Archive of Our Own

I stared at the photo on my computer screen for a full forty-seven minutes.

The man in the photo wore a meticulously tailored black three-piece suit beneath a knee-length black overcoat. His frame was lean and tall, standing beside the door of a black sedan. His left hand rested on the car door, his right hung naturally at his side, a sliver of white shirt cuff visible at the wrist, the cufflink catching a blur of silver light.

A gold watch chain hung from his vest, its end disappearing into the vest pocket, where in all likelihood an antique pocket watch was tucked away. What drew the eye most was the top of his head — a soft black fedora, its brim decorated with a thin band of gray striped ribbon, and above the brim on either side sat two distinctly non-human ears.

Lop rabbit ears. Black, soft, obediently drooping down on either side of the hat, their fluffy outlines edged in a faint warm brown halo by the sunlight. The ears looked entirely real — not a headband, not an accessory, but something that genuinely grew from his head.

I zoomed in on the photo, trying to make out the base of the ears. The resolution wasn't high enough, the edges of the image slightly blurred, but I could see enough — there was no visible seam where the ears met the scalp, the fur transitioning so naturally it was as if they had always belonged there.

Gene modification, I mentally classified it. The underworld never lacked for such unhinged technology. The rich and powerful always found ways to turn their bodies into canvases, altering whatever they pleased. It was just that most people chose to hide their fangs inside their mouths and their claws beneath gloves, while this man paraded a pair of rabbit ears openly on top of his head, flaunting them for all to see.

As if he was afraid no one would notice he was different.

I closed the photo and opened another folder. It contained everything I had gathered over three months of research — about him, about the Sonnellino family, about the young leader the entire underworld called "the Don."

Don Sonnellino. Age unknown. Gender listed as male, but I had typed a question mark in the notes column. Several versions of rumors about his gender circulated through the underworld — some said he was a man, some said a woman, some said he was neither, and some said a single look at the face beneath that hat would drive a person mad. The last claim was obviously exaggerated, but what interested me was that no one had ever been able to produce any evidence to support any version of the story.

Because he never removed his hat in front of anyone.

Not during internal family meetings, not during external negotiations, not even at those execution sites that were never meant to see the light of day. He always wore that black fedora, the brim angled just low enough to conceal everything above his eyes, revealing only a beautifully defined jawline and a pair of lips perpetually curved into a faint smile. The upward tilt at the corner of his mouth when he smiled was subtle, as if he were keeping a secret he would never tell anyone, and that secret amused him very, very much.

Some said he was disfigured, that beneath the hat was skin burned beyond recognition. Some said he actually had a third eye, like some ancient eldritch god. Others said his real face was utterly unremarkable, and he simply cultivated an air of mystery to enhance his intimidation.

I wasn't interested in any of those theories.

I just wanted to see that face with my own eyes.

It had become a knot lodged stubbornly in my brain, keeping me awake at night. I'm a killer. It's my profession, and the only thing I'm good at. I've taken countless contracts, killed countless people — good and bad, innocent and deserving — and I've never once developed any excess emotion toward a target. Finish the job, take the money, leave, move to the next city, the next face. I'd lived that way for seven years, and I thought I'd keep living that way until a bullet ended it one day, or time slowly wore me down into a worthless pile of ash.

Until three months ago, when I saw Don Sonnellino's photo for the first time in a commission file.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a real commission — just a tentative inquiry. Someone wanted to know how much it would cost to eliminate the head of the Sonnellino family. I quoted a number, and the client disappeared. That happened often; most people backed off once they heard the price. But that time was different, because along with the inquiry I'd received the target's information packet, and in that packet, I saw those drooping rabbit ears and that hat that forever concealed half a face for the first time.

I stared at that photo for a full twenty minutes, then realized I was drenched in sweat.

Not fear. I've never felt fear toward anything in my life. It was a more complex, harder-to-name emotion — as if curiosity and some primal hunting instinct had simultaneously exploded through my bloodstream. I wanted to know what lay beneath that hat. I wanted to know the shape of his eyes when he smiled. I wanted to know the texture of those ears to the touch — were they as soft and warm as a real rabbit's, or would they carry a trace of human warmth?

I wanted to tie him up, remove his hat, and measure every inch of that never-before-seen face with my own eyes.

Once that thought formed, it became impossible to dislodge. I canceled all my bookings for the second half of the year, turned down three handsomely paying contracts, and threw myself entirely into researching Sonnellino. I tracked his movements, analyzed his security patterns, mapped the locations and routes he frequented. The Sonnellino family's power was indeed vast — their tendrils extended into nearly every corner of the European underworld — but Don Sonnellino himself had one fatal weakness: he was too confident. His security team was small, and he occasionally appeared in certain places alone, as if deliberately offering an opening to those who wanted him dead.

Or rather, he simply didn't believe anyone could truly threaten him.

That thought made my fingers tremble with excitement.

I spent three months preparing. Reconnaissance, observation, planning, arranging escape routes. Then late last Wednesday night, I cornered him in the underground parking garage of the apartment where he lived alone.

