I wake up because my jaw hurts.
Not the sharp kind of pain. The dull, pulsing ache of something that has been forced open and then forgotten about. My tongue tastes like copper, which tells me I've been out longer than I should have been. I try to make sense of what is happening, but I seem to forget what I was doing before... this.
The chair is metal. One leg shorter than the rest. It rocks slightly when I shift, which means the floor isn't level. Or the chair is cheap... Not sure.
Wait... Why am I thinking about the chair?
SLAM!
A door closes somewhere far behind me, pulling me out of my musings. I try to turn my neck around to see who it was. A very bad idea— which I seem to be having plenty of these days. The throbbing pain shocks me back to my senses, and a high-pitched shriek comes out of my mouth as I try not to move a single muscle to somehow soothe the pain. Confusion, agony, jumbled thoughts, agony, darkness to blinding light, agony...
Where am I?
Someone clears their throat.
"Before we begin," a man says conversationally, "I want to acknowledge something important, Liam."
That voice.
I try to move my hands frantically through the pain, but I can't. I try to speak, say something, shout for someone. I can't. And it has nothing to do with the tape on my mouth.
I sense he is standing off to the side, coming to the front. Well-dressed. Calm in a way that makes the room feel temporary.
"I genuinely don't believe you meant to cause a problem," he continues. "That distinction matters. At least to me."
That voice.
It can't be... Why is he here?
Every thug and crime lord worth their penny knows that voice. You can't fake it or mistake it for anyone else. I mean, you can do both, but you'd forfeit your life in the same breath. There's comfort in it, an odd reassurance, as if chaos itself had been asked to sit down and behave. But there is also dissonance in it that shakes your bones when it's directed at you. I remember hearing it on one of the earlier trailing jobs Carl and I were supposed to do three years ago. Carl's phone rang while we were following the Prius that was supposed to belong to a doctor who disclosed some patient information of someone high on the food chain. I was murmuring along to a song on the radio, having a good smoke after a long day of trailing the most uninteresting guy I had the pleasure of following, when Carl slammed the brakes in the middle of the road and answered a phone call on speaker. That's when I heard it.
"Hey Carl, do you mind going back to the club and giving the phone to Anthony?"
"Yes, I mean no... No sir, I don't mind at all."
"Great, I'll call in ten minutes."
"Who was that?" I said.
"A voice you don't want to put a face to," is all Carl said before he dropped me off two blocks before we reached the bar. After that day, I haven't seen Anthony or Carl with the team. Or anywhere else for that matter. I was relieved when Carl called me a couple of weeks later and told me he was alright and had been transferred to LA to deal with some distribution changes before we said our goodbyes. I couldn't get a single thing about what happened that day from him or anyone else. The best I could gather were stories about what the voice said and the names of the people who heard it. Any details after that just don't exist.
But why am I here? With that voice?
He steps closer to the front. I notice his shoes first. Polished. Unscuffed. The kind you don't wear if you expect to walk far.
"There's a pervasive myth," he says, "that intent is the cornerstone of guilt. It's a comforting idea. It allows us to feel unlucky instead of responsible."
He calmly walks and sits on the chair opposite me, which I didn't notice until now. He smiles faintly, as if remembering something amusing.
That face, that mesmerizing sculpture of eyebrows that have absolutely no business existing in the male genome. A symmetry that feels unfair, almost intentional, as if someone had taken their morning caffeine before even thinking about making it. Clean lines, calm confidence, the kind of beauty you register the same way you register a well-made blade or a cathedral façade. For just a moment, I forget my situation and think how I didn't expect this from the voice at all. He's just a young, albeit annoyingly handsome, guy. I honestly don't know what I expected, but not this.
"The truth, however, is far less forgiving."
He meets my eyes. Now I understand . They say the eye is the gateway to the soul. But what if someone has none?
I try to speak again. My throat clicks uselessly. A pitiful sound, like a beaten dog, is all that's heard.
He notices and just waves it away.
"No need," he says. "You didn't come here to participate."
And that's when I hear another footstep coming closer.
"You see," he continues, "you didn't steal from me. You didn't lie to me. You didn't even know I was involved." He pauses. "Which is precisely why this happened."
My chest tightens.
"I build systems," he goes on. "Not empires—those attract attention. Systems. Quiet, cooperative arrangements where everyone benefits by doing exactly what they're good at and nothing more."
The footsteps stop just behind me. I feel the presence before I hear something rolling out like a carpet.
"You weren't malicious, Liam," he says gently. "You were just sloppy. And sloppiness creates noise."
He leans closer.
"Noise forces audits."
The word lands wrong. Too clean. Too bureaucratic.
"I ran audits, you see," he says. "And sadly, you appeared on my book."
He leans back in his chair, his fingers tapping lightly on his lap as he reflects.
"I was in a small village called Kibuye, tucked away in western Uganda. I had heard about a rare bird—the Shoebill, a prehistoric-looking creature, with its massive bill and imposing stature. People said it lived near the shores of Lake George, in the thick reeds where few ventured. So, I made my way there, hoping to catch a glimpse of it."
He pauses, a slight smile playing on his lips. "And there was this little boy, maybe five, named Juma. His mother had died not long before, and he was living with his grandmother. The poor kid had a fever, couldn't stop coughing. I tried to ignore it at first—I was there for the bird, after all—but Juma couldn't keep quiet. He cried, louder and louder, to the extent I could feel nature's tension in the air."
I was sitting by the river, waiting for the Shoebill to show itself, but all I heard was the boy's crying from far. Then, I noticed the movement in the bushes as the birds left without their story shared. I'd traveled all that way, but it wasn't the bird I was meant to see. It was the boy, and how sickness leads everything around him without meaning to.
I was silent as I listened to this weird story from a guy no older than 25.
"You see, Liam, I wouldn't have noticed your little site if you'd added just a little bit more tolerance to your sickness and been silent. But now I understand, it's just too much to ask."
Then understanding dawned on me. But still, why would he personally get involved?
He pulls something covered in a handkerchief from inside his coat, but I know what it is.
I shake my head. I don't know why. Reflex, maybe. The last illusion of negotiation.
He sighs.
"Who am I kidding? I would have, but it should've made you feel better to hear that. At least, that's what my therapist says, anyway."
"This is the part everyone gets wrong," he says. "They think this is punishment. It isn't. Punishment implies some kind of emotion."
He straightens more in his chair, putting the gun on his lap, already losing interest.
"This is simply removal."
The footstep behind me moves back.
"And for what it's worth," he adds, almost kindly, "you almost made me emotional."
Then the chair tips.
And the warehouse, patient as ever, accepts one more item into storage.
"Clear any trace of the website and let the parents know."
"Yes, sir."