At that moment, staring at the man she had just fought to release, Olivia Risa realized with a sinking horror that she had truly fucked up.
The prisoner she had vouched for, the "misunderstood victim" she had championed before the Justice Minister, was currently being pounded into the concrete floor. His face was a mask of crimson, his nose shattered into jelly, blood pooling beneath him. Maybe, she thought with a sudden, sickening clarity, it would have been better to leave him in the dark. In Triple Nine, he was safe. He was contained. Here, in the light, he was meat.
But as she watched, struggling against her own zip ties, she felt something else rise within her, a cold, professional detachment that chilled her more than the warehouse air. Her bosses, her colleagues, the entire DSA hierarchy had warned her: Joseph Cassian is dangerous to be in the same room with. They hadn't been talking about his physical strength. They were talking about what lived inside him.
And now, they were both captured, facing death, and the rumors were proving true. If Joseph is out, shit happens.
"Bitch?" the woman in the white suit screamed, her voice echoing off the rusted beams. "I am Jelena Salvatore! Say my name!"
She struck Joseph again, a brutal backhand to the already ruined bridge of his nose. The sound was wet and sickening.
Joseph's head snapped to the side, blood spraying across his chest, but he didn't cry out. He didn't beg. He didn't even flinch in the way a normal human would.
Olivia watched, her breath catching in her throat. She was trained for this. As a DSA agent, she knew how to counter torture, how to compartmentalize pain when fingernails were pulled or fingers broken. It was a skill drilled into them. But looking at Joseph, she realized with a jolt of disbelief that he possessed a mastery of it that defied logic.
He looked destroyed, yes. His face was a mess of swelling and blood. But his eyes… his eyes were calm. Too calm. He didn't look like a victim of torture; he looked like someone who was ready for it.
Like he had been waiting for this specific sensation for ten years.
He isn't sane, Olivia realized, the thought hitting her with the force of a bullet. Nobody comes out of a concrete box after ten years of absolute isolation without breaking. Research proved it. Men went blind. They developed schizophrenia. They screamed until their vocal cords tore. They became hollow shells.
But Joseph? He looked… functional. And that functionality was the most terrifying thing she had ever seen. It meant he couldn't be innocent. A morally right person would be screaming. A misunderstood welder would be begging for mercy.
Instead, Joseph Cassian was smiling.
Just for a millisecond, as Jelena raised her hand for another blow, Olivia saw it. A faint, almost unnoticeable smirk tugging at the corner of his bloody mouth. And in his eyes, there was no fear.
Only recognition.
The blood of the Cassian's.
The realization hit Olivia like a physical blow. The Cassian lineage was legendary in the underworld, not for their business acumen, but for their inherent monstrosity. Every generation, every single member of that bloodline, had been a criminal. Killers. Tricksters. Monsters. Not one had ever worked a legitimate job. Not one had ever walked away from the violence.
Except one.
Joseph. The only fucking Cassian in history who had said "fuck no." He had worked as a welder. He had rented a small apartment. He had tried to live a quiet life away from the empire.
And look where it got him.
Olivia realized then that her own greed, the ambition to climb the ranks by freeing the "innocent" Joseph, to prove to the Minister and the JCA that the system had failed, had shattered the moment the fifth punch landed. She had wanted to save a good man. But there was no good man here.
The family that had framed him, the guards who had beaten him, the world that had abandoned him, they hadn't broken him. They had made him. They had taken the one Cassian with a choice, the one who could have broken the cycle of relentless bloodshed, and they had forged him into something worse than all of them combined.
They had thrown him into a black hole, into the deepest darkness, where the monster deep within finally felt comfortable.
Joseph had been eighteen when they took him. A kid. A worker. A boy who had never even been in a fistfight. Then came the months between his arrest and the massacre. The guards, thinking they were doing the family a favor, or perhaps just enjoying the chance to break a "prince," had turned his cell into a slaughterhouse. Batons. Whips. Salt rubbed into open wounds. Beatings that should have killed him.
But then, the news came. When Joseph turned nineteen, the world outside burned. The families were massacred. The warehouses torched. The entire criminal ecosystem collapsed overnight. The government fell into chaos because the pillars holding it up were gone.
And in the prison, the beatings stopped.
The guards who had tortured him daily vanished. They fled the country with their families, terrified of the legend that was growing in the dark. The story spread like wildfire: The 19-year-old Joseph Cassian did it. He wiped them out from his cell.
A kill order had been issued immediately afterward, not to kill him, but to silence him. To ensure he never spoke a word to anyone, because if he did, the fragile new world might crumble again.
But during that year of hell, before the silence fell, Joseph had learned something. He had learned how to counter the pain. Or maybe, more accurately, he had become too comfortable with it. He had decided that death was inevitable, that his family had sent the guards to finish the job. And in that acceptance, the batons, the whips, the salt; they meant nothing.
Feeling no pain, or hiding it so perfectly that it ceased to exist, made him proud. It made him happy. Utterly happy that his tormentors didn't get what they wanted. They wanted fear. They wanted submission. Instead, they got a stare that pierced through their souls.
He felt every hit. He felt every fracture. But he stood up every time. He stared at them until they were the ones who looked away. Until they were the confused ones.
To Joseph, pain was an illusion. Death was a triviality. The only reality was the confusion in his torturer's eyes. They thought they were breaking a boy; they were feeding a beast.
So, in short, what Jelena Salvatore was doing to him right now? It was light work. It was a warm-up.
"How does it feel...?" Jelena whispered, grabbing Joseph's chin, forcing his bloody face up to meet hers. Her eyes burned with the hatred of an heir who had survived only because she was a child, the sole survivor of a purge that spared no one over eighteen. "Do you remember my family? Do you remember the heads they sent to the mayor?"
Joseph blinked, the blood dripping from his lashes. He looked at her, really looked at her, and the smirk returned, wider this time.
"It... feels..." Joseph rasped, his voice thick with blood but steady. "G-good."
Jelena froze, her hand trembling slightly. "What?"
"After a decade..." Joseph continued, his eyes locking onto hers with an intensity that made the air in the room feel heavy, "...being touched by a woman feels... amazing."
He laughed. It was a low, broken sound, bubbling up through the blood, but it was genuine. He wasn't mocking her. He was thanking her. For the first time in ten years, someone was touching him who wasn't trying to drag him to a cell or beat him into oblivion for sport. Even this violence was a form of connection. A form of life.
Jelena recoiled as if burned, stepping back in disgust and confusion. "You're insane," she spat.
"You're a fucking psycho."
"Maybe," Joseph agreed, tilting his head, the broken nose, turning his smile into something grotesque yet strangely charismatic. "Or maybe I'm just the only honest person in this room."
Olivia watched, paralyzed. She saw the shift in the dynamic. Jelena had come here to break him, to extract revenge, to prove she was the predator. But in those few seconds, the roles had reversed.
Joseph wasn't the victim anymore. He was the center of gravity. The monster was awake, and he was enjoying the show.
And the worst part? Olivia knew, with a chilling certainty, that Jelena had no idea what she had just unleashed. She thought she was torturing a man. She didn't realize she was ringing the dinner bell.