The process went far more smoothly than I'd imagined. He had just stepped out of his car, the hem of his black overcoat not yet fully drawn out of the seat, when I slid soundlessly out of the shadows behind him. A high-potency anesthetic pushed into the blood vessel at the side of his neck. His body stiffened for an instant, then went limp. When I caught him, his body was far lighter than I'd expected — so light it threw me off for a split second.

His ear brushed against my chin. Soft, warm, carrying a very faint, delicate scent, like some expensive woody fragrance blended with the natural smell of animal fur. In that moment, my heart skipped a beat, and my fingers tightened involuntarily.

I took him to the place I had prepared in advance — an underground cold room in an abandoned slaughterhouse on the city's outskirts. Soundproof, secluded, somewhere no one would ever find. The refrigeration equipment had long since ceased to function, but the thick insulated walls and sealed door suited my needs perfectly. I bound him to a metal chair with climbing-grade safety ropes — wrists, ankles, waist, shoulders, every joint capable of exerting force fastened tightly. I stripped off his overcoat and tossed it aside, unbuttoned one button of his suit jacket, but aside from that, I touched nothing.

Including the hat.

I sat across from him and waited for the drug to wear off.

The fluorescent lights in the cold room hummed with an electric buzz, the light pale and harsh, illuminating his figure with stark clarity. His head hung low, chin against his chest, long black hair spilling out from beneath the brim, veiling most of his face. The two rabbit ears drooped lifelessly, their tips nearly reaching his knees. His breathing was steady, the rise and fall of his chest subtle, as peaceful as sleep.

I watched him for a long time.

Then his fingers twitched.

Next came a slight contraction of his shoulders, his spine realigning vertebrae by vertebrae, regaining its supporting strength, and he slowly, incrementally lifted his head. The long hair slid away from either cheek, revealing that beautifully sculpted jawline and those faintly pressed-together lips.

He smiled.

Even before fully regaining consciousness, the corner of his mouth had already curved into that familiar arc — the exact same smile from the photo. Mysterious, touched with a certain private amusement, as if mocking something, or anticipating something.

"Awake?" I said. It was the first thing I ever said to him.

His body swayed slightly, as if testing the give of the ropes, then abandoned the struggle. He lifted his head. The brim still concealed his eyes, but I knew he was looking at me. The sensation of being watched was peculiar — even without seeing the other's eyes, you could clearly feel the weight of that gaze, like an invisible hand pressing against your skin.

"Mm." His voice was low, roughened by just waking, but the timbre itself was pleasant — a young man's voice. "Underground parking garage?"

"Yes."

"Anesthetic?"

"Ketamine derivative. Homemade. Not on the market."

He nodded, as if appraising the flavor of a cup of coffee. "Precise dosage. I should have been unconscious for... four hours?"

"Three and a half."
"Shorter than I thought." He smiled again, then tilted his head slightly, the two drooping ears swaying gently with the motion. "You know who I am."

It wasn't a question.

"Don Sonnellino." When I spoke the name, my tongue felt a strange weight. "Head of the Sonnellino family, one of the most feared mafia dons in the underworld, and also the most enigmatic. Never appears in public, never permits photography of any kind, never removes the hat. The rumors about you could fill a book. And the one that interests me most is your ability to perceive pain."

I'd been watching his reactions the entire time I spoke. He showed no surprise, no fear — not even a change in his breathing. He simply sat there in the chair, his posture one could even describe as relaxed, as if the person tied up wasn't him, but me.

"You've heard that theory?" he asked.

"You feel pain at only half the intensity of a normal person."

He didn't deny it.

"So you came to test that theory?" A hint of playfulness crept into his tone. "Kidnapped the head of a mafia family just to run a pain test?"

"No." I stood, walked over to him, and looked down at him from above. "I came for your hat."

The silence lasted about three seconds.

Then he laughed. This time the laughter was more pronounced than any before — not a polite upturn of the lips, but genuine, from-the-heart amusement. He laughed until his shoulders trembled faintly, his two ears swaying along, the down at their tips catching the light in a soft halo.

"Interesting." He said after the laughter faded. "Truly interesting. Most people want my life, or my territory, or certain secrets within my family. You want my hat?"

"I want what's under the hat."

His laughter stopped. Not an abrupt halt, but a slow receding, like a tide pulling back, leaving a charged silence in its wake. He lifted his head slightly, shifting the angle of the brim, and I caught a glimpse of the bridge of his nose — straight, delicately sculpted, like something carved from marble.

"Do you know why no one has ever seen my face?" he asked.

"Because I'm disfigured."

"I don't believe that."

"Or I have a third eye."

"I don't believe that either."

"Then what do you think the reason is?"

I reached out and took hold of the brim of his hat. His body made no movement, but I noticed his fingers curl inward slightly — the only place in his entire body that betrayed any tension. That discovery sent a surge of almost pathological pleasure through me.

"I want to see for myself," I said.

