..
"I don't need your help anymore," Mark replied, his smile sharp and empty, never reaching his eyes.
The mother's smile dropped, replaced by a cold realization. "Did you find that boy?"
"Yes... all thanks to you," Mark said, his voice dropping an octave.
"What do you want from me, then?" she shouted, the chair rattling against the floor.
"Don't raise your voice. I don't like noise. I just wanted to inform you that I found my man." Mark looked at her with a rictus grin—a baring of teeth that made her shiver to her core.
"Do you usually inform people of such things?" she snapped, trying to find her courage.
"Forget the rest," Mark said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly smooth register. "I heard you never treated the children like humans. Of course, I don't give a damn about the others—the world is full of fodder. But you should have treated my man with the devotion of a saint."
"Don't talk to me about humans and humanity!" she spat, her voice cracking as she tried to weaponize her fear. "It's pathetic coming from someone who carved the life out of his own father! Humanity doesn't suit you, Mark. It looks like a shroud on a corpse." She looked around the damp, weeping walls of the room, her eyes wide and bloodshot. "I know what this place is. Your graveyard. Your warehouse of dead bodies. I know you're going to kill me... because you're a maniac!"
She was drenched in a cold, oily sweat now, her chest heaving so violently the wooden chair creaked beneath her. She was shouting at the top of her lungs, a desperate, primal noise meant to drown out the suffocating silence of her impending death.
Mark didn't flinch. He didn't even blink. He leaned forward until the tip of his nose was inches from her face, his shadow swallowing her whole.
"Since you knew I was a maniac," he began, his voice eerily steady, like the calm surface of a black lake, "why in hell did you think it was safe to mess with me?"
..
The room seemed to shrink, the air turning thin and frigid as if the oxygen itself were terrified of him. Mark's eyes were lightless voids, reflecting nothing but her own trembling, pathetic image. "You gave me false information. You fed a monster lies while I burned in my own hell, all while you kept my Kitty in a cage of your making."
He reached out, his gloved hand moving with the slow, hypnotic grace of a predator, and gripped the edge of her chair. The wood groaned under the pressure of his fingers.
"Tell me why," he whispered, the sound vibrating through the rotted floorboards and into her very bones. "Give me a single reason not to show you exactly what a 'maniac' does to the person who stole many years of my life—and more importantly, a reason not to treat you exactly how you treated him: like something that doesn't deserve the title of 'human.'"
He paused, leaning back into the flickering shadows. The sudden shift in his posture was more terrifying than his proximity. He crossed one leg over the other with a casual, aristocratic grace, his fingers mindlessly rolling the heavy signet platinum ring on his finger—the metal clicking against his skin like a ticking clock.
"Actually, let's skip the theatrics. Wasting my precious time on a creature like you is beneath me," he said, his voice now a sharp, icy edge. "So, here is the deal: If you tell me everything—every name, every cent, every reason—I will ensure your son and daughter are taken care of. They will have lives you could never provide."
His eyes flared with a sudden, concentrated malice that felt like a physical blow to her chest. The temperature in the room seemed to plummet.
"But if you choose silence? I will make sure they pay every cent of the debt you owe me. I will dismantle their lives piece by piece until they curse the day you were born. I will make your children the living monuments of your mistakes."
He sat there, the absolute Sovereign of her fate, filling the small room until she felt she was drowning in his aura. He wasn't just a man in a black suit; he was the end of her bloodline, waiting for her to choose.
..
"Son of a bitch!" she shrieked, her voice bouncing off the damp walls. "Giving me choices at the end of my life! You think you're a god because you can decide who lives and who dies?"
Mark didn't move. He didn't blink. He just watched the way her jugular pulsed with every scream, a hunter observing the last twitches of a trapped animal. "Do you want to tell me or not?" he asked, his voice flat, devoid of the irritation a normal human would feel. To him, her shouting was just noise—a delay he was losing patience with.
The lady gritted her teeth, a harsh, skeletal grinding sound that filled the heavy silence. "I will tell you..." she hissed, her bravado crumbling into a mother's desperation. "...but my children have nothing to do with this. Keep them out of your filth."
