.

I pulled the brand back, letting the smoke drift up toward the swaying overhead light bulb, where it curled and vanished into the dark beyond the reach of the light.

Dalton slammed back down onto the chair, gasping frantically for air, his whole frame vibrating as if he were having a massive seizure, tears and sweat pouring off his chin onto his ruined shirt.

He looked, in that moment, less like a man and more like something broken beyond repair, a husk wearing the memory of a person who used to exist. Whatever pride or defiance he’d carried into this room had long since burned away, leaving only the raw, animal need to survive.

"I’ll sign..." he sobbed, his voice ragged, ruined, barely a whisper against the hum of the ventilation shaft. "I’ll sign... please stop, Boss... please..."

The broad, warm grin returned to my face in an instant, bright and cheerful, as if we had just finished a friendly game of tennis rather than carving a man open with fire and lead.

"See?" I said, tossing the cooling iron into a bucket of water with a loud, steaming HISS. "That wasn’t hard, was it?"

I flicked two fingers toward the dark shadow near the door.

Marco stepped into the light carrying a thick leather accordion folder and a fresh paper towel, his footsteps unhurried, his expression carved from stone... a man who had seen this scene enough times that it no longer registered as anything but routine. He stepped up to the chair, pulled out a pair of heavy shears, and snipped the zip-ties binding Dalton’s right arm to the rest.

Marco never looked at the wounds, never so much as glanced at the blood pooling beneath his shoes; he had long since trained his eyes to see only the paperwork, only the task, only the next signature waiting to be collected. In another life, I imagined, he might have made a fine accountant, the kind of man who found comfort in columns and totals rather than the chaos of flesh and screaming.

Marco laid the thick, multi-page customs agreement across the small wooden tray, slapped a gold-nibbed pen into Dalton’s slick, trembling fingers, and held the paper flat, waiting with the patience of a man who had done this a hundred times before and expected to do it a hundred more.

I leaned down, placing one hand on the back of his chair, my thumb lightly stroking the side of his bloody jaw, my face inches from his. I could smell the copper tang of blood mixing with the sour reek of fear-sweat, could feel the tremor running through his whole body like a current, and somewhere beneath the violence I’d inflicted, I felt something almost like tenderness, the twisted intimacy of a man who had just broken another completely.

It was the closest thing to connection I still understood, this strange communion born of pain and surrender.

"Sign it," I whispered.