When you spend your childhood fending foryourself, doing whatever it takes to survive, you become an expert at slipping through the cracks, ghosting past the dangers this world has to offer. And for a nobody kid with nothing like me, danger was a fucking constant. But honestly, I’m starting to enjoy it. Watching my prey squirm for a change, feeling their fear curl around me, especially when I’ve been searching for this asshole for almost two years. There’s a dark satisfaction in knowing that finally, the hunter has the upper hand.
“Where is she?” I ask calmly, though I’m the exact opposite. I move in closer, my boots scraping against the concrete with each step until there’s only a breath of space between my captive and me. His body trembles as he squints through puffy eyelids, bloodied, bruised and on the verge of sealing shut.
“I told you everything I know,” he croaks, his insincere, sad excuse for eyes now locked onto mine. “I don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about,now let me fuckin’ go!” he shouts, before spitting blood onto the ground beneath him. He’s lying and at this point, it doesn't matter. I already know the truth. My eyes flick to Ezekiel’s henchmen, Billy-John and Danny, leaning with their backs against the wall to my right, half amused, half bored out of their minds. I raise an eyebrow, a silent signal, and they each give me a nod in response. It’s done. Time to wrap things up. Because my captive likesgamesso much,I walk over to the wooden table in the center of the warehouse, taking in the selection of toys I now get to play with.
“You know what happens to liars like you, David?” I ask over my shoulder, gliding my gloved fingertips over the plethora of blades splayed out in a neat row until I’m hovering over my favorite one. Wrapping my fingers around the KA-BAR knife, I turn back, slowly circling my target as he hangs limply, helplessly, his eyes glazing over when he sees the knife in my hand. All signs of the fighter we dragged here earlier are long gone, replaced with a man who has finally accepted that he’s not leaving this building alive.
I examine his face, almost unrecognizable from the blood trickling from his shattered nose and busted lips, and lean in close enough for him to feel my breath on his skin. He dares to flinch, irritated by my closeness, but shit like that only encourages me. I give him one last opportunity to talk, despite already giving him more chances than anyone else who had ever been in his position. If he had half a brain, he’d know he’s on borrowed time. Every second he wastes, every stubborn twitch of denial only digs a deeper hole. Cooperate, and maybe it might be over quickly. Resist, and I’ll gut him like a fucking fish, slowly enough for him to see every last moment of it.
“I know you know who she is. I also know she paidyou a visit two years ago, the last time you were both seen by anyone with a set of fucking eyes. I will ask you one more time, David.Where. Is. She?” My tone is sharp, emphasizing each word as I clench my fingers tighter around my knife. When he offers nothing but silence, I drag the flat of my blade along his sternum, feeling it scrape through soft, yielding flesh. I trace a line downward toward his navel, letting the sharpened tip slice through muscle with a wet, sickening resistance. Pressing it beneath his ribcage, I push, watching the metal pierce tender tissue. Blood wells along the jagged edge, spilling down his mangled torso and pooling onto the ground. He roars, face paling, body jerking violently before his chin falls to his chest, mewling in pain and in terror. He knew this was coming, yet his defiance only stretches the agony, and I savor every fucking second of it. If he tells me what I want to know, he’s dead. If he doesn’t tell me, he’s still dead, only he’ll die with a little pizazz for fucking me around all morning and wasting my goddamn time.
“I can’t,” he rasps, squeezing his eyes shut, hoping I don’t see the truth. As much as it pains me not to kill him right now, he’s the biggest lead I’ve had on this woman in ages. The word ‘can’t’ implies he knows far more than the nothing he’s offered up since this all started.
“Can’t, or won’t?” I hiss, teeth clenched, my gazelocking onto his with a promise of pain he hasn’t yet fucking earned.
“Both,” he mutters, blinking through tears and the crimson flooding his eyes. I let the silence stretch between us, knowing that if I give him enough rope, pretty soon he’ll end up choking himself with it. When he realizes that I’m not buying into his bullshit, he shifts, wincing as he uselessly tugs at his mangled wrists. Even if he had one last ounce of fight left in him, he wouldn’t get far.