"Go ahead," Mark prompted, leaning slightly into the flickering light, his eyes two bottomless pits of shadow.
..
She glared at him, her eyes spitting pure, concentrated venom. "Your father... he always played the part of the saint with his charities, but he was a monster. He was a bastard who loved sleeping around with those who couldn't fight back. He used to sleep with the older boys and girls at the orphanage—even I wasn't spared from his rot."
Mark didn't flinch. If anything, his expression grew even colder, a jagged edge of boredom cutting through his features. "I don't want to know about my father," he interrupted, his voice like a guillotine blade dropping. "I am well aware of his sins; that's why he is no longer breathing. I didn't kill him for being a saint."
The woman recoiled as if he had struck her. The casual way he admitted to parricide—the murder of his own blood—was more than her mind could grasp. "You are such a psycho," she spat, the word trembling on her lips.
Mark's lips thinned into a ghost of a smile—a cold, humorless curve that never reached his eyes.
"I know," he whispered, the two words vibrating with a dark, terrifying pride. He looked at her then, truly looked at her, and she realized that calling him a psycho wasn't an insult to him—it was a description of the only weapon he had to protect what he loved. "Now, stop wasting my breath with the history of a dead man. Tell me why you kept Win from me?"
"Win... right?" she asked, her voice trembling as she tested the name.
At the sound of that name, Mark's hand froze. The rhythmic clicking of his ring stopped instantly, the silence following it more deafening than a scream. For a fleeting, agonizing second, the "Sovereign" vanished. His face softened into something raw and haunted, his eyes turning misty with a grief so profound it seemed to pull the light out of the room.
"Yes..." he replied, his voice a ragged, hollow ghost of itself. "Win."
"I gave you the wrong information because we sold him," she confessed, the words coming out like a flood of filth. "We sold many of them. Your father started that business. But Win... he was the most beautiful thing in that hellhole. Even, I wanted him. I forced him into the beds of powerful men. He was stubborn at first—fought like a cornered animal—so he was beaten until he couldn't stand by a man who came specifically to break him."
..
The air in the room turned to ice. Mark sat paralyzed, the words hitting him like physical blows. The memory of Win's sobbing in the night, the way he flinched at a tender touch, the "acid" tears—it all converged into a single, horrific picture. It wasn't just the adoptive father. It was an entire industry of monsters, and his own bloodline had held the leash.
She continued, her eyes wide with a sick kind of triumph. "Four years ago, your father sold him to a trader. Six months later, he was sold again at a premium price. Win called that man 'Father,' but that 'Father' used him as a centerpiece. He invited others to pay for the privilege of breaking him. They liked it rough; they wanted to see him shatter. He came back to me sometimes, bleeding and broken, but I did nothing. It was your father's deal. Did you know even your father slept with—"
"SHUT UP!"
Mark bolted to his feet, the chair flying backward and splintering against the wall. The roar that tore from his throat wasn't human; it was a physical blast of sound that seemed to make the very foundations of the house tremble.
His eyes were no longer obsidian; they were twin suns of white-hot, agonizing rage. His eyebrows were drawn down into a terrifying V, and his fists—veiny, massive, and trembling—looked capable of crushing a star into cold powder. Hearing her desecrate his Kitty's soul with her tongue felt like she was staining Win all over again, dragging him back into the mud. The oxygen in the room vanished, replaced by the suffocating pressure of Mark's lethal intent. He wanted to reach into her chest and tear the memories out of her.
Daniel stood behind him, his own jaw locked in a steely, bone-cracking clamp, his eyes reflecting a mirror of Mark's fury. He placed a heavy, grounding hand on Mark's shoulder—the only thing keeping the room from turning into a slaughterhouse.
Mark forced himself back into the chair, his chest heaving as he fought for breath, his hands vibrating with a primal, electric urge to kill. He raised his eyes, which had settled into a cold, predatory stare that promised a death slower than anything she could imagine.
Daniel stepped forward, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. "Do you have anything else to say before the mercy ends?"
