The words hung in the air between them, thick and poisonous. One soul. Once a month. Jax felt a glacial cold spread through his chest, colder than the peppercorn had been. It wasn't the shock of the supernatural. The dish he had just tasted was proof that something impossible was at play. It was the brutal, ugly simplicity of the price. He had spent the last two years trying to wash the blood from his hands, to scrub away the grime of his past. And now, this… thing, this devil in a bespoke suit, was offering him a return ticket.
"You're insane," Jax breathed, the words barely a whisper. He pushed himself away from the counter, putting distance between himself and Kazimir, as if the man's proposal was a physical contagion. "Get out. Now."
Kazimir didn't move. He simply watched Jax with an expression of patient amusement, like a master angler watching a fish tire itself out on the line. "Is that a no? Pity. I was rather looking forward to our partnership."
"There is no partnership," Jax snarled, a wave of revulsion and fury rising in him. "I'm done with that life. I don't kill people." It was the one clean line he had drawn for himself. He had been an enforcer, a leg-breaker, a terrifying presence in a room. But he had never pulled the trigger. Never taken that final step. He had left the Morettis to build a life where he wouldn't have to.
"Ah, but you see, that's where you're mistaken," Kazimir said, his voice dropping into a reasonable, persuasive tone. It was the voice of a lawyer closing a loophole, a salesman dispelling a customer's final doubt. It was the most dangerous voice Jax had ever heard. "Who said anything about 'people'? I am a connoisseur of souls, Jax. I have very specific tastes. I'm not interested in the misguided, the desperate, the merely flawed. I'm talking about refuse. The rot that festers in the dark corners of this city, poisoning everything it touches."
He took a step toward Jax, his movements slow and deliberate. "You wouldn't be a killer. You'd be a garbage man. Taking out the trash so that good people, people with dreams—people like Sofia, who deserves to finish her degree; people like the family who runs the bodega on the corner, who deserve to feel safe—can have a fighting chance."
It was a masterful reframe, a subtle twisting of the knife that turned a monstrous act into a civic duty. Jax felt a flicker of uncertainty. His jaw remained clenched. "No."
"Allow me to provide a demonstration," Kazimir said, undeterred. He gestured toward the front of the restaurant, his hand moving with the flourish of a magician. "Come. There's something I want you to see."
Reluctantly, Jax followed him out of the kitchen. They stopped at the large front window, the name "Romano's" peeling in gold leaf letters from the glass. The street outside was quiet now, bathed in the jaundiced orange glow of the streetlights. Across the way was a rundown five-story tenement building, its brick facade stained with grime, a few of its windows boarded up.
"You see that building?" Kazimir asked. "It's owned by a man named Silas Croft. A real pillar of the community." The sarcasm in his voice was thick enough to taste. "Mr. Croft likes to buy up rent-controlled buildings and then 'persuade' the tenants to leave so he can gut the place and build luxury condos. His methods of persuasion include cutting the heat in February, ignoring rat infestations, and hiring thugs to intimidate families late at night."
Kazimir's voice was a low, steady murmur, weaving a tapestry of casual cruelty. "Last winter, a gas line in the basement started leaking. The tenants, a family with two small children on the third floor, called him every day for a week. He never sent anyone. Said it wasn't his problem. The little girl, seven years old, had asthma. She died in her sleep from the fumes."
Jax felt a familiar, cold anger begin to burn in his gut. He knew men like Silas Croft. The city was full of them. Parasites in expensive suits.
"A tragedy," Kazimir continued, his tone dripping with false sympathy. "But a profitable one for Croft. The family moved out the next week. Now, focus on that window. Top floor, second from the left. That's his office."
Jax stared. At first, it was just a dark square of glass. "What am I looking for?"
"Look closer," Kazimir urged, his voice a whisper in Jax's ear now, though he hadn't moved. "Don't just look with your eyes. Feel it."
Jax narrowed his eyes, concentrating on the window. A strange pressure built behind his temples. The world seemed to fade at the edges, the sounds of the city muffling until all that was left was the sight of that one window. And then he saw it.
It started as a faint shimmer, a heat-haze distortion in the air. Then, it began to bleed into color—a foul, ugly, rust-colored stain that pulsed like a diseased heart. It wasn't a light; it was an absence of it, an aura of pure malevolence that seemed to suck the warmth from the air. The longer he looked, the more vivid it became. And then came the smell. It wasn't a physical scent, but it registered in his mind with nauseating clarity: the coppery tang of old blood, the cloying sweetness of decay, and the acrid, metallic stench of boundless greed. It was the scent of a soul so thoroughly corrupted it was practically rotting on the vine.
"What… what is that?" Jax stammered, taking an involuntary step back from the window.
"That," Kazimir said, a note of satisfaction in his voice, "is what I call Sin-Scenting. My little gift to you, to ensure quality control. You'll never have to take my word for it. You will always know that your target deserves it. You'll see their filth, their sin, as clearly as I do."
Jax couldn't tear his eyes away from the pulsating, diseased aura. Croft was in there. A man who let a child die for profit. A monster hiding in plain sight.
His gaze drifted from the window, back inside his restaurant. His eyes fell on the stack of bills on Table Four. The foreclosure notice. The death sentence for his dream. He thought of the bland, soulless pasta he had cooked. He thought of the transcendent, life-altering dish that came after. A world of flavor, of success, of greatness, was being held out to him. And the price was taking out the trash.
He was caught between two deaths: the death of his future, and the damnation of his soul. But Kazimir's words echoed in his mind. Was it damnation to remove a cancer?
He turned, his face a mask of grim resolve. The war inside him was over. A decision had been made.
"One soul a month," Jax said, his voice low and gravelly, the sound of a door slamming shut on his old life for the second, and final, time. "But they're my choice. I confirm them with… that," he nodded toward the window. "And I take them down my way. No questions."
A wide, triumphant grin spread across Kazimir's face. It was the first genuine one Jax had seen, and it was terrifying. "Deal," he said, extending a hand. The air crackled around it.
Jax stared at the hand for a long moment before grasping it. The grip was firm, the skin unnaturally cool. It felt like signing his name in blood on a sheet of ice.
"Welcome to the grand reopening, Chef," Kazimir said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Now, about Mr. Croft. He's a creature of habit. Every Saturday night, he dismisses his security and counts his dirty money, alone in his office. You have twenty-four hours to prepare."
Kazimir's grin sharpened. "Don't worry. I'll teach you a new skill for the occasion. We'll call it… a Touch of Fear."