Chapter 173

The smell nauseated me.

The rotting flesh in cold drawers, the bodies marked with pens to indicate exactly what to cut and remove, and the devil’s screams commanding everything that was happening still caused a rebellion in my stomach.

I had seen this image so many times. I lived through that crap, yet I never got used to the putrid stench of the underworld of this city.

How children and adults were devoured by the sheer animalistic essence consuming certain people. Before I allowed myself to be tamed by vengeance, I investigated. I tried to find out what drove people like that to crave human flesh. Pure depravity was the only explanation.

We cry at birth because we arrive at this vast madhouse.

Shakespeare knew what he was talking about.

My memories still haunted me every time I arrived at places like these. At warehouses hidden from society, dug to the ends of the earth to store their next meals.

The location of one more had been delivered by Vincenzo after I gouged out one of his eyes. His screams spilling the address were enough for me to take out the other and kill him in suffering.

He had a family. A sick wife, a five-year-old daughter, and a useless twenty-two-year-old son. They weren’t rich. The debts had piled up, many of them to pay for his wife’s chemotherapy and his son’s rehab.

He was the one who fed that household. He was the one who took his daughter to the parks, taught her the alphabet and multiplication tables. He was the one who tried to attend all of his wife’s appointments, even if it meant skipping his job—the same job that killed millions and dragged me and my comrades to hell.

I killed him mercilessly. I murdered him cruelly, knowing I was breaking a family. That I was dooming those who had no clue what was happening to ruin.

The wife would likely die of grief. The five-year-old daughter would end up in an orphanage, and the eldest son would sink back into drugs.

And I accepted that. I didn’t care.

Any spark of humanity I might still have was nothing but dust in my blood.

I had already accepted who I was. Just as rotten as those who had wanted me dead.

"Hey, Captain, you need to see this."

Van Doren snapped me out of it.

I stood, stretching and inhaling the fetid odor of the blood spilled from the dead. I grabbed my HK416 and leaped over a few bodies. The catastrophe I had left behind would terrify some, but in my mind, it was a realm of peace.

I let Cole lead me to one of the warehouse beams. Vance was there too. They hadn’t taken off their cloaks, but I recognized that guy from afar. Always sitting oddly with a knife in his hand.

If I caused destruction, Vance was discord incarnate.

He reveled in it like a chess game where he had been the Grandmaster for three years.

I had seen him stab bodies as if they were nothing but dust in his eyes. The act of the knife going in, coming out, going in, and coming out, splattering his clean face and clothes, tainting further what was already ugly and dark in his core. He cut until he hit bone. He made his victims chew their organs until they tasted their own poison. He enjoyed testing knives and weapons on his victims as experiments. Like an open-field surgery, without anesthesia. Without humanity.

They called for God, but Campbell sent back their demons.

Vance used humans as pieces in his mental games. He lived in anarchy. It was his mistress. The woman of his life. Campbell loved only what bled, and that was why he lived.

Jaxon, though he had that golden face, was another lunatic. He carried more victims than I did, but he was less impatient. He didn’t limit himself to extracting information; he went straight for the heart of his targets. Thus, he rarely entered the field during missions. I preferred having him handle computers, cameras, or whatever else was technological.

"What do I need to see?"

I spotted Asher with a woman in her twenties restrained.

I raised an eyebrow, trying to understand the spectacle.

"Why the hell are you not wearing your cloak?" Cole growled.

"She’s going to die."

"Let me go, you demons!" she screamed, as if she could tear out her own throat.

"Demons? Let’s see what that pretty mouth of yours has," Asher teased. "Oh, look at her, blood between her teeth."

My chest burned.

She was one of those filthy pieces of trash that dined on human bodies.

"Your parents own one of the largest commercial networks in the country," Hawthorn continued.

I analyzed her from head to toe.

"The Foodmarket?" I asked, crouching in front of her.

I did this often, and although they thought it was an intimidating move, it was just the fatigue in my legs calling to me. I couldn’t stand for long, especially after the bullet wound in my leg that Emilia had miraculously saved. Even so, the scar seemed to rupture, and the pain threaded through my bones.

"Yes."

My lips curled satisfactorily.

"Who would have thought one of the biggest companies in the country would be involved in something so rotten?"

The blonde snarled again, trying to free herself from Asher. But his strength was colossal. Hawthorn could break her arm with a single finger if he wanted to.

Emilia would know how to handle her.

"Her parents don’t have direct contact with the Factory’s men, but…"

"They have information, and that’s what we want. Do you know anything?"

Her blue eyes nearly set the space ablaze.

"I don’t know anything! Let me go!" she screamed.

"Wrong answer, girl."

A shot was fired, hitting the tip of her foot. Her scream echoed off the walls, vibrating the atoms of the area. The blonde’s forehead was drenched in her own hair, her muscles drowning in a single wave of weakness.

"If you give us what we want, I might consider letting you leave here alive," I declared.

Her fear was irrational.

She wasn’t thinking, clinging to every damn word.

"I don’t want to die," she pleaded. "Please."

"Then tell us where your parents make the deals and who organizes them."

Her sobs grated on me. The tears and snot coating her cheeks were too disgusting to keep watching.

They were all like this.

Begging for their lives while destroying others.

"I don’t know…"

Another shot to the other foot.

"Try again."

Her screams went on and on and on.

Who was the fool that believed this act? I had seen this play too many times.

"Hurry up, girl." Asher grabbed her hair, murmuring in her ear. "The longer you delay telling the truth, the more painful it’ll be."

Her teeth clenched.

"Wayne… Angelo Wayne. He’s the only one I know who organizes."

I glanced at Asher, then at Cole, who shrugged. None of us knew the name.

"Jaxon says it might be true," Van Doren spoke. He was the only one still in direct communication with Fish. The guy was in our car, doing what he could on the computer.

"Of course it is," the girl snarled. "Wayne is one of the main sponsors for homeless children. He invests millions to build orphanages, renovate schools, and provide a better life for every bastard without a mom or dad out there. But it’s for money. For business. There’s no kindness in what he’s doing. It’s like a plantation so they can be harvested."

My ears rang.

The doubts speeding up the synapses.

"How long?"

She shrugged.

"I don’t know. They’ve been planning it for years, but only last year did reports of some children getting sick and dying start to surface."

I took a deep, exaggerated breath of oxygen.

Could this be the new Section? But exclusively for children? What was it?

A terrifying need to uncover more tamed my blood, but it wasn’t my objective. I avenged those who hurt us, not saved children. It wasn’t in my nature.

"I want a list of those orphanages, schools, whatever they are."

"I don’t know!" she cried out. "I don’t know anything else. Now, please, let me go. Please…"

I looked at Asher, who raised his eyebrows as if to explain that perhaps she really was ignorant about the matter.