She was shivering violently under the weight of Mark's gaze, her body vibrating against the wood of the chair. Yet, she smirked—a final, hideous act of defiance from a woman who knew she was already a ghost.
"Did I hit a nerve, Mr. Mark?" she rasped, her voice dripping with malice. "When you first came to me searching for him, throwing tons of money around like it was dirt, I knew exactly what kind of bastard you were. I knew that if a man could kill his own father for a boy, he would surely skin me alive if he found out what I really did to him. That's why I lied. I'd do it again."
Mark's jaw tightened until the bone looked ready to snap through his skin. His eyes were watery, the moisture shimmering with a rage so deep and ancient it looked indistinguishable from sorrow. He stood up slowly, a predatory movement that seemed to stretch his shadow across the weeping walls. He slid his hands into his pockets, his posture returning to that of a lethal aristocrat.
When he spoke, his voice was no longer a roar; it was a sudden, terrifyingly calm whisper—a silence more frightening than any scream.
"Are you done with your story?" he asked, the words falling like ice into a grave. "Do you realize the mistake you've made? You think death is the only currency I deal in. But now... I've changed my mind. I've decided I will let you live."
A terrifying, razor-thin smile spread across his face, one that made her heart skip a beat in pure, primal terror. She became hysterical, her eyes bulging from their sockets as the realization of his "mercy" set in.
"Why?! Why won't you just kill me, you bastard!" she shrieked, her voice rising into a panicked, jagged edge. "Kill me! Just end it!"
She kept cursing him, her insults turning into incoherent babbles of fear as Daniel stepped forward. With a face like stone, Daniel untied her, his grip like iron as he began to drag her away—not toward the exit, but deeper into the bowels of the house, toward the parts of the "White Room" where the sun never reached and the screams never escaped.
Her voice faded into a long, echoing wail that bounced off the rotted floorboards and died in the stagnant air. Mark remained standing in the center of the room, alone in the dust and the dark. The silence that followed was heavy, stained by the filth of her words, as he stared into the shadows, already calculating how he would burn the rest of the world to the ground to wash Win clean.
..
Left alone in the hollowed-out silence of the room, the mask finally shattered. Mark covered his face with his trembling palms and slouched, his spine buckling under the crushing weight of the woman's revelations. He wasn't just enraged; he was being consumed. He wanted to tear the world apart limb from limb, to reach back through time and erase the very existence of every man who had ever laid a filthy hand on his soul's sanctuary.
He felt the trauma as if it were his own—as if those phantom hands were crawling over his own skin, leaving a trail of sludge that no amount of blood could ever wash away.
His internal world was in chaos. His heart felt like a burning cauldron of molten lead, heavy and searing, melting his resolve from the inside out. He pressed his heels into his eyes, fighting a desperate, losing battle against a tidal wave of powerlessness. He was the most powerful man in the city, a King of shadows, yet he was a failure. He felt the universe was punishing him, tightening burning chains around his throat for the sin of leaving Win behind thirteen years ago.
Finally, the dam broke. The Sovereign died in that dusty room, and a broken man took his place.
He burst out in a raw, jagged agony, sobbing in a way that defied his nature. It wasn't a quiet cry; it was a primal wail, a haunting sound that echoed off the rotted walls like the scream of a dying god. It was the sound of thirteen years of guilt and love colliding in a wreck of salt and sorrow.
..
Daniel stood by the door, a silent witness to the impossible. He had served Mark for twenty years—he had seen him walk through fire, bury his mother, and execute his father without a single flicker of emotion. But seeing the Master wail like this, his massive frame shaking with the vulnerability of a lost child, was a sight that made Daniel's own heart ache with a foreign pain. The "Sovereign" was gone; there was only a man bleeding out from a wound that no bandage could fix.
The creak of the floorboards was the only warning before Daniel stepped into the epicenter of the grief. He placed a heavy, grounding hand on Mark's shoulder, his voice low and thick with a rare, brotherly tenderness.
"Win is waiting for you," Daniel said, the name acting like a tether to a man drifting in a storm.
