Chapter 45: Blood in the Boardroom
The rain hadn’t let up for days. It sheeted down the grimy warehouse windows, turning the world outside into a blur of bruised purple and neon smears. The meeting was supposed to be straightforward—a handoff of shipping manifests, a greasing of palms for the new port authority commissioner’s “consultants.” Low-level bureaucratic bullshit Roman found tedious but necessary. He’d sent Reese because, as he’d put it, “You look the part, and you scare the pricks in suits. They see me, they get ambitious. They see you, they just want to leave.”
Reese had gone alone. A show of confidence. Or a test. He was never sure with Roman.
The warehouse was a cavern of echoing emptiness and the sharp, metallic scent of rust. His boots echoed on the concrete as he approached the designated spot under a flickering fluorescent tube. Two men in cheap overcoats waited, looking nervous. Standard.
The third man, leaning against a stack of moldy pallets, wasn’t. He had the stillness of a predator. Reese clocked him immediately—the too-clean boots, the way his hands were kept loose at his sides, not shoved in pockets.
The handoff started fine. Envelopes exchanged. Reese kept his gaze on the third man.
It happened fast. A sound, soft and slick, from behind a pillar. Reese started to turn, but the nervous-looking suit in front of him wasn’t nervous anymore. He lunged, not for the envelope, but for Reese’s arm. Reese twisted, but a second man—he hadn’t even seen the second—came from his blind side, wrapping him in a bear hug from behind.
The third man pushed off the pallets. A knife appeared in his hand, long and thin, a surgeon’s tool. Two more figures melted from the shadows. Five total. Not three.
“Sionis’s little project,” the knife-man said, his voice a gravelly monotone. “He talks pretty for you, doesn’t he? Tells you you’re special. Let’s see how special you are when you’re bleeding out on the floor.”
Reese stopped struggling. He went limp in the man’s grip, letting his weight sag. As the holder adjusted, Reese snapped his head back hard. He felt the crunch of a nose, a wet scream in his ear. The grip loosened. He drove an elbow into a solar plexus, broke free, and pivoted.
A fist caught him on the temple. Stars exploded. He stumbled back, his hand catching on a crate, finding purchase on the neck of a forgotten whiskey bottle. He swung it in a wide, desperate arc. It connected with the knife-man’s wrist. Bone cracked. The knife skittered away into the dark. The bottle shattered, leaving a jagged spear of brown glass in Reese’s fist.
He grinned, blood from a split lip coating his teeth. “First one’s free.”
They swarmed him.
The broken bottle was a brief advantage. He opened a cheek on one, buried the glass in a thigh of another. Then a metal pipe took him in the kidney from behind. The breath left his body in a shocked, silent gasp. He dropped to his knees. Kicks landed—ribs, stomach, the side of his head. The world narrowed to bursts of white pain and the wet sound of impacts on his body. He curled in, protecting his vitals, as the storm of blows rained down. Someone wrenched his arm behind his back, a sickening pop followed by a firework of agony in his shoulder.
Through the haze, he heard the gravelly voice. “Enough. He’s no good to us dead.”
A bag, stinking of concrete dust and mildew, was dragged over his head. The world went dark and choking. He felt hands grip him under his armpits, his ankles, and he was lifted, his body a single screaming nerve. He was carried, jostled, then dumped onto a cold, unforgiving metal surface. An engine coughed to life. Tires hissed on wet pavement.
Blackness, punctuated by pain, swallowed him whole.
Back at the Bristol estate, Roman looked at the clock. Then he looked at his phone. No messages. Reese was fifteen minutes past check-in.
A cold, precise anger, different from his usual volatile rage, began to crystallize in his gut. He opened a tracking app on his tablet. The signal from the subdermal implant—a necessity for all his key assets—was stationary. At the warehouse. Not moving.
He was in the car within two minutes, driving himself. He didn’t call for backup. This was between him and whatever had dared to touch what was his.
The warehouse door hung open, swinging slightly in the wind. The scene inside was a messy, silent scream. Overturned crates. A dark, sticky pool of blood soaking into the concrete dust. Shards of brown glass glittering under the flickering light. And a single, familiar platinum ring, discarded near the wall.
Roman knelt, picking up the ring. It was the one from the night at the Lounge. He closed his fist around it, the metal biting into his palm. His eyes scanned the blood pattern. Defensive. A struggle. Then a larger pool where someone had lain, motionless, before being dragged.
