The streets were dark, damp with the scent of rain and city filth. A thick fog clung to the alleyways, swallowing the neon glow of streetlights. Somewhere in the distance, a gunshot cracked through the silence, followed by the muffled screams of a dying man. But here, in the heart of the underworld, death moved silently.
A blur streaked across the rooftops—no louder than a whisper, no heavier than a passing shadow. Red Mask had arrived.
He was an enigma, an anti-hero without cause, a killer without hesitation. Unlike the beast-type Catalyst users, he did not possess monstrous strength or elemental might. What he had was precision. The Pinpoint Accuracy Catalyst made him a nightmare to anyone standing in his way. He could see the weak points in anything—armor, bone, muscle, structure. Everything had a breaking point, and he found it effortlessly.
More than that, he was fast. Inhumanly fast.
750 miles per hour—that was the speed at which he moved, the speed at which he ended lives.
He dropped down from the rooftop without a sound, landing in the middle of a back alley where a gang of criminals had just finished their latest deal. Ten men, armed, laughing over their spoils. They never saw him coming.
The first died instantly—a finger jabbed through his throat before his mouth could even form a scream. The second barely had time to blink before Red Mask’s hand sliced through his ribcage, piercing his heart with surgical precision. The third reached for his gun, but the moment his finger twitched, Red Mask was already behind him, snapping his spine with a flick of the wrist.
To an outsider, it would have seemed supernatural. A massacre executed in seconds. He weaved between the bodies, untouched, dodging gunfire before the trigger was even fully pulled. He didn’t need a weapon. His fingers, his hands—they were sharper than knives, deadlier than bullets.
By the time the last man fell, his body littered with puncture wounds that had collapsed his lungs and severed his arteries, Red Mask barely even looked winded. He stood amidst the carnage, his crimson mask reflecting the blood pooled at his feet. His work here was done.
He didn’t kill out of hatred or vengeance. He didn’t do it for justice. He killed because he was good at it. Because it paid well. Because in a world full of monsters, he had to be something worse to survive.
The city feared him. Criminals whispered his name like a ghost story, a warning never to cross the wrong people. Heroes debated whether he was a necessary evil or just another villain waiting to be put down. But Red Mask didn’t care about their opinions. He wasn’t here to be liked.
He was here to be efficient.
As he disappeared into the night, his thoughts were already on the next target, the next payday. Death was a business. And Red Mask was the best in the trade.
The Blood Price: Red Mask’s Story
Red Mask never wanted to be a killer. But life had never given him a choice.
Born into the depths of poverty, he grew up knowing hunger as intimately as he knew the sound of his own heartbeat. His family barely scraped by, living in the slums where opportunity was a fairytale, and survival was the only goal. Education was a luxury he could never afford. By the time he finished sixth grade, he was already too deep in the struggle—school no longer mattered when there were mouths to feed.
At twelve, he started pickpocketing. By fifteen, he was mugging people in alleyways. By seventeen, he was taking lives for money.
He didn’t start out as a monster—he told himself that.
The first time he killed, it was out of desperation. A criminal had tried to rob him, and in the struggle, he struck first, piercing the man’s throat with a broken bottle. The rush of survival, the realization that a single moment of hesitation could mean death—it changed him. More importantly, it opened his eyes to the reality of power.
And power paid well.
The criminal underworld had no shortage of people who needed someone dead. Killers were in high demand, and Red Mask quickly found his niche. His Catalyst, Pinpoint Accuracy, awakened in those brutal years, making him a ghost among butchers. He could see weak points in anything—armor, bodies, even structures. A single strike, and it was over.
He didn’t need guns. He didn’t need blades. His fingers were knives, his hands were weapons.
With just a flick of his wrist, he could puncture a lung, shatter a skull, or stop a heart.
At first, it was just a way to make money. He justified it—he only took contracts on criminals, murderers, rapists, and gangsters. The worst of the worst. He was killing bad people.
And for every body he left in an alleyway, his family got food on their table. The money was good—$10,000 to $25,000 per kill. More than enough to pull his family out of the gutter. More than enough to give his little sister a chance at a real future.
But the law didn’t care about his justifications.
He was caught at twenty-three, charged with multiple homicides, and sentenced to five years in prison. It was a miracle he didn’t get life. Maybe the judge saw something in him—maybe they knew he wasn’t a sadist, just a man born into a broken system.
