2026-02-09 19:48:28BRAKK!
The sound did not come from splintering wood, but from Eduardo’s jaw colliding with the iron knuckles of Claude “The Sark.” Eduardo collapsed onto the wooden planks of the pier, slick with moss and rainwater. His head rang violently. The metallic taste of blood flooded his mouth, mixing with rain that tasted faintly of salt.
“Get up, Eduardo. I don’t think my punch was that hard,” Claude’s voice sounded calm beneath the roar of the storm.
Eduardo coughed, dark red blood spilling from his mouth. He tried to push himself up, but the moment he moved, the world spun violently.
“I told you… give me time, one more week,” Eduardo rasped, wiping blood from his lips with his hand.
One of Claude’s men, a bald thug with a scorpion tattoo on his neck, laughed mockingly while dragging on his cigarette. “One more week, huh, Boss? He said that last week. Same thing last month. Sounds like this loser’s mouth needs to be sewn shut.”
Claude lit his cigarette and crouched in front of Eduardo. He grabbed Eduardo’s rain-soaked hair, forcing him to look into eyes as cold as ice. Claude ruled this old pier. In his hands, human life was worth less than the illegal cargo that came through every night.
“Hey, asshole… I’m a businessman,” Claude muttered, blowing smoke into Eduardo’s face. “Business is about certainty, not sweet promises from trash mouths like yours,” he whispered into Eduardo’s ear.
“Claude… I’ll pay my debt… I will…”
“Shut up, you bastard!”
Buak… Buak!
Eduardo groaned in agony, clutching his stomach where he had just been struck, while Claude shook out the hand he had used to punch him.
“Your debt’s piled up. Just the interest could buy a new car. And now, I want payment. Tonight. Right now,” Claude said with a crooked smile.
“I don’t have any money left, Claude! You took everything!” Eduardo shouted in frustration. His voice was swallowed by thunder cracking in the distance.
Claude took another drag and slowly stood, wiping his hands with a silk handkerchief as if he had touched filth. “I know you don’t have cash. But you’ve got something a lot more valuable at home.”
Eduardo’s heart nearly stopped. “What do you mean?”
“Your wife’s beautiful, Eduardo. Too beautiful to rot in a shitty apartment with a loser like you,” Claude said casually.
“Claude…” Eduardo whispered as he tried to stand, but Claude’s men immediately held him down.
Claude snorted when he saw the fire burning in Eduardo’s eyes. “I just opened a new brothel branch downtown. High-end clientele. Emily will be a star there. Of course, I’ll need to train your wife for a week first, satisfy my appetite. In exchange, your debt’s wiped clean. Fair, right?”
“BASTARD!” Eduardo lunged forward, but two of Claude’s men slammed him down and kicked his stomach, sending him crashing back to the ground.
“You should be grateful,” Claude continued, smoking, ignoring Eduardo’s cries of pain. “Emily will get nice clothes, good food, and she’ll serve people with real money. Better than starving to death with you. She’ll be happier with me.”
“Step over my corpse first, you demon!” Eduardo spat on Claude’s expensive shoes. “I’ll kill you if you touch my wife!” He screamed, struggling with what little strength he had left.
Claude let out a long sigh, disappointment written across his face. “That’s the problem with poor people like you. Big pride, empty brains.”
He chuckled and shook his head. “You think you can kill me in your condition?”
Claude signaled with his finger. The bald man stepped forward and handed him a plastic folder filled with documents.
“Sign the collateral transfer agreement,” Claude said coldly. “Or I’ll send my men to your place right now, drag your wife out in front of your kid, and you’ll watch me and my boys take turns using her before I put a bullet in your head.”
Eduardo stared at the document with blurred vision. Emily’s gentle face filled his mind, along with Chloe, his five-year-old daughter. He imagined filthy hands touching them. Rage burned in his chest, eclipsing even his physical pain.
“So, Eduardo? Easy choice. Emily becomes a high-class whore, or you all die tonight,” Claude said, flicking away his cigarette.
Eduardo fell silent. He lowered his head, letting his hair hide his face.
“Okay… I agree,” Eduardo whispered.
Claude grinned with satisfaction and motioned for his men to release him. “That’s more like it. Now that’s a smart head of the family. Come on, sign it.”
