Darkness pressed against Jade's eyelids before she even opened them. The air around her was thick it was humid and metallic; like she had been dropped into someone's lungs. Her cheek rested on wet concrete. The sharp sting of it forced her awake.
A sound echoed somewhere in the distance: slow dripping, steady, deliberate.
She lifted her head.
Chains lined the walls like vines. Hooks dangled from the ceiling, swaying gently as though something had recently been removed from them. The place wasn't a room; it was a holding pen, a forgotten basement, a slaughterhouse carved into concrete and rot.
Her wrists were bound.
Her throat tasted like copper.
Bambi…?
Her whisper cracked in the stale air, there was no answer. Only footsteps, heavy ones.
A door groaned open behind her, letting in a wash of fluorescent white. Shadows sharpened. Jade blinked against the brightness as silhouettes entered: three men in black, their faces blurred behind tinted masks.
But the last man who walked in didn't bother with a mask.
He didn't need one. His presence alone was a disguise; his aura swallowed the room whole. Tall, thick arms. A face carved with lines that weren't wrinkles but warnings. Salt-and-pepper hair slicked back, jaw locked tight.
The Boss.
The one Mateo had heard whispers about.
The one no one survived meeting. He stopped just inches from her, studied her face with a stillness so deep Jade felt her blood freeze. His eyes were cold, but something moved behind them; something old and jagged.
"Lift her," he said.
Two guards dragged her up by her arms. Her legs buckled beneath her. The boss stepped closer until his breath brushed her cheek. For a long moment, he said nothing.
Then—
"Turn her head."
One guard grabbed her chin, tilting her face toward the light. She groaned in pain, then;
Silence; deafening and thick enough to drown in.
The Boss's gaze sharpened. His nostrils flared as his jaw clenched so hard she heard his teeth grind.
"She looks like him," one guard muttered. His right hand man, maybe; not a lot of people have the balls to speak up when the boss is around, yet alone talk about his past.
The Boss didn't reply.
His fingers brushed her cheek: not gently, but with the reverence of someone touching a ghost. Jade's breath stilled. His eyes were glossy now, almost unblinking.
The men exchanged looks.
"Boss," one whispered cautiously, "you sure you want—"
"Quiet."
His voice cracked like a whip, almost upset but enough to send chills down the spine of his guards. He stepped back, face turning unreadable, shadowed. Jade saw only the cold part of him now: the part that made grown men kneel.
He pointed at her.
"Bring her to the basement."
The basement. Not a basement. The basement.
The guards stiffened, uncertain, they felt a mixture of pity and fear for the girl, a quick death would have spared her all this torture. She had already been through enough.
"Boss… the basement is for—"
"I said take her."
The guards dragged her down a narrow hallway. The stench grew worse. Walls closer together. Light's thinner. Like they were walking deeper into the mouth of something with a heartbeat. As they got closer to the door the guards were already breaking into cold sweat, reliving the things they faced when the went in there. One of the guards felt an aching pain on his back the more he went closer, it was in this same basement that the boss gave him a stern correction.
They stopped at a rusted door. One guard muttered a prayer, the other swallowed hard.
Then they opened the door.
A room draped in white sheets. Surgical lights. A long metal table in the center. Tools laid out like an altar—some sharp, some blunt, all stained. And on the far wall—
A photo.
A framed picture of a teenage boy.
Soft dark curls. Sharp eyes. A smile that didn't belong anywhere near this place.
Jade's stomach twisted. He looked like her, not just similar, it wasn't just a passing resemblance. He looked like her brother, her reflection, her own blood.
The Boss entered the room behind her, closing the door with a slow, echoing click.
His voice was low, distant.
"I buried him seven years ago… and yet… here you stand."
Jade couldn't breathe.
His hands curled into fists.
"I thought I'd finally stopped seeing his face in crowds. I thought grief had surrendered."
He stepped closer, eyes shining with something dangerous.
"But you—"
He lifted her chin with one cold finger.
"You've brought it back."
She trembled, legs buckling so hard they gave out and she dropped to the floor.
His expression twisted into something unreadable—grief, rage, longing, denial, all at war beneath his skin.
He leaned in, whispering, voice splintered:
"I killed the last person who tried to replace him."
Her blood went cold. She tried to mutter words out, maybe to plead for her life, but words failed her.
He straightened himself staring at her as though he wants to pry into her soul.
"Clean the tools," he told the guards. "Prepare her."
Jade's heart dropped.
Prepare.
For what?
A ceremony?
A punishment?
An execution?
The endless possibilities sent Jade into a spiral of thoughts, she was so scared she puked into her own mouth and as though to not to offend the people that currently have sole ownership of her life, she swallowed it back. taking into account her defeat, telling herself that she can't be saved she resolved herself for her impending death.
The guards moved around her, silent, grim.
The Boss walked to the far corner of the room and picked up something wrapped in black cloth. He unraveled it slowly…
A blade; long, thin, surgical.
A scalpel meant for precision.
He held it like a memory he was ready to reopen.
Jade's pulse thundered in her ears.
No one spoke.
No one breathed.
Then the Boss walked back toward her.
His shadow swallowed her whole.
And his voice—low, final—sealed the dread:
"You shouldn't have been born with his face."
The scalpel gleamed.
The room spun.
Everything went black.