Mark took a jagged breath, the air in the room tasting of ash and the bitter rot of the truth he had just unearthed. He wiped his face with a silk handkerchief, his movements robotic, as he forced his features to calcify back into stone. By the time he reached the car, the tears were gone, replaced by a cold, simmering fire in his reddened eyes.
He leaned back against the cool leather of the seat, the luxury of the car feeling like an insult to the life Win had lived. "Let's stop at a flower shop," he commanded, his voice a low, sandpaper rasp.
..
When the car finally hummed to a stop twenty minutes later, Daniel spoke softly, sensing the fragile silence. "Mark... we're here."
"Okay." Mark opened his eyes, but he didn't move immediately. He instructed Daniel to stay in the car, a silent plea for privacy. He needed a moment where the "Sovereign" didn't have to exist—a moment where no one, not even his most loyal shadow, could witness the cracks in his soul.
Stepping into the shop was like crossing into a different dimension. The air was sweet, light, and vibrant—a sharp, almost painful contrast to the suffocating stench of the "White Room." Here, things were allowed to grow; here, things were beautiful.
He asked for a bouquet of plumerias, his voice trembling slightly at the mention of the flower that Win loved. When the staff apologized, explaining they were out of stock, Mark didn't erupt in rage as he usually would. Instead, a hollow, desperate look crossed his face. He didn't argue; he simply took out a card, scribbled his address, and placed an order that sounded more like a desperate vow.
"I want one hundred plumerias," he said, his voice thick with a sudden, driving urgency. "Delivered by 11:00 AM. Not a minute later."
He didn't just want a bouquet; he wanted an army of flowers. He wanted to saturate every corner of the house with their scent, to build a wall of fragrance so thick that the smell of the orphanage, the trader, and the "Father" could never reach Win's nose again. He wanted to drown out the stench of the past with the only thing Win found sacred.
As he walked back to the car, empty-handed for now, he felt the weight of the 100 flowers already pressing against his chest—the start of a long, beautiful war to win back his Kitty's peace.
..
Back in the car, the silence was no longer heavy—it was pressurized, like the air inside a bomb.
Mark stared into the passing blur of the city, his eyes twin voids of cold, calculating malice. "I want a list," he said, his voice dropping into a low, lethal frequency that seemed to vibrate the very glass of the windows. "Everyone. Every man who crossed the threshold of that house in the last four years. Every 'guest' who paid for a piece of his soul. And I want the trader—I want his name, his bloodline, and every shadow he hides in."
The sheer, dark scale of the request hit Daniel like a physical blow. He slammed on the brakes, the tires screeching in a high-pitched scream against the asphalt as the car jolted to a violent halt. "What?" Daniel gasped, turning to look at Mark. He saw a man who had moved beyond human emotion into something ancient and predatory.
Mark didn't flinch. He didn't even turn his head. His gaze remained fixed straight ahead, as if he were already looking at a pile of corpses. "Are we home already?" he asked, the question as sharp and cold as a razor.
"No," Daniel gulped, his heart racing against his ribs. He realized then that Mark wasn't planning a series of hits—he was planning an apocalypse. A bloodbath was coming, a cleansing to everyone who had even breathed near Win. He was going to hunt them all, from the buyers to the sellers, until the city ran red with the debt they owed a boy who just wanted to be loved. Daniel restarted the engine with shaking hands. "And what... what should I do with 'Mother'?"
Mark's jaw tightened, a slow, terrifying ripple of muscle. "Just make sure she doesn't die," he whispered, and the cruelty in his voice was enough to make the air in the car turn toxic. "I want her eyes wide open. I am going to bring her every face, every name, every monster she ever let touch my Win. I want her to recognize them all while I dismantle them in front of her. I will tear every inch of skin from her memory until she bleeds from her eyes."
He paused, and the darkness in the car seemed to thicken, swallowing the light from the dashboard.
"Daniel. I have a debt for her to pay, and death is far too cheap a currency, make sure she doesn't die, Not yet."
The words "Not yet" hung in the air like a noose, a promise of a slow, agonizing eternity before he finally allowed her the mercy of the grave.
..