“Give him to me,” s’Ex commanded.

As the executioner grabbed onto the back of the hold, he lifted iAm’s limp body from the floor with no more effort than he might put into raising a flask of wine.

“Please . . .” Trez begged. “He is not of this . . . let him go. . . .”

For some reason, his brother’s dangling lower legs registered with nauseating clarity. Only one of iAm’s shoes was on still, the other having been lost in whatever abduction and torture had occurred. And both feet were pointing inward, the big toes touching, one tilted in unnaturally from a broken ankle.

“Now, Trez,” s’Ex said, “did you think your decision wasn’t going to affect him? I’m telling you to put the knife down. If you do not, I’m going to take this”—the executioner jogged iAm’s limp body up and down—“and I’m going to wake it up. Do you know how I’m going to do that? I’m going to take this”—in his free hand he flashed a serrated knife—“and put it into its shoulder. Then I’m going to twist until it starts to scream.”

Trez began to blink away tears. “Let him go. This has nothing to do with him.”

“Put the knife down.”

“Let him—”

“Shall I demonstrate?”

“No! Let him—”

s’Ex stabbed iAm’s shoulder so hard, the blade cut through the leather and went into the flesh.

“Twist?” s’Ex barked over the scream. “Yes? Or are you dropping that butter knife?”

The clatter of the silver hitting the marble floor was overpowered by iAm’s harsh, dragging breaths.

“That’s what I thought.” s’Ex jerked the knife out and iAm started to moan and cough, blood speckling the floor. “We’re going back to your quarters.”

“Let him go first.”

“You are not in a position to make demands.”

Guards came out of that hidden door in a swarm, all black-robed figures with chain-mail masks. They didn’t touch him. They weren’t allowed to. They surrounded him and began to walk, pushing him along with their bodies. Forcing him back to the place he had escaped.

Trez fought the tide, rising up on the balls of his feet, trying to see his brother.

“Don’t kill him!” he shouted. “I’ll go! I’ll go—just don’t hurt him!”

s’Ex stood where he was, that notched, bloodied blade catching the light as he held it aloft. As if he were considering major organs for the next stab.

“It’s up to you, Trez. It’s all up to—”

Something snapped.

Later, when the white light had faded from Trez’s vision and the cresting wave receded, when the roar was silenced and a strange pain in his hands began to ride up his forearms, when he was no longer standing but on his knees, he would realize that the first guard he had killed that night was far from his last.

He would realize that he somehow murdered with his bare hands all who had surrounded him . . .

...and s’Ex was still standing there with his brother.

More than the deaths he caused, and the horror at iAm’s imprisonment with him, more than the copper-scented blood that was so red and now not just marking his footprints, he would remember the soft laugh that percolated through the mesh links covering the executioner’s face.

A soft laugh.

As if the executioner approved of the carnage.

Trez did not laugh. He began to sob, lifting bloody, torn hands to his face.

“The astrological charts did not lie,” s’Ex said. “You are a force in this world, well suited for procreation.”

Trez slumped to the side, landing in the blood, the jewels embedded in his robes digging into his flesh. “Please . . . let him go. . . .”

“Return to your quarters. Voluntarily and without hurting anyone else.”

“And you’ll let him go?”

“You’re not the only one who can kill. And unlike yourself, I have been trained in the art of making living things suffer. Go back to your quarters and I will not make your brother wish, as you do, that he had never been born.”

Trez looked at his hands. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“No one asks for life.” The executioner hiked iAm’s body up higher. “And sometimes they do not ask for death. You, however, are in the position to control the latter when it comes to this male. So what are you going to do. Fight against a destiny you can’t change and sentence this innocent to a wretched, prolonged suffering? Or fulfill a sacred duty many before you have found great honor in providing our people?”

“Let us go. Let us both go.”

“It is not up to me. Your chart is what your chart is. Your lot was determined by the contractions of your mother. You can no more fight this than you could fight them.”

When Trez finally tried to stand up, he found the floor slippery. The blood. The blood he had spilled. And when he was on his feet, he had to scramble through the gruesome tangle of bodies, stepping over lives that he knew had not been his to take.

The footsteps he left on the marble were red. Red as a Burmese ruby. Red as the core of a fire.

And the ones he left now were parallel to his first set of tracks, heading away from the escape he had so desperately sought.

It would have heartened him to know that in some twenty years, three months, one week, and six days from this moment, he would get free and make it stick for quite some time.

And it would have shocked him to the numb core of his soul that he would, sometime after that, voluntarily return to the palace.

The executioner spoke the truth that night.

Destiny was as uncaring and influential as the wind to a flag, carrying the fabric of an individual’s existence this way and that, subjecting that which it rocked to its whims without an inquiry as to what the banner may have desired.

Or may have prayed for.

SHADOWS NIGHTCLUB, CALDWELL, NEW YORK

There was no knock. The door to the office just flew open like someone had hit it with C4. Or a Chevy. Or a—

Trez “Latimer” looked from the paperwork on his desk. “Big Rob?”

—cannonball.

As his security second in command stuttered and went into all kinds of hand flapping, Trez glanced over his shoulder at the twenty-by-ten-foot one-way mirror behind all his Captain Kirk, command central. Down below, his new club was poppin’, humans milling around the converted warehouse’s open floor space, each one of the poor sick bastards representing a couple hundred dollars of profit, depending on what their vice was and how much of it they needed to juice up.

It was opening night at shAdoWs, and he’d expected trouble.

Just not the kind that would make a veteran bouncer go twelve-year-old girl on him.

“What the fuck is going on?” he demanded as he got up and came around.

“I—you—I . . . the guy . . . he . . .”

Find your vocab fast, Trez thought. Or I’ma have to bitch-slap some words into you, my man.

Finally, the bouncer choked out, “Need to see this for yourself.”

Trez followed Big Rob out and jogged down the stairs. His office was self-locking, not that he had any secrets shut in there. He did, however, have a couple of nice leather sofas, and some video-monitoring equip that could go the eBay route—plus he didn’t like people in his spaces on principle.

“Silent Tom is containing the issue,” Big Rob called out over the noise as they hit the ground floor.

“Like it’s a chemical spill?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

T.I.’s “About the Money” was so pumped it formed a physical presence in the air, becoming something that Trez had to fight through as they made their way past the security guy guarding the entrance to the private lounges hallway.