The bald man shoved a pen and the document toward Eduardo’s face. Eduardo took them with trembling hands. He drew a deep breath, as if it were his last breath as a man with dignity.
Eduardo looked up. Instead of signing, he gathered all the blood and saliva in his mouth and spat straight into Claude’s handsome face.
Silence fell instantly, broken only by rain pounding against rusted metal around the pier. Claude’s men froze, unable to believe what they had just seen.
Claude closed his eyes. He wiped the spit from his face slowly. His hand trembled, not with fear, but with boiling rage.
“You… just chose the most painful path, Eduardo,” Claude said, his voice shaking with restrained fury.
“I might be a loser, Claude,” Eduardo grinned, blood coating his teeth. “But I’ll never sell my family to a devil like you.”
Claude did not shout. He simply nodded to his men. “Break him. Don’t let him die fast. I want to hear every bone snap, one by one.”
The storm of blows came instantly. Boots smashed into Eduardo’s ribs, forcing the air from his lungs. He curled into a fetal position, trying to protect his head, but they did not stop.
KRAK!
His left arm snapped as he tried to block a kick. Eduardo screamed, but thunder swallowed the sound.
“Die, you worthless trash!” the bald man roared, slamming a pistol grip into Eduardo’s temple.
Darkness took him instantly. He felt his body dragged across rough wood. The smell of the sea grew stronger. He knew what came next.
Claude stepped closer, unzipped his pants, and urinated on Eduardo’s face. “Enjoy your last drink, hero!”
Warm liquid splashed across Eduardo’s face. He tried to fight back, to kick Claude in a final act of defiance, but his body refused to obey his mind. Claude’s men laughed loudly as their boss relieved himself on Eduardo.
“Throw him into the sea,” Claude ordered coldly as he zipped up and jerked his chin. “Tomorrow morning, pick up Emily. Tell her her husband became shark food. If she doesn’t come quietly, you know what to do.”
“Yes, Boss!”
Two thugs lifted Eduardo’s limp body, swung him a few times, then hurled him over the pier railing.
For a brief moment, Eduardo felt weightless, before icy seawater swallowed him whole. The burning pain faded into a terrifying numbness. He sank deeper, farther from the dim pier lights above.
His lungs burned as oxygen ran out. Saltwater flooded his nose and mouth. In the pitch-black depths, only one thought remained.
“Emily… Chloe… forgive me. I was a useless husband and father.”
His consciousness began to fade. His heartbeat slowed. At the edge of death, regret crushed him harder than his shattered bones. He needed power. He needed a miracle. He wanted to slaughter them all.
Suddenly, in the total darkness, Eduardo’s chest flared with blinding light, and a cold yet authoritative mechanical voice echoed directly inside his mind, as if splitting his soul.
[CONDITION MET: TOTAL DESPAIR DETECTED.]
[ACTIVATING PROTOCOL: EQUIVALENT EXCHANGE.]
Eduardo’s body sank deeper toward the ocean floor beneath the pier, and with his next breath, his consciousness was violently torn into a completely different dimension.