He stood, his movements terrifyingly calm. He pulled out his phone, dialed a number he rarely used directly. “I want every traffic camera, every street-level snitch, every patrol car’s route from the Dock 7 warehouse in the last thirty minutes.” His voice was flat, devoid of inflection. “Find the vehicle. Find my property. You have one hour before I start peeling faces off.”
Consciousness returned in a nauseating wave. Reese came to lying on his back on something hard and cold. A surgical table, its cracked green vinyl cushioning long since perished. Straps—thick, worn leather—bound his wrists and ankles to the metal frame. The air was thick with the smell of antiseptic and decay, a chilling parody of a hospital.
Every breath sent a sharp, grinding pain through his left side. Broken ribs, probably. His shoulder was a hot balloon of agony, dislocated for sure. He tested the straps. They were tight, unforgiving.
A single, dusty operating lamp hung directly above him, its bulb casting a pitiless white circle on his bruised torso. He was shirtless, his tattoos a violent roadmap across his pale skin. His new bruises, darkening to ugly purples and yellows, blended with the older ones Roman had left.
Footsteps clicked on the tile floor, echoing in the vast, empty room. A figure moved into the edge of the light.
Oswald Cobblepot.
He wasn’t what Reese expected. Shorter, leaning on a finely carved cane, dressed in a ludicrously formal tailcoat that was out of place in the grime. His hair was slicked back, a cruel parody of elegance. He stood over Reese, his small eyes taking in the damage with detached, clinical interest.
“He does leave his mark, doesn’t he?” Penguin said, his voice a nasally wheeze. He tapped Reese’s ribs with the tip of his cane. Reese jerked, a hiss escaping his clenched teeth. “The collar was a nice touch. Very possessive. I suppose he had to find some way to make you presentable.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Reese croaked, his throat raw.
“Eloquent.” Cobblepot smiled, a thin, humorless stretch of his lips. “Roman always did have a taste for strays with spirit. It’s his sentimentality. A fatal flaw.” He leaned closer, the smell of his expensive cologne clashing with the room’s rot. “Here is what is going to happen. You are going to tell me the access codes for the dry docks. The ones Sionis just ‘acquired.’ Then, you are going to tell me the names of the three judges who were so… persuadable in dropping his charges.”
Reese laughed, a wet, painful sound. “You think he tells me that shit?”
“I think he whispers it in your ear while he fucks you,” Penguin said calmly. “I think you are his weakness, walking around on two legs. A shiny new toy he can’t stop playing with. And toys break.” He nodded to someone in the shadows.
A man stepped forward. He was huge, with a meaty, bored face. He carried a heavy canvas roll, which he unfurled on a metal trolley beside the table. Surgical tools gleamed dully under the light. Not sterile. Just sharp.
Reese’s heart hammered against his broken ribs. He stared at the ceiling, at a water stain shaped like a continent. He thought of Roman’s hand on the back of his neck. The weight of the platinum collar. The look in his eyes in the Lounge. You look exactly like what you are.
“The codes,” Penguin repeated, his voice gentle. “Let’s not make this theatrical. I have a dinner reservation.”
Reese turned his head, spitting a mouthful of coppery blood onto the floor near Penguin’s polished shoe. He looked up, meeting the little man’s eyes, and grinned his bloodstained grin. “You should’ve stuck to birds, Ozzy. You’re out of your depth.”
Penguin’s smile vanished. He sighed, a disappointed sound.
Roman’s town car screamed through the rain-lashed streets. His phone lit up with a coordinates ping. A disused veterinary clinic in the Bowery, owned by a shell corporation linked to a shipping company Cobblepot used for smuggling exotic animals.
He didn’t wait for backup. Rage was a white-hot coil in his chest, focused and pure. Someone had taken what was his. Had touched what was his. The world needed to understand the cost.
He parked a block away, moving through the alleyways like a shadow. The back door to the clinic was ajar. He slipped inside, the smell of wet animal fur and formaldehyde assaulting his senses. He heard a voice, nasally and smug, from deeper within. Then a muffled, choked-off sound that wasn’t an animal.
Roman moved forward, a stiletto knife silent in his hand. The world had narrowed to a point. To a room. To the man who had dared.
He was coming. And there would be no more talking.