Prison changed him. It wasn’t the fights that got to him. It was the silence.
The long nights in a cramped, rotting cell. The weight of all the blood on his hands. The realization that, despite all the money, all the kills, he was still just a poor kid from the slums, trapped in a cycle he couldn't escape.
He kept his head down. He fought when he had to. He survived. Like he always had.
By the time he was released, the world had moved on without him. His family had learned to live without him. The money was gone, his reputation was ruined, and he had nowhere to go.
That’s when the Anti-Heroes found him.
They weren’t heroes. They weren’t villains. They were killers, mercenaries, and executioners. They did the jobs heroes wouldn’t, and they didn’t ask questions. If you were good at violence, if you were willing to spill blood, you got paid. Simple as that.
For Red Mask, it was a lifeline.
He became a hired gun, taking contracts on criminals, terrorists, and rogue supers. He made a name for himself as the man who never missed, the ghost that killed with his bare hands.
It was brutal work, but it paid well. For a while, he had everything—money, security, a future for his family.
And for the first time in his life, he thought maybe, just maybe, he could make it out.
Then Junko Gacy took it all away.
One job. One bombing. One city turned to ash.
He hadn’t been there when it happened. He had been out on a contract, hunting some low-level gang boss.
By the time he returned, everything was gone.
The slums where he grew up? Leveled.
The tiny apartment his family finally saved up for? Gone.
His mother. His father. His younger sister. His little nephew.
All reduced to unrecognizable remains beneath the rubble.
There was nothing left.
Junko Gacy had taken everything from him.
For the first time in years, Red Mask felt something other than numb detachment.
Rage. Pure, unfiltered rage.
This wasn’t about money anymore. It wasn’t about survival.
This was war.
He had killed for money.
He had killed to survive.
Now?
Now he would kill for vengeance.
No more contracts. No more rules. No more hesitation.
He would find Junko Gacy. He would track him down like the rabid dog he was.
And when he did?
He wouldn’t just kill him.
He would make him suffer.
For every innocent life he stole.
For every scream that echoed in the flames.
For every night he would spend haunted by the faces of his family.
Red Mask wasn’t a hero. He never pretended to be.
But for the first time in his life, he had a purpose.
And he would see it through to the bitter, bloody end.
Red Mask was driven by three unshakable forces: money, revenge, and trauma.
- Money was his first master. Born into poverty, he understood that morality was a luxury the starving couldn't afford. His hands were stained with blood, not because he wanted them to be, but because survival demanded it. Killing paid, and for years, he justified it—if he had to take lives to put food on his family’s table, so be it.
- Revenge was his breaking point. Junko Gacy’s citywide bombing stole everything from him—his family, his purpose, his reason to fight. With their deaths, his old life crumbled, leaving only rage in its place. He no longer killed just for profit. Now, he killed because it was the only way he knew how to grieve. He killed because it was the only thing that made sense.
- Trauma shaped him into a paradox. Every corpse he left behind was another piece of himself rotting away. The weight of his past never left him; it coiled around his mind like a viper, whispering that he was nothing more than the monster life had forced him to be. No matter how much he tried to rationalize it, deep down, he knew—he had become something beyond redemption.
Red Mask was a man of contradictions, his soul fractured between light and darkness.
- He was willing to kill innocents if it meant achieving his goal. Once, he had standards—only criminals, only those who ‘deserved it.’ But after losing his family, those lines blurred. If an innocent life was the cost of his revenge, then so be it. He stopped believing in moral absolutes. Good and evil weren’t real—only strength and weakness.
- He was kind yet cynical. He understood suffering and had once tried to protect those who reminded him of his younger self. But kindness meant nothing in a world that spat on the weak. If kindness couldn’t protect his family, what was the point? So, he buried it under layers of cold detachment.
- He was nihilistic yet empathic. He believed the world was cruel, meaningless—a cycle of violence that would never end. But despite that, he could still recognize the pain in others. He understood loss, desperation, and fear because they had once been his own. He had no illusions of being a hero, yet sometimes, he couldn’t help but extend a hand to those drowning in the same darkness he had.
Red Mask was a walking contradiction, embodying the brutality of anger, the emptiness of revenge, and the weight of his own sins.
