After he has managed to transfer Marina and her mother to somewhere safe, he decided to text a meeting place to Armand.

Where some of his bodyguards were waiting with cuffs and a gag…

The warehouse where they dropped the stepfather off was dead.

Not just abandoned— but dead. The kind of place where light went to die and breath curdled in the lungs. Rotting wood beams groaned softly overhead, their moans echoing like restless ghosts. Rats scurried above, claws scratching across rusted pipes that hissed like serpents. The air was thick with mildew and old blood, heavy enough to choke any one who dared enter.

In the center of it all stood one who did: Reuben, motionless.

His once-pristine long-sleeved shirt — tailored, branded and silken — was stained with soot, blood, and something darker. Not his. Not entirely. It clung to his chest like a second skin, the top buttons torn, the sleeves rolled with mechanical calm up to his elbows. His royal blue eyes, dark and unreadable, burned with something cold.

At his feet knelt the stepfather.

Cuffed. Gagged. Trembling in a puddle of his own piss. His head swayed like a rag doll, sweat pouring from every crevice. His lips made pitiful, muffled pleas behind the gag, gray eyes darting around the warehouse like a cornered animal.

He stank.

Not just of fear — but of decay.

Of the rot inside him finally oozing to the surface like pus under pressure.

Reuben said nothing at first. He didn’t need to. His silence stalked the man, coiling around him tighter than the cuffs. He just stared — unblinking, unreadable, like a surgeon preparing for an intense life-and-death operation.

Then, slowly, he stepped forward.

Each footfall echoed like a countdown.

“I know what you did to her…”

A muffled cry. A violent shake of the head. Denial. Too late.

Reuben crouched in front of him, eyes level. Calm. Icy.

“No?” he whispered. “That’s strange. Because I saw the bruises. The burns. The bite marks.”

The man sobbed behind the gag, tears streaking down his face. He looked less like a human and more like a deflated husk of one — gutted by terror, stripped of the mask he’d worn for decades.

Reuben reached into the black duffel bag beside him and drew out a small, velvet pouch. The sound of the zipper sliding open cut through the silence like a knife.

From it, he produced five tiny glass vials, each filled with a different colored clear liquid. Hand-labeled. No brand. No pharmaceutical signature.

Homemade. Intimate.

“My little hobbies,” Reuben murmured, as if reminiscing over old college projects. “Not for fun. For function.”

He uncapped the first vial and poured the contents onto a cloth. It smelled sterile — acidic and strangely sweet.

“You know,” he mused, folding the cloth with surgical precision, “I used to think pain was the worst thing you could do to someone.”

He paused, then smiled softly.

“Yet pain ends. But shame…? Shame sticks like the marrow in your bones.”

He pressed the cloth firmly over the man’s nose and mouth.

A twitch. A muffled scream. Then silence as the stepfather’s body slumped forward — alive, awake, but paralyzed.

Reuben tilted his head, studying him like a painting.

“I’m not going to beat you,” he said gently. “I won’t break your bones. No bruises. No scars.”

He smiled wider.

“That would make you a victim in your own deluded little narrative. I’m here to unmake you.”

He reached back into the bag and pulled out a cracked compact mirror, holding it before the man’s frozen face.

“And you’re going to watch.”

For the next two hours, Reuben whispered.

Not threats. Not violence.

But truths.

Each sentence a scalpel, peeling back the man's mind.

He spoke of Marina’s nightmares — the ones she muttered in her sleep, half-conscious and weeping ever since he transferred the poor abused girl and her mom to the main Castaňeda mansion’s servants quarters.The ones where fire licked at her arms and shadows screamed her name.

He described the smaller things — the flinch in her spine when keys jingled too loudly, the way she refused to sit with her back to a door. The wordless apologies she made for taking up space. Even for just existing.

And then he began to list names.

Contacts. Mistresses. Bribed officials. Places where the stepfather had hidden his past. The embezzlements. The assaults. The fake passports. The blackmailed victims.

“Interpol knows now,” Reuben murmured. “But don’t worry. I left you anonymous. Mostly. Just a phantom in a web of suspicion.”

He chuckled softly. “However, you’ll be noticed, not caught. Hunted, not found, which is a lot worse.”

The stepfather’s eyes rolled in his head — terror fraying every nerve like unraveling twine.

Reuben stood and circled him. “Oh — and your name? Blacklisted across every hospital database. I replaced your medical profile with one belonging to a man dying of late-stage syphilis.”

He leaned in, almost affectionately. “Hope you don’t need surgery anytime soon.”

Finally, he pulled out a phone. Slid it into the man’s back pocket with a practiced hand. “One number. My number.”

He crouched again, gaze steady and lethal. “You’re going to live, you piece of shit. Because every breath you take will taste like me . Like her pain. Like the end of everything you thought you were. And you’ll remember for the rest of your sorry excuse of a life that a teenager half your age is the one who punished you.”

Then Reuben stood and turned toward the exit. Behind him, the man was beginning to move — sluggish, twitching, like a corpse remembering it had limbs.

Reuben paused in the open entrance, bathed in fractured light from a shattered skylight above. His silhouette cast long shadows — almost inhuman.

“Oh,” he added over his shoulder, “and if I ever hear that you so much as breathe near this city again…” He turned back. Smile cold. Smile final. Smile fatal. “I’ll make you eat your own fingers and toes while they're still connected to you.”

And then he disappeared into the light, like an avenging ghost who’d just finished his last rite.

Armand collapsed in a broken heap, limbs twitching as sensation returned with a vengeance — pins and needles stabbing through his nerves like electric ice. His mouth hung open in a silent scream, throat too raw to cry out anymore, his sobs reduced to gasping whimpers.

His body was whole.

Untouched.

Not a bruise on him. Not a single cut.

But his soul had been peeled open with the precision of a scalpel, every hidden shame dragged into the light, every protected lie torn down and ground to dust.

He lay curled on the cold concrete like a dying animal, shaking uncontrollably. Tears mixed with drool. The piss he'd lost earlier had soaked into his pants, now clinging cold and rancid against his skin. But he didn’t move. He couldn’t.

The silence returned, heavier than before.

And in that silence, he saw her — in every shadow. He heard her voice, broken and small. He heard Reuben’s voice too, clinical and calm, repeating the truths that had hollowed him out. Echoes. Screams that weren’t his but lived inside him now, gnawing at the base of his mind like rats in rotted wood.

He would try to sleep in the coming nights, but there would be no rest.

Only flashes.

Chains clinking.

Her sobbing.

The gleam of vials.

The mirror.

The mirror!

And the reflection of a man stripped of any mask he’d ever worn — just him, naked and forever unforgivable.

He crawled to the wall, leaving a damp smear behind him, and pressed his forehead to the peeling concrete, trying to disappear into it. Praying that oblivion would swallow him whole.

But oblivion didn’t come.

Only the horrifying realization:

He would live.

No bruises. No scars.

But he would never be whole again.

He would carry Reuben’s voice inside him until death — a voice colder than vengeance, more merciless than pain.

A sentence more permanent than dying.

And far, far more frightening.