The syringe slid home with a quiet, clinical finality. Maximillian's grin snapped off. His hand went to the puncture before his eyes went unfocused, confusion and then a panic that filled him like cold water. He staggered, voice jagged, trying to say something that stuck in his throat. Ethan lunged, but Xavier's other hand found purchase on his wrist, anchored and vicious. The two men spun—one desperate, one simply awake—and the room narrowed to fists and the terrible business of survival.

Viola moved like someone stepping into a room they'd already read. She grabbed the black case off the floor where Ethan had dropped it, flipped it open, and let the edge of the lid click like a metronome. "You brought the contract alive so you could kill him yourselves," she said to Ethan, voice clean. "You tried to double-cross the job. That's why I have a contingency for people who don't keep their end."

She was still acting like she wasn't in cahoots with Xavier. It didn't matter, but she kept it professional.

At first nothing seemed to happen. Maximillian's smile split wider — triumph, premature and loud. He opened his mouth to finish the sentence he'd been promising. The words fell out of him wrong; his throat tightened. He tried to laugh and it came out a small, shocked cough.

Then the change hit like a physical thing. Heat flared beneath the skin and in the eyes — not fire, but a pressure that stole the easy cruelty from his face. Color drained from his mouth while his cheeks flushed; he swore, voice pitching high with surprise and then cracking. His hands fumbled at his neck where the needle had been, fingers clawing at the spot as if he could tear the answer out of his own skin.

Ethan froze the way a man does when he sees a mirror of his worst choices. For a blink he still moved toward Xavier, but his step was a question. "What—" he started, but the word died as Maximillian's stance went wrong beneath him. The big man's knees buckled like a bad hinge. He staggered, eyes widening to a look Xavier would remember: pure, naked panic.

Maximillian tried to speak, to threaten, to call for help — anything that kept him above the ground — but the sound that came was thin, raw, and slipping. His fingers jerked uselessly at Ethan's sleeve, then at air. His body convulsed, a spasm that shook him through, then another. He sucked in ragged air, cheeks working, and then his breathing chewed up and shortened into something that sounded borrowed and small.

Ethan lunged then, the desperate motion of a man who'd just seen his ladder pulled away. He swung at Xavier, fast and stupid, a punch meant to erase the moment that had just happened. Xavier caught the blow with an arm that had been waiting for the contact and returned it with a motion calibrated to end threats, not to show off. Ethan's head snapped. He fell back against the crate, eyes huge, the color gone from him for a second as the reality set in.

Viola watched it all with an expression as neutral as steel. No joy, no relish — only business accepted and executed. She didn't move to help. She didn't have to.

Maximillian's muscles began to betray him more and more. His fingers went slack, his jaw worked once like someone who'd been punched in the gut, and then he slid down the side of the crate until he was on his knees, gasping. Sweat shimmered on his brow; his shirt clung dark in places where his body no longer behaved. His eyes rolled, not away from them but through them — like a man watching his life from too far above.

"Please," he croaked at one point, a word that tasted like admission. "Don't—" And whatever threat he had left dissolved into a plea so small it barely registered.

Ethan's face was a map of horror and calculation. He fumbled for his phone as if a number could put this back the way it had been. "What did you do to him?" he barked, voice breaking.

Xavier's voice was a cold piece of glass. "You told me to finish the ledger," he said. "I finished the ledger." He was steady, each word measured. He crouched close to Maximillian, eyes watching for the last flutter of resistance. "You wanted me to beg? He's begging now."

The room smelled faintly of metal and something acidic that clung to the back of the throat — the thin tang of panic and antiseptic, the world compressed into the sound of a man's breath and the distant keening of the city. Maximillian's limbs trembled and then went stiller, the fight shrinking into a single, shallow inhale.

Xavier kept his hand near Maximillian's shoulder while the man's struggles softened into small, meaningless jerks. There was no neat, cinematic moment of triumph — only the quiet, terrible reality of a fight turned and finished. Maximillian's breathing slowed; his fingers slackened in the dust. The look that remained in his eyes was not of the predator he'd been but of a smaller thing, lost and afraid.