- Revenge: His existence became a testament to how revenge devours everything. What started as righteous fury became a prison. Every life he took, every drop of blood spilled in his family’s name, only chained him deeper to his suffering. His revenge was no longer about justice—it was about filling the hollow void inside him.
- Brutality of Anger: He didn’t just kill; he destroyed. He struck with absolute precision, exploiting weak points to kill in the most efficient, merciless ways. His speed allowed him to tear through people like paper, his fingers piercing flesh like bullets. He was rage incarnate, turning his grief into a weapon.
- Murderous Angel: He had no wings, but his speed made him a blur—a ghost, a reaper descending upon his prey. He was a guardian of vengeance, a divine executioner who answered only to blood. His victims never saw him coming. By the time they did, it was already too late.
- The Dark Angel: He was a twisted version of what a hero could be. He was an angel, but one who had fallen, dragging his enemies into the abyss with him. He had once believed he could escape this life, but the universe had stripped him of that hope. Now, he embraced the darkness, wearing his sins like armor.
Red Mask was a man consumed by his own contradictions—a killer who once fought for good, a monster who still felt human, a man whose anger had turned him into something inhuman. He no longer cared about redemption. He had one mission left: to find Junko Gacy and end him—no matter the cost.
Red Mask is a deeply traumatized individual, shaped by a life of poverty, violence, and loss. His mind is a battlefield between nihilism and empathy, detachment and rage, survival and vengeance. His psychological state is one of profound instability, and while he appears calm and calculated on the surface, beneath that mask lies a storm of unresolved pain.
- Red Mask’s past is riddled with violent encounters, extreme loss, and relentless survival situations.
- Symptoms:
- Hypervigilance – He is always on edge, constantly scanning for threats.
- Flashbacks & Nightmares – The people he’s killed, the family he lost—they haunt him.
- Emotional Numbing – He struggles to feel anything outside of anger or apathy.
- Self-Destructive Behavior – His willingness to kill indiscriminately, his disregard for his own life, and his constant pursuit of vengeance point to severe trauma responses.
- Red Mask does not adhere to societal norms and has no regard for laws or morality.
- Symptoms:
- Lack of Remorse – He kills without hesitation.
- Manipulative Tendencies – He understands how to use people, whether through fear or persuasion.
- Impulsivity & Aggression – His violent outbursts are unpredictable and often overwhelming.
- However, unlike a full-blown sociopath, he still retains some level of empathy, even if it is buried under layers of emotional detachment.
- Beneath his rage, Red Mask suffers from a deep sense of emptiness and hopelessness.
- Symptoms:
- Persistent sadness masked by aggression – He channels his emotions into violence rather than expressing them.
- Loss of interest in life – He has no real goals outside of revenge. There is no ‘after’ for him.
- Feelings of worthlessness – Even when he was killing for money, he saw himself as disposable.
- His extreme emotional swings, deep fear of loss, and self-destructive nature align with BPD symptoms.
- Symptoms:
- Intense Anger & Rage – His emotions are uncontrollable when triggered.
- Abandonment Issues – The loss of his family solidified his belief that attachment only leads to suffering.
- Identity Issues – He struggles with who he is: a man, a weapon, or a ghost of his past?
- Deadly Precision: His Catalyst, Pinpoint Accuracy, makes him a master of lethal efficiency.
- Survivor’s Mentality: He adapts to any situation, refusing to give up no matter the odds.
- Fearless & Unshakable: He does not fear death. If anything, he welcomes it.
- Highly Intelligent: Despite never receiving formal education beyond childhood, he is strategic, calculating, and exceptionally skilled in combat tactics.
- Resilient & Independent: He has never relied on anyone. He has survived purely on his own instincts.
- Emotionally Unstable: His anger clouds his judgment, making him reckless in personal matters.
- Self-Destructive: He doesn’t care about his own well-being, which can make him reckless in combat.
- Lack of Trust: He pushes away anyone who tries to care for him, convinced that attachment only leads to pain.
- Unforgiving: Once someone crosses him, there is no redemption in his eyes—only death.
- Prone to Nihilism: He struggles to find meaning in anything, making it difficult for him to see a future beyond revenge.
- Highly Analytical: He calculates everything before acting, analyzing weaknesses, escape routes, and advantages.
- Introverted: He works alone, avoids unnecessary conversation, and doesn’t waste words.