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Ch 150. The Price of a Memory
The evening breeze drifted gently through Rome, sweeping across the square once known as Piazza della Mafia, now renamed Piazza del Fantasma, Ghost Square.At its center stood a monument that defied time itself.The ten-meter-tall statue, cast in black bronze, had no distinguishable face. It was only the silhouette of a man in a suit, his left hand missing one finger, gripping a grim reaper's scythe pointed toward the earth.At the foot of the monument, thousands of tiny candles lit by the citizens flickered beneath the wind, creating a sight that resembled a galaxy scattered across the asphalt that had once been soaked in blood.The golden plaque beneath it still gleamed.THE PRICE OF A MEMORY: PAID IN FULL.A young tourist turned to his guide."Why doesn't he have a face?""Because he traded it away," the guide answered with almost sacred reverence. "He gave up his face and his name so we would never have to look into the face of fear every time the sun went down."Far from the worl
Ch 149. Requiem (Song of Death)
Twenty years.Long enough to turn a pile of rubble into a monument, and vengeance into history that was almost forgotten. Yet in Rome, time seemed to revolve around a single axis, a white marble gravestone atop Crystal Heights. The cemetery was no longer merely a burial ground. It had become a cathedral for those who worshiped shadows.That morning, the Roman air was remarkably clear, as though the sky had been washed clean by the night's rain. A convoy of armored black limousines climbed the hill at a measured pace, passing rows of tactical security personnel standing at attention every ten meters along the private road.Vito Eduardo stepped out of the lead vehicle.At twenty-one years old, he was no longer the little boy who played with pebbles around a gravestone. He stood nearly six foot three, dressed in a custom-tailored charcoal gray three-piece suit crafted in Milan. His hair was jet black, sharply contrasting with his pale complexion.But the most striking feature was his eye
Ch 148. The Legacy of the System
Dust that had accumulated for nearly two decades swirled through the air as the soundproof steel door deep beneath Sark Tower groaned open with a piercing screech.This room did not exist on the building's official blueprints.Even Belerik, the keeper of the numbers, only dared enter once a year to make sure the ventilation system was still functioning.This was Sector Zero, the place where the Ghost's darkest secret had been sealed away behind walls lined with solid lead.Vito stood at the entrance.He had just turned twenty years old.He was taller than the average Italian man, broad-shouldered, with the solid posture forged through relentless training alongside the remnants of the Iron Guard. He wore a black suit without a tie. Thin leather gloves covered his hands, a habit he had copied from his father. His arms rested calmly at his sides.His pitch-black eyes, devoid of warmth yet as sharp as an eagle's, swept across the room.There was only a steel table.And resting in the cent
Ch 147. The Right Hand
Ten years had passed since the dust settled over the Commissioner's headquarters in Rome. Yet at the top of Sark Tower, time itself seemed frozen within the endless circuitry and the glow of monitors that never went dark.The main control room had become much quieter. There were no more explosions or pounding against reinforced steel doors. Only the steady hum of server cooling systems running twenty-four hours a day to keep trillions of dollars flowing smoothly across the world.Belerik sat in his advanced electric wheelchair, now equipped with sophisticated life-support sensors attached to his increasingly frail body.His hair had turned completely white.His skin was wrinkled like aged parchment.His carbon-fiber prosthetic leg rested stiffly against the wheelchair's foot support."Look at that number blinking in red, Vito. What does it mean?" Belerik asked in a raspy voice, interrupted by heavy breaths.Beside him stood a twelve-year-old boy with perfect posture.Vito.He wore a f
Ch 146. The Golden Cage
Snow fell relentlessly over Zermatt, Switzerland, until the majestic peak of the Matterhorn seemed to vanish beneath an endless sea of white fog. Atop the most isolated hill stood an ancient Gothic villa, completely renovated yet still imposing in its timeless grandeur. A thirteen-foot steel fence, charged with electricity, surrounded the estate, sealing it off from the outside world.The villa had everything: a heated swimming pool, an underground wine cellar stocked with vintage bottles from the 1940s, and furniture expensive enough to support an entire village in Italy. Yet inside the eight-hundred-square-meter mansion, the only sound was the soft clink of ice against crystal.Emily Eduardo sat before her vanity, surrounded by luxury cosmetics from Paris and bottles of Scotch whisky from Scotland. She wore a silk robe worth more than a teacher's annual salary, yet the radiant confidence of the once-proud "Parasite Queen" had long since disappeared.The face staring back at her had
Ch 145. A Conversation with a Ghost
The Roman sun slowly sank beneath the western horizon, leaving behind streaks of orange that looked like burn scars across the cooling evening sky. Within the grand private mausoleum, the last traces of Emily and Chloe's hypocrisy had vanished with the dust drifting across the pavement.Now, only silence remained.The kind of silence so dense that Freya could hear the slow rhythm of her own heartbeat, as if it were dying alongside the memories buried beneath this white marble.Freya knelt beside Eduardo's headstone, a simple monument with no carved portrait. Her expensive black dress was stained with dried mud and scattered gravel, but she didn't care. Beside her, two-year-old Vito sat with his chubby little legs stretched out, happily picking up white pebbles around the grave and stacking them into uneven little piles."Easy, Vito. Don't throw them," Freya whispered.Her voice was hoarse, still raw from the fury she had unleashed on Emily earlier.Vito glanced at his mother for only
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