Chapter 14: The Blood Debt
Weeks have passed since the blood, neon and overwhelming sex of Miami. Jonathan had moved westward, following the sun. He was now in New Orleans.
The air here wasn't the salty, clean breeze of South Beach. It was thick, heavy with the moisture of the Mississippi River, and smelled of history. It smelled of sweet jasmine, beer spilled on centuries-old cobblestones, and rusty wrought iron. The city felt ancient, whispering with a chaotic energy that Jonathan found intriguing.
The scene began not in a dark alley, but in a luxurious hotel suite in the heart of the French Quarter. It was twelve o'clock in the afternoon. The Louisiana sun streamed in through the tall French doors, illuminating a room that was a testament to her new life of excess.
Expensive new clothes—linen shirts, designer trousers—were sprawled on velvet chairs. A bottle of expensive whiskey sat on the desk, open but barely touched; He enjoyed the taste, not the drunkenness. In the corner, next to his inseparable sheathed machete, lay the military backpack that he had "freed" from the Miami Capo. It was noticeably lighter now.
Jonathan shifted in the king-size bed, waking not by an alarm, but by choice. The sheets of a thousand threads were tangled around him.
Beside him, fast asleep in the chaos of pillows, were two local women. He had met them the night before at a jazz club on Bourbon Street. One, with dark, curly hair, was face down, her bare back covered in the dry sweat of her activities. The other was curled up on her side, snoring softly.
This had become their new norm. Her escape from the Orphanage had not only awakened her need for freedom; it had unleashed a different hunger, an addiction. Sex, he discovered, was the loudest and most pleasurable noise in the world, and he used it effectively to drown out the silent, perpetual whisper of his murderous instinct.
Careful not to wake them, he slipped out of bed. His muscles, now relaxed by a life of indulgence rather than tense by survival, were stretched. He put on a pair of linen pants and walked barefoot to the wrought-iron balcony, closing the doors silently behind him.
The city below was alive. A brass band was playing in a corner, the sound of trumpets rising with the heat. He took a cup from the room service table. Coffee. Strong, black and expensive.
As he watched the crowd of tourists and locals below, his instinct was unusually calm. He was still there, of course. 'Man with straw hat, inattentive, femoral artery exposed. Woman with high heels, unstable ankle, easy to break.' But the calculations were lazy, automatic, like an engine idling. They were asleep. Numbed by the constant sensory stimulation of true freedom: the amazing food, the vibrant music, the new culture and, above all, the almost nocturnal sex.
For the first time in his life, Jonathan felt safe. He had become complacent.
He thought he had won. He thought the game was over.
….
In a Miami skyscraper. Sixty floors above the "Purple Lotus" and the seedy alley where Jonathan had taken his first life by choice, this office was a world of smoked glass and brushed steel.
Behind a polished obsidian desk that seemed large enough to park a car, sat Ricardo. He was the older brother of the dead Capo.
But where his brother had been a fat, ostentatious bully with gold teeth, Ricardo was anything but. He wore a custom-made Italian three-piece suit, his hair slicked back with severe precision, and his eyes were cold and calculating.
Unlike his brother, who ran the nightclub, Ricardo ran the lineup. He had international connections and a quiet cruelty that made him infinitely more dangerous.
Ricardo wasn't looking at the Miami skyline. He was staring at a large plasma screen on the wall, playing a grainy, greenish security footage.
On the screen, he saw his brother raise a ridiculous gold revolver. He saw a thin, ghostly boy move with impossible speed. He saw the flash of a crude weapon—a machete?—and then watched, with clinical calm, as his brother was dismembered.
Ricardo was not sad. He was not in mourning. His brother had been an incompetent sadist and a liability.
He was furious at the humiliation. He was furious about the interruption of his money laundering operation at that club. And most of all, he was furious about the theft of more than two million dollars in cash.
He pressed a button on his desk phone. It wasn't a standard phone; it was an encrypted line connected to an intermediary in Zurich.
"Ricardo speaks."
The voice on the other end was brief. "What do you need?"
"I'm looking for someone," Ricardo said, his eyes still fixed on the freeze of Jonathan's blurred face. "A child. Russian, we think. About fifteen years old."
He paused, staring at the gun in Jonathan's frozen hand.
"He's carrying a rusty machete."
There was a sharp silence on the other end of the line. The intermediary acknowledged the description. "That ... it's a high-risk asset, Ricardo. Rumors from Russia... they call him 'Bog Machete'... the God of the Machete. Rumor has it that he massacred an entire Spetsnaz facility."
"I don't care about rumors," Ricardo said coldly. "He robbed me. I put a reward. I want him dead."
"... Understood. The contract is active."
Ricardo hung up. He looked out the window at the bright Miami sun. In the American underworld, the "God of the Machete" contract had just been activated. Jonathan's complacency was about to end.
…..
It was night in New Orleans. Jonathan was walking down a cobblestone street in the French Quarter, his hands in the pockets of his new expensive jacket. Unlike the dark alleys of Russia or the neon boulevards of Miami, this place felt heavy, as if the air was loaded with history and ghosts. Live jazz music poured out from the open bars, a melancholy saxophone melody mingling with the murmur of tourists.
