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I shudder. “Please! I don’t know what?—”
Takato spins, turning the sword in his hand. In one motion, just as the blood-curdling scream rips from my throat, he slams the sword down…
Right through the back of my father’s hand and into the floor.
I scream over and over as Takato slides the blade out again, letting blood spill onto the hardwood floor. I shrug off the men gripping my shoulders and rush to my father. He groans in pain, cradling his bleeding hand as I sob against him and blindly press my hands to his wounded one.
“Do. We. Understand. Each. Other?”
My pulse thuds like lead in my veins. I turn, my chest heaving as I stare in horror and fury up at the man.
“Five million dollars. You have one month.” He smiles, grabs a folded blanket from my dad’s favorite chair, and wipes his blade clean before sliding it back into a lacquered sheath.
“It was so nice to see you again, Fumi.”
All I can do is shake in fear and hold my father’s bleeding hand as the men grin at me, turn, and silently file out of the door.
2
GABRIEL
Saying that I relish the feel of his windpipe crumpling under my grip makes me sound like a sociopath.
But then, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck?
It’s usually a fucking duck.
Salvatore weakly slaps at my hands as they tighten around his throat. For a second, one particularly sharp nail of his hooks into my skin. But a quick punch to his nose makes him lose that advantage just as quickly.
His eyes bulge grotesquely as he stares up into my face. His lips burble and flap. Even though he can’t say shit with his air completely shut off and his voice box virtually crushed, those lips are trying to form a word.
“You know why,” I growl quietly, not doing a thing to hide the malice in my tone.
He means “why are you doing this” not “why is this happening”. Sal might be a monstrous piece of shit, but he’s no idiot. Which is how he was able to get away with his horrors for so long, not to mention escape justice for them.
For a time.
Point is, Sal is well aware of why someone might break into his home and throttle him with their bare hands. What he might be genuinely confused about is why that person is me, although it appears he does remember me from my time across the aisle from his own legal counsel during his travesty of a trial.
Justice, as they say, is blind. Sometimes, though, she should keep her fucking eyes open. Because it’s not so much that she’s blind, it’s that she’s been blindfolded by greed and evil. By money. By the right words.
That’s where I come in, to be justice’s eyes when her own go dim. I’m not egotistical enough to call myself “justice”. What I do isn’t out of any misguided and narcissistic opinion that I’m an avenging angel, or that I’m playing judge, jury, and executioner.
It’s just that sometimes, justice gets bird shit in her eye and flinches at the wrong time. Sometimes, evil is allowed to go unpunished when the scales tip the wrong way.
I fix those scales.
Restore balance.
And tonight, that means I’m choking the life out of Salvatore Avella.
Slowly.
There are much faster and easier ways of a killing a man besides crushing his windpipe with your hands. But, at the risk of sounding like a complete sociopath… again…where’s the fun in doing it too quickly? Or from a distance?
When I act as justice’s wingman, I want the monsters I put down to know in their very soul, in their very last moments, that it was me. And I want them to know why.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
