PROLOGUE
The man on his knees had stopped begging three minutes ago.
Gus crouched down, resting his forearms on his thighs, and studied the ruined face before him with the detached smile of a hunter eyeing its prey. The warehouse light flickered, a bad bulb, or maybe one of his men had put a round through it earlier. He couldn't remember. “f*****g Idiots!” He sighed to himself.
“nkkllkjbjhv!” A small voice whispered.
"Say it again," Gus said.
The man's lips moved. Blood bubbled. Nothing came out.
"Shame." Gus stood, stretching his back like he'd been sitting through a boring meeting.
Behind him, two of his minions exchanged glances. They'd learned his cues early enough. This was cue six hundred and fifty two.
He was an almost large man. This confused people. You'd expect brutality to come in bulk, to announce itself with sheer size and scar tissue and a certain viking thickness of the brow. But Gus was lean. Clean-shaven. He wore suits that cost more than most people's cars but looked like he'd slept in them, because he usually had. His hair was dark and always slightly too long, falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger than his thirty -six years. His hands were the hands of a pianist or a surgeon - long-fingered, elegant, disturbingly steady.
Those hands had killed 19 men that he could name.
There were others he could not.
He hated himself.
He hated admitting it to himself more. Would not have admitted it under any conventional form of duress and he had a fairly broad understanding of what duress could look like. It was not something he liked thinking about.
But it was there.
Had always been there. A low frequency hum beneath everything. A core knowing, that the life he had built was built on a foundation that had bled through years ago and was now held up purely by skeletons and the fact that everyone around him was too afraid to point at the cracks.
He had been born a weakling, an anomaly, a bastard!
He had become undeniable.
He had turned the gap between those two things into an empire.
And from that s**t he rose!
In moments like this where his demons were tested. He derived his strength from this. His f****d up past. A cursed man who was told by his very existence that he did not matter and decided, with total and irrevocable commitment, to make that the world's problem.
But strength and peace were different things.
Always had one.
Never the other.
"What's your name?" Gus asked suddenly, turning back to the man on the floor.
The man tried to speak. A wet, rattling sound.
The man's eyes widened. Or tried to. One of them was already swollen shut.
He crouched again, face to face with his untimely guest. Paused. Reached into his jacket pocket. Pulled out a small paper twist of something.
His men tensed. They'd seen him do this before.
He unwrapped the candy a strawberry bonbon, pink and unassuming, the kind you'd give a child after a pulled tooth and popped it into his mouth. Sucked thoughtfully. His jaw worked the sugar as he considered the man on his knees.
"I don't forgive."
He said it simply. Without heat. Without the theatrical menace of a man who needed to prove he was dangerous. That was the thing about Gus. He didn't need to prove anything. The proof was all around them; in the warehouse walls that had absorbed a thousand screams, in the river three blocks east that had accepted a thousand bodies, in the empire he'd built from the ground up with nothing but nerve and cruelty and a complete absence of mercy. It was undeniable!
"I don't forgive," he repeated, the bonbon clicking against his teeth, "and I don't forget. But I do get bored. So here's what's going to happen. You're going to tell me who sent you. Not because I'll let you live if you do I won't. But because if you don't, I'm going to find your sweet, long haired-blue eyed mother. And I'm going to make her pray for you to die."
The man broke. He’d heard what this devil does to people. He’d never heard of survivors. Ever! Only gorged eyes , dissolved bones and missing family members.
It took less than ten seconds.
Gus listened to the name, nodded like he'd expected it all along, and stood up. He dusted off his knees restlessly, almost fussy and walked toward the warehouse door. Halfway there, he stopped. Reached into his pocket again. Pulled out another bonbon.
He turned. Tossed it.
The candy landed on the man's lap.
"For the road," Gus said.
And then he was gone, stepping out into the rain without an umbrella, without a coat, without any apparent awareness that the weather was inconvenient. His driver scrambled to open the car door. Gus didn't acknowledge him. He never acknowledged anyone unless he wanted something.
The car pulled away from the curb, and Gus sat in the back seat, sucking his strawberry candy, watching the rain streak the window like tears, and feeling absolutely nothing at all.