Ethan sank down on the edge of the crate and held his head in his hands. The terror on his face was almost more satisfying than any scream could have been. He had imagined control, contracts, payment. He had not imagined this: a ledger closed with hands that knew how to end a thing properly.

Viola stepped forward, took the syringe case from where Xavier had tossed it, and snapped it shut with a soft, final sound. "You wanted proof," she said to Ethan, simple and flat. "You got it." Her voice had no glee — only the efficiency of someone who'd done the job and wanted her cut.

Maximillian's first panic was all noise — a jagged, animal sound that tore out of him and didn't fit the polished shell he always wore. For a second he fought like a man who still believed his own size would keep him safe: flailing hands, a curse, a fruitless grab at the place the needle had gone into his neck. Then the second phase hit, and whatever shallow armor he'd had crumpled like paper.

The drug was a thing of precision. It didn't explode outward with flame or steam; it turned inward and took its time making a life betray itself. Heat bloomed under his skin, bright and wrong, as if someone had shoved a fist through his ribs and was squeezing. Color fled his face in patches while sweat rose in angry beads along his hairline. He tried to jerk free, but his hands moved like they belonged to someone else — clumsy, heavy, traitorous.

Sound narrowed around him. Voices pulled into tunnels and stretched thin. Ethan's shouts became a faraway hiss, like a radio with dying batteries. Maximillian's own pulse became a thunderclap in his ears. He clawed at air and metal, nails scratching concrete, a last, useless attempt to anchor himself to something that would answer back.

Breath turned traitorous. Every inhale felt like dragging air through a wet cloth. The chest cramped, muscles seizing in spasms that folded him in on himself. He bent forward as if someone had taken the floor away, knees buckling, then straightened, then buckled again. Salty taste filled his mouth, metallic and wrong, and he gagged; whatever he brought up was nothing and everything at once — the sudden, shameful knowledge that his body had betrayed him to the very thing he'd weaponized.

Images came at him like unwanted visitors: flashes of faces he'd ignored, voices he'd dismissed, the tiny desolate majors of people whose lives he'd considered currency. They weren't clear; they were a press of guilt and memory behind his eyes, a film of shame that made him flinch. He tried to scream, to bark orders that might pull someone to his side, to force the world back into the outline he preferred, but the sound was small and cracked.

His limbs went from clumsy to numb, sensation retreating as the toxin worked inward. Fingers slackened until he could barely make a fist. The legs that had carried him through the world with a swagger folded like old rope. He fell to his knees and then onto his side, the concrete biting through his clothes. Movement became staccato — a jitter, a spasm, a quick hop of muscle — then a long series of useless, exhausted twitches.

Ethan moved clumsily around him, hands in the air like someone bargaining with a storm. Horror replaced the smirk that had always lived on his face. For the first time that night, Ethan looked smaller than the panic he'd worn as armor. He backed away slowly, eyes darting as if the walls might provide an explanation he could afford. "W-What," he breathed, the word a prayer and a curse at once. "What did you—what did he—"

Xavier didn't answer with words. He watched instead, letting the room hold the sound of a man collapsing. There was no relish in his stance, no delighted spectacle. Satisfaction came in a quieter, harder shape: the ledger balanced, the scale settled. Maximillian's eyes watered and refocused on the faces around him as if searching for mercy in a room that had none left to give. When his gaze found Ethan, it was raw with panic and a pleading that had once been a threat. There was nowhere for the plea to land except vacant air.

Blood came out of his mouth, ears, and nose, and with blood also came a nasty smell of bleach and acid. It was so punget that one could pass out if they stayed there for long.

Soon, his skin began to melt and his muscles left the bones that had already turned into powder. HIs organs spilled out, but they were also fuming with pus and bubbles. And soon, Maximilian's entire existence turned into something one would not even piss at.

There was only the dull, absolute ending of a body that had been working and then simply stopped. The last thing on Maximillian's face was not triumph or cruelty but a small, stupid look of surprise, as if the world had miscounted its own rules.

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