He was relaxed. His day had followed his new comfortable routine: waking up late, good food, and a pleasant evening with a local art student he had met. His killer instinct was a low hum, lulled to sleep by the pleasures of his newfound freedom.
But instinct never slept completely.
As he crossed a dimly lit intersection, the buzzing turned into a silent alarm.
Anomaly..
His gaze drifted to a wrought-iron bench under a flickering lamppost. A man was sitting there, hidden behind a newspaper. '9:40 PM,' Jonathan thought. 'The newspaper is upside down.'.
He kept walking, without changing his pace. His charismatic smile remained, but his eyes were now scanning, actively analyzing.
Anomaly two. A flower delivery van was parked in a red no-parking zone, twenty meters ahead. It was off. Too late for deliveries.
Anomaly three. A street violinist was playing near an alley. The melody was slick, but its violin case was set at an odd angle. It was too heavy. And the man hadn't blinked. Not once in the last ten seconds.
Jonathan stopped in the middle of the cobblestone sidewalk.
He realized his mistake. He was not complacent; it was rusty. The multimillion-dollar contract had paid off. This was professional. A three-point kill zone.
The "violinist" stopped playing.
The "newspaper reader" slowly lowered his newspaper.
The back doors of the flower van slammed open.
It was the first team of mercenaries.
The "violinist" opened his case, revealing not velvet, but high-density foam that held an H&K MP7 submachine gun with a silencer. The "reader" did not have a gun; he had a MAC-10 on his lap. Three more men emerged from the van, dressed in black tactical armor and night vision goggles.
Jonathan's "Inverted Training" was activated out of pure habit. Neutralize. Do not kill. Escape. It was a test, like in the Orphanage.
The violinist held up the MP7.
Jonathan dodged. It was not a panic dodge; He was a fluid pivot, moving toward the nearest threat, the newspaper man. His brain calculated a non-lethal route: disarm, break the wrist, use the man as a shield, escape through the alley.
He lunged at the man in the newspaper...
…..
Jonathan's plan for non-lethal neutralization lasted exactly 0.3 seconds.
As he lunged at the man in the newspaper, his "Reverse Training" dictating a disarm and wrist break, the man in the leftmost van opened fire.
5.56mm bullets pierced the air where his head had been, shattering the window of a souvenir shop behind him.
Jonathan stopped in his tracks, spinning in the air in a way that defied physics. He landed in a low crouch as more bullets from the "fiddler" whizzed past him.
He realized his mistake. An almost fatal mistake.
'It's not the Orphanage,' he thought, the world becoming crisp and cold. 'It is not a test. They're not trying to contain me. They're trying to kill me.'.
The philosophy he had meticulously built over three years—control over lethality, peaceful rebellion—evaporated in that instant. It was a luxury he could no longer afford. His "Inverted Training" was turned off.
These people were not test subjects. They were obstacles.
The innocent smile disappeared. His face became the empty, calculating mask of the "Machete God." Su Touki flooded his body, a cold and furious power. His hand shot into the holster of his backpack and he drew the rusty machete in a single fluid motion.
The blade hummed faintly, glowing with the aura of his Touki.
The massacre lasted six seconds.
A second: The "violinist" saw the boy move and tried to download his MP7. Jonathan lunged at him, not far from him. Touki's imbued machete moved in an upward arc, cutting the submachine gun in half and continuing upward, opening the man's chest from the sternum to the throat.
Two seconds: The "newspaper man" yelled and raised his MAC-10. Before he could pull the trigger, Jonathan's left hand shot off. The combat knife he had taken from the dead Capo in Miami flew through the alley and stuck in the man's throat, silencing him forever.
Three seconds: The three men in the van, dressed in tactical armor, moved forward, forming a triangle of fire. Shot.
Four and Five seconds: Jonathan flowed between them like smoke. The first man screamed when the machete cut off his arm with which he was holding the rifle. The second man tried to turn, but Jonathan was already behind him, the rusty blade sinking into the gaps in his Kevlar armor.
Six seconds: The last man, the squad leader, managed to point his rifle at Jonathan's chest. He pulled the trigger. CLANG. Jonathan had stopped the bullet with the flat part of his machete. The man's eyes widened, terrified. Jonathan's machete moved one last time, a horizontal cut so fast that it seemed invisible.
The silence descended, broken only by distant jazz and the jingle of falling bullet casings.
Sirens began to howl in the distance.
Jonathan stood in the alley now silent, surrounded by mutilated bodies. His "vacation" was over. He wiped his machete on the tactical jacket of one of the dead mercenaries and retrieved his combat knife.
He disappeared into the shadows of the French Quarter seconds before the first patrol arrived.
The final scene was for the New Orleans police. They arrived and found a butcher's shop that defied logic. A pale, veteran detective shone his flashlight on the submachine gun that had been split in two. Then he lit up the Kevlar vest that had been cut like tissue paper.
"My God," he murmured to his companion. "The rumors were true. The 'God of the Machete' is in the city."
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Mike.
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