The first guard died without a sound, Roman’s knife finding the soft space beneath his jaw. The body crumpled against a stack of empty birdcages with a rustle of metal. Roman caught the walkie-talkie before it hit the floor, listening to the static crackle of bored voices further in.
He moved through the darkened offices, a spectre in a two-thousand-dollar suit. The second guard, leaning against a doorframe scrolling on his phone, heard nothing until Roman’s arm locked around his throat. The phone clattered to the floor, the screen cracking on impact. The chokehold was efficient, relentless. The guard’s frantic kicks slowed, then stopped. Roman lowered him quietly, retrieving the dropped pistol from his holster.
The corridors of the old clinic were a maze of peeling paint and faded animal charts. A line of light bled from under a double door at the end of the hall. Muffled sounds leaked out—a voice, then a wet, terrible crunch followed by a strangled gasp that Roman knew, down in his bones, was Reese.
His pace didn’t quicken. It became more deliberate.
Inside the operating room, the world had narrowed to pain and light. The Penguin’s man, whose name Reese never learned, worked with a dreadful, unhurried precision. He had started with the left ankle, using a rubber mallet to methodically shatter the smaller bones. Each impact was a sickening thud that vibrated up Reese’s entire skeleton. He’d screamed then, a raw, involuntary sound that tore from his throat.
He’d bitten his tongue bloody to stop the next one.
“The access codes,” Penguin reiterated, leaning on his cane. He sounded almost bored.
Reese panted, sweat dripping into his eyes. He focused on the water stain on the ceiling. It looked like Australia. “Go… visit the docks yourself,” he managed, his voice trembling with the effort to keep it steady. “I hear the view… is lovely this time of year.”
The man with the mallet exchanged it for a sharp, hooked blade. He didn’t speak. He just made a long, deep incision along the inside of Reese’s calf, parting skin and muscle with a terrible, slick sound. Reese arched against the straps, a silent scream locked behind his clenched teeth. The pain was a white-hot nova, erasing thought.
“You are delaying the inevitable,” Penguin sighed, checking his watch. “This stubbornness is so pedestrian.”
The man worked upward. Tendons were separated with the tip of the blade. A periosteal elevator, a tool meant to peel tissue from bone, was used to scrape along Reese’s shin. It made a sound like a shovel on gravel. Reese’s vision swam, dark at the edges. He vomited, turning his head just in time, the acid burning his cracked lips.
They had moved to his thigh now. A different tool, a small, brutal saw, was used to score the femur. The high-pitched whine filled the room, the vibration traveling through his body in nauseating waves. He could smell his own scorched bone. The man leaned his weight into it.
A sound escaped Reese then, not a scream, but a broken, animal whimper. He hated it.
He thought of Roman’s face, the cold fury in his eyes when he was challenged. He thought of the weight of the harness, the possessive grip on the back of his neck. The way Roman looked at him after, like something priceless he’d reclaimed. He held onto that image, letting it anchor him in the storm of agony.
“Just… the judges, then,” Penguin tried, a note of frustration creeping into his wheeze. “Three names. That’s all. Then this stops.”
Reese blinked sweat and tears from his eyes. He looked at Cobblepot, right in his small, piggish eyes. He summoned a grin, all blood and defiance. “Their names… are ‘Go,’ ‘Fuck,’ and ‘Yourself.’ … You want the spelling?”
He saw genuine anger flash across Penguin’s face. A victory, tiny and costly.
The man moved to his right leg, starting fresh at the ankle. The mallet rose again.
Down the hall, Roman passed a room with a monitor showing four camera feeds. One was the operating room. He saw Reese’s body strapped to the table, saw the man with the tools, saw the small, suited figure of Cobblepot. He saw the blood, the awful, intimate violation of it. The cold fury inside him ignited into something primal and incandescent.
He didn’t break his stride. He simply turned towards the door.
Two more guards stood outside it, chatting about a football game. They died confused. Roman shot the first in the throat with the guard’s own pistol, the suppressed pfft sound lost under the whine of the bone saw from within. The second turned, fumbling for his weapon, and Roman drove his knife up under his ribs, through the diaphragm and into the heart. He let the body slide down, propping it against the wall.
He stood before the double doors. He took a slow, steadying breath, the knife in one hand, the pistol in the other. He could hear the saw. He could hear Reese’s ragged, sobbing breaths.