“I’ve heard about you, you know?” he rasps, voice scratchy from his endless wailing and the blood coating his split tongue.Careful what you say next, old man, because one wrong word and I’ll tear that tongue from your mouth.Still, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious. Curious what he thinks he knows about me. “You’re the Gravedigger,” he hisses. Well, isn’t this a small world?His lips curl at the corners, smug as if he’s just unearthed a deep, dark secret of mine. His head lolls, and a breathless, cracked chuckle escapes past the bloodied edges of his mouth. “The twisted bastard son of a drunk who never amounted to anything. Just like his father!”
I snap, losing all my fucking patience. My knife finds his upper thigh, careful not to hit any arteries, though every fiber of me begs to carve him open fully.
“You fucking cunt!” he roars, jerking his arms against his restraints. The barbed wire digs deeper,biting and tearing into his flesh, his blood dripping faster as he strains to break free. I strike him hard across his cheek with the back of my gloved hand, causing his head to jerk sideways with a sharp crack. The sound makes my chest hum with satisfaction.
I’ve been called many things in my time on this deplorable planet. A soulless monster. The reaper. Shit, I’ll even answer to motherfucker. But the thing that makes my blood boil faster than anything else? Any comparison to my fucking low-life father. Considering this asshole owns a jumped-up bar downtown, it makes perfect sense that he’s pieced together who my father is. That old drunk probably spent every dirty penny he had there at one point, trying to forget the unbearable burden of having two mouths to feed. I shrug, nodding to the guys like I didn’t just completely lose my shit a second ago. Billy takes this moment to stride over to the table, lifting the laptop and opening it up to the surveillance footage that proves I know what the fuck I’m talking about, and that David here is a lying, scheming, pathetic prick. Billy holds the device in front of David’s face. He blinks a few times, squinting against the brightness as he’s forced to focus on the screen and watch his own lies unravel in real time.
I take a step back, giving Billy some breathing room, but my gaze never leaves David, pretending his ass off that he doesn’t know what’s happening. On thescreen, a cloak-wearing woman in bug-eyed sunglasses anxiously enters his bar. Tuesday, November 18th, 11 p.m. Two years ago. I watch his reaction like a fucking bloodhound, noting every flicker of unease, every microsecond of betrayal he tries to mask. The footage speeds up, then slows back down as patrons leave the bar, hail taxis, stroll the sidewalk, carrying on with their mundane evenings. All except her. She doesn’t leave. A loose end vanished without a trace. And me? I’m the sorry bastard who got ripped from the serene comfort of my job and wasblessedwith this irritating fucking assignment. Finding her.
“You see my dilemma, David? I’ve been searching high and low for this woman, and I keep hitting dead end after dead end. I’ve got to tell you, I don’t appreciate it when I'm given the runaround,” I say, letting each word sink in like the threat they are. Billy walks back to the table with the laptop, Danny hovering close, ready to breach David’s files and accounts and extract any data tied to the woman. If they succeed, we’re out of here, and he’ll be left behind as nothing more than brain matter and dog food.
“I don’t know where she is. Fuck, I don’t even knowwhoshe is!”He’s a terrible liar.I suppose I’ll humor him for a moment. I already know that he’s responsible for her disappearance, so even if he’s telling the truth about not knowing where she is, that detail, his involvement, will not be overlooked.
“Seraphine Vexley, illegitimate daughter of the notorious billionaire and allegedsex offender, Charles Jensen. Her mother? His college sweetheart, Gwenneth Vexley.” I scan his face carefully, expecting his usual indifference. Instead, resentment tightens the corners of his eyes. The mere mention of his ex-lover and Charles Jensen in the same sentence is enough to rattle him.Noted.Now we’re getting somewhere. David knows that I’ve got him. He and Gwen had an affair months before her death, and I’m not even circling that rabbit hole. Digging into the whys and whos would only piss me off. And with this guy’s track record, it was probably his fault. And I’m already walking the edge of my restraint with this dickhead.
“I don’t fucking know anything. Seraphine is probably living it up with the estate left behind by her dead daddy,” he spits, animosity lacing his every word. It sounds hollow. There is no estate. All assets were frozen two years ago when The Royal, a corrupt secret society run by some of the world’s most powerful and renowned people, was exposed. Names were revealed. Atrocities were catalogued. Innocent lives of women and children have been destroyed for decades, if not longer, and those who’ve survived will pay the price until the day they die. Seraphine’s biological father and his wife, Valerie, were founders.