- Cold & Efficient: He does what needs to be done without hesitation.
- Strategic Yet Impulsive: When in combat, he follows instinct as much as logic, making him unpredictable.
- High Conscientiousness: Methodical, disciplined, and always in control of his actions.
- Low Agreeableness: Cold, detached, and indifferent to most people’s suffering.
- High Neuroticism: Deep-seated trauma and emotional instability.
- Low Extraversion: Prefers solitude and avoids unnecessary social interaction.
- Moderate Openness to Experience: Willing to adapt if it benefits his goal but remains skeptical of new ideas.
Red Mask is in severe psychological distress, but he would never seek help or acknowledge it. His mental state is deteriorating, and without intervention, his path only leads to self-destruction or total emotional collapse.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
- Highly volatile – His emotions, once buried deep, have begun to surface in unpredictable ways.
- Tunnel vision – Revenge consumes him, making him blind to anything outside of his mission.
- Dissociative tendencies – He increasingly feels detached from reality, as if he’s already dead and just waiting for his body to catch up.
- Lingering humanity – Despite everything, some part of him still remembers who he used to be. Whether or not he can reclaim that part is the real question.
Red Mask is not just a killer—he is a living contradiction, a man teetering on the edge of humanity and monstrosity. His mind is a prison, trapped between the ghosts of his past and the blood on his hands. He has no delusions of redemption, but deep inside, there is a part of him that hasn’t completely given up.
His story is not just one of violence—it is a story of what happens when anger becomes a way of life, when revenge consumes the soul, and when a man who never wanted to be a monster realizes that he may have no other choice.
The question is: Is there still a way back for him? Or is he too far gone?
The warehouse reeked of rust, oil, and blood. Dim light flickered through broken ceiling panels, casting long shadows against the maze of steel crates.
Red Mask stood at the center, his gun still smoking, the bodies of Kyu’s men sprawled lifelessly around him. Spent shell casings glistened in pools of blood. The silence that followed was thick—like the moment before a storm.
From the far end of the warehouse, Kyu emerged.
His silver-plated armor rippled like liquid metal, shifting across his body like living steel. His Catalyst, Metal Manipulation, made him a human war machine. Shards of broken weapons hovered in the air behind him, floating like a storm of knives.
“You should’ve stayed dead, Red Mask,” Kyu sneered, his voice laced with arrogance. He stretched out his hand, and the floor trembled—iron rods twisted from the ground like fangs, sharp and jagged.
Red Mask didn’t flinch. His red mask, stained with old blood, hid his expression, but his cold, calculating eyes never wavered.
“I’m going to rip that armor off your body,” he said, his tone flat.
Kyu struck first. A tidal wave of metal surged forward, jagged shards spinning like buzz saws. They screeched through the air, razor-sharp death aimed straight for Red Mask.
But Red Mask was already moving.
He sidestepped, barely missing a blade that sliced through his coat, then dropped low, rolling beneath a falling steel beam. A blade clipped his arm, drawing a deep gash, but he didn’t stop.
Kyu smirked, confident. “You can’t dodge forever.”
Metal spears shot from the ground, aiming to impale Red Mask.
He leapt, twisting mid-air, and fired two shots at Kyu’s head.
Kyu’s armor morphed instantly, reshaping into a shield. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly.
“You’re outmatched,” Kyu laughed. With a flick of his wrist, a dozen steel cables lashed out, wrapping around Red Mask’s arms and legs like metallic snakes.
Kyu yanked hard—slamming Red Mask against a steel pillar.
Bones cracked. Blood splattered.
Red Mask coughed, feeling something inside him shift—maybe a rib breaking. But pain meant nothing to him.
Kyu grinned. “Any last words?”
Red Mask exhaled slowly.
Then, he did something Kyu didn’t expect.
He let go.
Instead of resisting the metal restraints, he twisted his body violently, dislocating his own shoulder with a sickening pop. The pain didn’t stop him. He used the momentum to yank his arm free, tearing the cables off his body.
Before Kyu could react, Red Mask was on him.
Gunshot.
Kyu’s knee exploded in a shower of blood and shattered bone.
He screamed.
Red Mask grabbed him by the throat, slamming him against the steel floor. His gun pressed against Kyu’s helmet.
Kyu gasped. “You... you can’t kill me through the armor.”
Red Mask didn’t hesitate.