He kicked the doors open.
The scene froze. Penguin’s man looked up, his bloody hands still holding the saw against Reese’s ruined ankle. Cobblepot spun, his eyes widening. Reese, through a haze of unimaginable pain, turned his head. He saw Roman framed in the doorway, backlit by the hall’s dim light, his suit immaculate, his face a mask of serene, murderous calm.
For a second, there was only the hum of the operating lamp.
Roman’s eyes met Reese’s. They held for a fraction of a second—a transfer of something wordless, an acknowledgment. Then Roman moved.
The man with the saw was the first priority. He was still holding the tool, his reflexes slowed by shock. Roman didn’t shoot him. He crossed the room in three long strides and, with a savage, backhanded swipe of his knife, opened the man’s throat from ear to ear. Blood arced across the green vinyl, a shocking, violent spray. The man dropped, the bone saw clattering to the floor beside the table, its whine dying into silence.
Penguin stumbled back, fumbling for something inside his tailcoat. “Sionis, you fool, you can’t—”
Roman shot him in the leg. The report was deafening in the tiled room. Cobblepot shrieked, collapsing against the trolley of instruments, sending them cascading across the floor with a metallic clatter. He clutched his thigh, blood welling between his fingers.
Roman didn’t even look at him. He went to Reese. His eyes scanned the devastation—the grotesque angles of the left leg, the deep, purposeful cuts, the pale gleam of bone in the lamp light. A muscle in his jaw ticked, a tiny, frantic pulse. He gently, so gently, brushed the sweat-soaked hair from Reese’s forehead.
“I’m here,” he said, his voice low and rough, a private sound meant only for Reese. He began unfastening the leather straps at the wrists, his fingers sure and quick. “Just look at me.”
Reese’s breath hitched, a wet, shuddering sound. His eyes, glazed with pain, found Roman’s and clung to them. The defiance was still there, but it was a flickering ember now, banked beneath sheer, drowning agony. “Took… your time,” he rasped, the ghost of a joke in his ruined voice.
One strap came free, then the other. Reese’s arm fell limp to the table. Roman moved to the ankles, his hands carefully avoiding the brutalized flesh. As the last strap released, Reese’s body went completely slack, a shudder of relief and total systemic collapse rolling through him.
Roman shrugged out of his suit jacket, bundling it. He carefully, so carefully, slid it under Reese’s head. Then he turned. The serene calm was gone, replaced by a glacial, focused rage. He walked over to where Cobblepot writhed on the floor.
He knelt beside him, placing the bloody knife on the floor within the little man’s view. He picked up a tool from the scattered array—the periosteal elevator, its tip still glistening.
“You used this on him,” Roman stated, his voice devoid of all inflection.
Penguin shook his head, his face pale with shock and pain. “It was business, Roman, you know that! He’s just a—”
Roman drove the tool into Penguin’s right eye.
There was a soft, wet pop, then a scream that was high and thin and endless. Roman worked the tool, his movements clinical, detached. Cobblepot’s body spasmed, his heels drumming a frantic tattoo on the tile floor. Roman leaned close, his lips almost brushing the man’s remaining ear.
“He is mine,” Roman whispered, the words soft as a kiss. “And you are nothing.”
He stood, leaving the tool where it was lodged. He didn’t look back at the convulsing figure. He returned to the table, to Reese, who was watching through slitted eyes, his breathing shallow and rapid.
Roman’s hands, which had just been instruments of horrific violence, were suddenly tender. He smoothed the hair back from Reese’s brow again. “I need to move you,” he said, his voice returned to that low, private register. “It’s going to hurt.”
Reese gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. He trusted the hands that had just carved a man apart to carry him now. That was the truest, most terrifying thing of all.
Roman slid his arms underneath Reese—one under his shoulders, avoiding the dislocated joint, the other under his knees, meticulously avoiding the worst of the damage on the left leg. He lifted him from the table. Reese cried out then, a short, sharp sound he couldn’t suppress, his head falling back against Roman’s chest.
“I know,” Roman murmured into his hair, holding him close, as if he could absorb the pain through his own skin. “I know.” He carried him from the room, stepping over the bodies, past the dying gurgles of the Penguin, and into the dark hall. He walked steadily towards the exit, towards the car, towards help only he could provide. Reese’s blood soaked into his pristine white shirt, a permanent claim.