One by one, we’ve been hunting them down—members, associates, anyone linkedto The Royal. Tying up loose ends and cleaning up the kind of colossal, festering mess most people couldn’t even imagine. Every step, every kill, every shred of intel is to eliminate any chance of retaliation and to protect our families. After all, it was my boss, Ezekiel, who spent years undercover, reliving traumas from his childhood and dismantling The Royal from the inside to save Titan’s daughter. The harrowing things Ezekiel had to endure…the horrors he had to commit. They’re unfathomable. They left scars no one sees, and it changed him. In turn, it changed our entire organization. Don’t get me wrong, we still blur lines. We still play in the shadows. But it’s all in the name of family and survival. But we’ll be damned if we continue to turn a blind eye to the elite and their soulless, rotten depravity.
With the number of Feds and other high-ranking law enforcement agencies entangled with The Royal, we couldn’t exactly turn into massive whistleblowers. Who would believe the Mafia? Criminals who have been painted as the most dangerous lawbreakers this world has ever seen for years by political influence and the media. Not a single soul. Also, we didn’t and still don’t harbor the same kind of dominion as them, which would mean that a lot of stones would be kicked around, and innocent lives would be lost. Our family’s lives. We’d be the first to pay the price before anyone moved their asses fast enough to get whatneeded to be done over with. Besides…villains will always be villains ifheroestell the story.
The world wasn’t ready for it. Still isn’t. But it doesn’t matter. We’re not stopping until every last one of them is found and dealt with, and the inconveniently elusive Seraphine Vexley? She’s at the very top of my list.
“Seraphine has no inheritance. She has nothing. Not anymore. The money, the stock, the accounts, all of it.Gone.And she knew it. She didn’t have a penny to her name, which is why she came running to you that day. Isn’t that right, David? Because she knew they’d come for her next!” The look on his battered face is telling. Tension. Fear. The tiniest flicker of guilt. It all confirms just how right I am.
“I d-don’t know where s-she is. I couldn’t contact h-her, even if I wanted to. You’re barking up the wrong f-fucking tree where she’s concerned, k-kid. I don’t have any-t-thing to do with h-her anymore,” he sputters from the sheer pain I put him through, weak from blood loss. Still not confirming or denying his involvement with her disappearance. That’s all I care about.
“Raven. We have a meeting in an hour.”
An hour? Danny’s voice cuts through the warehouse, and I glance over. Both he and Billy are packed and ready to move. They work fast.
I check my watch. Six hours. That’s all it’s beensince the call came in with David’s location, yet it feels like we’ve been at this for days. Billy, Danny, and I wasted no time finding him and bringing him in. If he knew nothing, why the hell was he in hiding? They’re all the same. They think that just because I’m young, I'm a fool. That I won’t see past their carefully crafted masks. They should know better because I don’t just dig graves. I bury truths. Entire fucking bloodlines. And when you’re as good at making things disappear as I am, you learn how to find what others would kill to keep hidden.
Turning back to face an unfortunate David, his body grows rigid, understanding flashing across his features as his face crumples with trepidation at what’s about to happen.
“Three,” I say, gazing at his bruised, puffy face, the whites of his eyes stained a blood red from being beaten. Still, they cut through me as they brim with tears.
“Please!”He’s screaming now, but I don’t care. David might not know Seraphine’s whereabouts, but he lied to me when he said he didn’t know her. Whoever else was at the bar that day might know something too, which means the search for her still isn’t over.
“I swear to you. I don’t know where she is,” he cries, his words breathless and panicked. David isn’t the worst man I’ve killed by any means, though heisn’t a fucking saint, either. The asshole beat and murdered his own wife to be with one of his many mistresses, then paid his way out of it because he could. That’s how it is when you have friends in high places. Although, since exposing The Royal, thosefriends in high placeshave been hiding like their lives depend on it. “Two,” I continue, ignoring his pleas as I reach behind me and pull out my Glock tucked away in my waistline. I rack the slide with a sharp pull that echoes throughout the warehouse, then raise my arm to aim it at the spot between David’s eyebrows.