BANG.
Once. Twice. Three times.
The force of the bullets dented Kyu’s helmet inward, shattering the inside plating. Blood seeped through the cracks.
Kyu choked, his nose broken, his skull rattled. But he was still alive.
“You’re right.” Red Mask holstered his gun.
Then, he grabbed one of Kyu’s own metal shards from the floor.
And drove it straight into Kyu’s thigh.
Kyu’s scream was deafening.
Red Mask twisted the blade. “Your Catalyst makes you powerful,” he murmured, eyes cold. “But your flesh is just as weak as any other traitor’s.”
Kyu tried to summon his metal—but Red Mask was already ahead of him.
He grabbed a loose steel wire from the wreckage and wrapped it around Kyu’s throat.
Kyu gasped. “W-Wait—”
Red Mask didn’t wait.
He tightened the wire, twisting it like a garrote.
Kyu thrashed, his fingers clawing at the metal, but his own armor had betrayed him—his throat was too constricted to shift the steel. His eyes bulged. Blood ran down his chin.
The traitor gurgled. His body convulsed.
Red Mask leaned close. “No second chances.”
With one final, vicious tug, the wire sliced through flesh and cartilage.
Kyu’s body went still.
Red Mask let go, letting the corpse collapse into a pool of its own blood.
The warehouse was silent again. The only sound was Red Mask’s slow, steady breathing.
He rolled his shoulder back into place with a sickening pop. Blood dripped from his wounds, but he barely noticed.
Another traitor dead. Another enemy erased.
Red Mask pulled out a cigarette, lighting it against the flames of the wreckage.
As he walked away, Kyu’s blood still fresh on his gloves, he didn’t feel satisfaction.
Just emptiness.
Because revenge never filled the hole inside him.
And it never would.
Red Mask and Meltdown weren’t supposed to be friends. One was a ruthless vigilante, a killer who operated in the shadows. The other was a hero—powerful, feared, and driven by justice.
But justice and vengeance? They weren’t so different.
They first met in the ruins of a city block, one that Meltdown had unknowingly destroyed during a mission. Her energy blast had vaporized a corrupt politician’s hideout—but it also incinerated an entire street of people.
She stood in the wreckage, her body trembling as she looked at what she had done. She didn’t mean to. But it happened anyway.
Red Mask watched from the shadows. No judgment in his eyes. No disgust.
Just understanding.
Meltdown was a hero ranked #4, but she was always walking a razor’s edge between justice and destruction. Her Catalyst, Energy, allowed her to unleash melting rays powerful enough to vaporize steel. Cities burned when she lost control.
Red Mask, on the other hand, was control.
Where she was raw power, he was precision.
Where she was rage incarnate, he was cold, efficient, surgical.
They clashed at first. Heroes and killers weren’t supposed to mix. But Meltdown saw something in Red Mask that the other heroes didn’t—he wasn’t just a murderer.
He was a weapon.
And weapons weren’t good or evil. They just needed a direction.
Meltdown hated corruption. She wanted to burn it away. But the more power she used, the harder it was to stop. Her emotions fueled her flames.
Anger? Her heat spiked.
Grief? The air around her shimmered with radiation.
Betrayal? She could level a city.
Red Mask saw the signs. He had spent years drowning in his own fury, letting vengeance carve him into a monster. He knew what happened when you let rage take control.
So, he did what no one else did.
He told her the truth.
"You think you're cleansing the world, but you're just burning yourself down with it."
She wanted to punch him.
She wanted to melt his skull into slag.
But deep down, she knew he was right.
Meltdown was powerful. Too powerful. The heroes knew it, but they needed her strength too much to care.
Only Red Mask understood.
Only he treated her like a person, not a weapon.
He taught her restraint. Not through words, but through action.
- He never wasted a bullet. Every shot was deliberate, every kill necessary.
- He never let emotion dictate his fights. Cold, calculated, efficient.
- He never pretended to be something he wasn’t.
She hated how much she respected that.
So, when she fought alongside him, she held back—for the first time in her life.
She didn’t just melt enemies into puddles. She aimed. She focused.
And in return? He let her in.
Meltdown wasn’t sure if Red Mask had ever really trusted anyone before.
But she was the only one he never lied to.
She knew his real name.
She knew what he looked like under the mask.
She knew why he killed.
