Chapter 100

The following day, in the pre-dawn hours, he paid an inconspicuous visit to his protégée. Like a predator, he broke into her home unannounced. This time, he did not appear in her bedroom. Instead, he settled in the living room after helping himself to an apple from the fridge.

Malaya, alerted by suspicious noises, crept slowly toward the living room. In the shadows, she discerned his seated silhouette before she flicked on the light.

“Makizal!” she gasped, her heart pounding in her chest.

“Here I am. So, you aren’t looking for me anymore? I heard you paid a few visits to my hospital room while I was unwell. Was it out of solicitude?”

“What do you want? Have you come to eliminate me?”

“Should I?”

“I will never say anything negative against Williams,” she asserted, her voice trembling.

“And the police?”

“I only told them what I saw.”

Makizal remained calm, biting into his apple. “The document Williams left on the table, what did you do with it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You aren’t so different from me, finally. Malaya Montira.”

Malaya stared at him in silence, her fists clenched.

“You hid that document to protect Williams,” he continued, standing. “But I wonder. Was it to protect your boss, or to hide what she did to Emilio and his gang?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Don’t play the ignorant. In this affair, you are the only one who has won everything: a prestigious position, a colossal salary, and swift justice dealt to the perverts who harmed you.”

“That’s enough!” she exploded.

“Give me the document.”

She jerked a drawer open and handed him the papers. “Here.”

He took the document and watched Malaya for a long moment. His expression shifted, losing its usual hardness. “Thank you.”

“I suppose you’re doing another grand cleanup before the trial, under Miss Kai’s orders,” Malaya remarked. “Are you going to kill again?”

“It is my job. But I am not a serial killer, Malaya. I am a master strategist.”

He took a few steps toward the exit, then paused. “Do you want to know why Marz is dead?”

“Why?”

What Makizal had discovered was far darker than anyone knew. When Marz ran out of victims, he trapped them himself. He orchestrated assaults, sometimes rapes, only to blackmail the victims afterward using videos of the crime. He had built an industry of organized crime based on the destruction of human dignity.

“How can you work for a woman who shot you?” she asked, struggling to maintain her composure.

“I don’t hold grudges.”

“You’re a lunatic who thinks he’s God!”

Makizal turned and stepped closer to Malaya. He was so near that his words seemed to permeate her mind like toxic smoke.

“You didn’t complain when I mentioned Mr. Assanago,” he countered coldly. “You didn’t complain about Emilio being in prison. Your only problem was that he didn’t have to die.”

“Because no one deserves to die!” she pushed him violently to create distance.

“Oh, stop lying to yourself! If he had died, it would have been too easy. You wanted him to go to prison, to pay, to suffer day after day.” He paused. “Tell me, the day you handed over the evidence against Emilio, it was so that he would pay. Yes or no?”

Malaya remained mute.

“You knew Dr. Williams wasn’t the type to play games. Look at your eyes. You feel no pity for those men. You hid that document because you wanted to protect Williams, protect this business, and protect yourself.”

“I, at least, have a reason! I wanted to protect women who are victims! How about you? You get paid to do the dirty work, and you enjoy it. Why did you spare me, when I know too much?”

Makizal’s gaze locked onto Malaya’s with a disturbing intensity. “I cannot bring suffering to one who already suffers. And I cannot kill someone already dead inside.”

The words did not just reach Malaya. They excavated her.

The structural integrity of her pride, meticulously built over years of corporate ladder climbing and expensive armor, finally collapsed. It was a terrifyingly lucid realization. Mr. Assanago had not just stolen her safety. He had strip-mined her humanity. Since that day, she had been a hollowed cathedral of a woman, inhabited only by the cold wind of her own bitterness. Her knees struck the floor with a dull, final thud, and the dam broke. The tears were not just sad. They were caustic, born of a humiliation so deep that no amount of clinical therapy could ever hope to reach it. Forgiveness was a ghost story people told to feel better. Memory was the only thing that remained real.

One does not heal from such humiliation through a few therapy sessions. One may forgive, perhaps, but one never forgets.

Makizal felt the vibration of her jagged sobs through the soles of his shoes as he crossed the threshold. In the lightless sanctuary of the hallway, the master strategist vanished. His jaw tightened with such force that the bone ached, his teeth grinding against the tide of a rare, burning moisture that threatened his dark, suffocating gaze.

He was not just an architect of shadows. He was a map of old, jagged wounds. Makizal was the legacy of a crime, the living, breathing fruit of an infamy that had begun with his mother’s stolen dignity. He had watched her drift deeper into the gray mists of trauma, eventually crossing the final, silent border between life and death despite every resource he had bled to provide her.

He was the orphan of a tragedy and the son of a phantom, a man who had forged his future in the twin furnaces of hatred and silence. His life was a war against remorse, a long campaign against the pain of being born from a scream. It was the reason he looked at resilient women as if they were holy relics, and why his contempt for men without a moral compass was not just professional. It was visceral.

He lived by the cold edge of the blade, fully aware that the iron would one day come to claim its due. But until a man rose who was capable of matching his darkness, Makizal would remain the apex of the shadow. And as he looked out into the pre-dawn fog, he knew that man was nowhere on the horizon.

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