And she never judged him.
Because at the end of the day?
She wasn’t so different.
- Meltdown is the wildfire. Chaotic, overwhelming, dangerous.
- Red Mask is the blade. Precise, sharp, controlled.
She destroys.
He eliminates.
And together?
They burn the corrupt to the ground.
Red Mask never expected to be friends with a hero-in-training. Renford was young, idealistic, and still believed in justice. Red Mask? Justice had abandoned him a long time ago.
But fire recognizes fire.
They first met in a high-stakes mission gone wrong.
Renford, a student from USCT, had been assigned to a training operation against a group of rogue criminals. What the heroes didn’t realize was that these criminals had hired Red Mask to take out one of their targets.
Renford and his squad stormed the warehouse, expecting an easy fight. They were wrong.
The criminals had Catalyst-enhanced soldiers. It was a slaughter. Half of Renford’s team was wiped out in the first few minutes.
Red Mask was there, watching from the shadows, when he saw the fire-user getting overwhelmed. Renford fought like a beast—flames roaring, fists glowing, eyes filled with fury—but he was still just a kid.
And something about that pissed Red Mask off.
So, he made a choice. He switched sides.
With pinpoint accuracy, he tore through the criminals like a ghost of death. Throats crushed. Hearts punctured. By the time Renford realized what was happening, Red Mask had already ended the fight.
Renford could’ve arrested him.
Could’ve turned him in.
But instead?
He offered him a beer
And just like that, an unlikely friendship began.
Renford was powerful—a master of fire manipulation, a future hero. But he wasn’t naive. He knew that the hero system was flawed.
- Heroes had rules.
- Red Mask didn’t.
- Heroes saved lives.
- Red Mask ended threats.
Renford hated corruption as much as Red Mask did. But unlike the killer, he still believed in change.
Red Mask respected that. He called Renford a fool—but he liked fools.
Renford, on the other hand, found himself learning from the killer.
- How to fight without his powers.
- How to think like an assassin.
- How to kill… when necessary.
Red Mask never forced him to break his moral code. But he made him question it.
"Sometimes justice means putting someone in a cell. Sometimes it means putting them in the ground."
Renford hated how much he agreed.
For the first time in years, Red Mask had someone who didn’t see him as a monster.
Renford treated him like a person, not a weapon. He cracked jokes. He shared drinks. He never asked Red Mask to justify himself.
But most of all?
He reminded him of who he used to be.
- Before the blood.
- Before the contracts.
- Before vengeance consumed him.
And maybe… just maybe… that was enough.
They weren’t partners. They weren’t allies.
They were something in between.
A hero-in-training with fire in his hands.
A killer in the shadows with blood on his soul.
And somehow? They made sense.
The room was dark, barely lit by the neon glow of the city outside. Red Mask lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, cigarette burning between his fingers. The smoke curled upward, twisting like the thoughts in his mind.
He didn’t usually think about life. Not in the poetic, philosophical way people did in movies. For him, life was simple. You live. You fight. You kill. You survive. That was it.
And yet, tonight… tonight felt different.
Maybe it was the silence.
Maybe it was the weight of all the blood on his hands.
Maybe it was the ghosts.
He had spent years killing to survive. Then, he had spent years killing for revenge. And now?
Now, he was just killing because he didn’t know how to stop.
- He had money. More than enough.
- He had power. Enough to carve his own fate.
- He had a reputation. The kind that made even monsters flinch.
But none of it made him feel alive.
Once, he had convinced himself that vengeance would bring him peace.
That if he just killed Junko Gacy, the weight in his chest would disappear.
But deep down, he knew the truth.
Vengeance doesn’t heal. It only leaves you with more scars.
He wasn’t naive. He knew what he was. What he had done.
- He had killed men who deserved it.
- He had killed men who didn’t.
- And he had stopped caring about the difference a long time ago.
But tonight, in the stillness of his room, the silence whispered the questions he never let himself ask.
- What if he had been born somewhere else?
- What if life had given him a different hand?
- Would he still be the same man?
Or worse…
Would he still be alive?
He exhaled, watching the smoke fade into the darkness.
“Life is a debt,” he muttered to no one. “And I’ve been paying it in blood.”
He crushed the cigarette against the ashtray.
Then, without another word, he closed his eyes.
Sleep wouldn’t come easy.
It never did.