Then I removed his hat.

The moment the brim slid past his face, I felt as though someone had pressed pause on time itself.
First, the forehead. Smooth, the skin so fine the pores were nearly invisible, glowing with a warm luster under the light. Then the eyebrows — two gently arched black lines, so perfect they looked painted on, needing no grooming whatsoever. And then the eyes —

His eyes were a deep brown, but not an ordinary deep brown. It was a color somewhere between amber and obsidian, with an extremely fine ring of gold threading around the pupils, as if cast from molten gold. His lashes were long, thick and curled, fluttering like the wings of a butterfly with every blink. And the shape of his eyes — I don't know how to describe that shape. Neither round nor narrowly feline, but an arc somewhere between the two, one that made it impossible to look away, carrying an air of natural indolence.

The effect of the whole face together left me standing there, his hat clutched in my hand, utterly speechless.

It wasn't a face that could be summarized by words like "handsome" or "beautiful." It was a beauty that transcended all language and aesthetic standards, like a blade painstakingly forged over a thousand years, sharp enough to wound the eyes of anyone who dared to look directly at it. He was breathtakingly beautiful, so beautiful it unsettled the heart, so beautiful it made one want to kneel and tear him apart all at once.

And he just looked at me like that.

Those golden eyes were calm and focused, wearing that signature enigmatic smile, as if he had long known I would react this way, as if he had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

I could hear my own heartbeat, like someone drumming inside my chest, each beat heavier and faster than the last. My hand was still suspended in mid-air, frozen in the posture of having removed the hat, my whole body pinned to the spot.

"So?" He spoke, his voice still calm. "Is it what you imagined?"

I set the hat down on the table beside me and took a moment to recover my voice. "No."

"Where does it differ?"

"I didn't expect — " I paused. "I didn't expect you to be like this."

He tilted his head slightly, his long hair slipping off his shoulder to reveal the elegant line of his neck on one side. The gesture made him look like a curious animal, innocent and dangerous all at once. "Like this? What do you mean?"

"This beautiful."

When those two words left my mouth, I felt my throat tighten. I'm a killer. I've seen too much bloodshed and ugliness in this world. I thought my nervous system had long since become immune to anything beautiful. But he sat there, looking at me with that face, and I felt a chemical reaction taking place inside my body unlike anything I had ever experienced.

He didn't respond to my assessment, only continued to hold that smile. But I noticed that when he lowered his eyes, his lashes cast a faint shadow across his face — an image so beautiful one wanted to frame it and hang it on a wall.

I forced myself to tear my gaze away from that face, stepped back, and sat down once more on the chair across from him. I needed time to process what I had just seen, but my eyes, as if acting of their own will, kept drifting uncontrollably back to his face.

"Now you've seen it," he said. "What now?"

What now?

That was a good question. My original plan had been simple — take off his hat, satisfy my curiosity, and then do whatever needed to be done. But now my curiosity, far from being satisfied, had multiplied exponentially, spreading through my mind like a wildfire raging out of control.

I wanted to know whether he was a man or a woman. His voice was masculine, but that face — that face could belong to any gender, or transcend gender entirely. His beauty was genderless, just as a blade does not change its sharpness whether held in a man's hand or a woman's.

I also wanted to know what color those eyes would turn when he was in pain. Was he truly as indifferent to pain as the rumors claimed? If I applied enough stimulation, would that enigmatic smile of his finally break? Would he make a sound? What expression would he wear when he looked at me?

These questions gnawed at my brain like a swarm of ravenous insects, making it impossible for me to stay still.

I rose from the chair and walked over to the metal cart against the wall. On the cart, arranged in neat rows, were the tools I had prepared in advance — blades of varying sizes, from surgical scalpels to hunting knives; a pair of brass knuckles, still bearing dark traces from their last use; several small vials filled with liquids of different colors, their labels marked with chemical names only I could decipher.

I picked up the smallest scalpel and turned it in the light. The blade reflected a piercing line of white glare.

"They say your pain threshold is higher than normal," I said, turning around to show him the blade. "That what a normal person would feel as ten parts of pain, you can feel five at most."

He glanced at the scalpel, his expression utterly unchanged, as though I were showing him a nail clipper.

"You want to test it?"

"Yes."

"Then you may be disappointed," he said. "I truly don't fear pain much."

"I know." I set the scalpel back on the cart and picked up the brass knuckles instead, slowly sliding them onto my right hand. "That's why I prepared a special gift for you."

His gaze fell on my right hand, then shifted to the rows of colorful little vials on the cart. His expression remained unchanged, but I caught a split-second contraction of his pupils — less than half a second, but it was enough to confirm one thing for me.

He didn't fear knives, didn't fear fists, didn't fear any conventional pain stimulus. But he knew nothing about what was inside those little vials, and the unknown itself is the most primal source of fear.

Even if it was just a trace, even if he hid it well, I had seen it.

I took the brass knuckles off my hand, set them back where they belonged, turned, and walked back to stand before him. He looked up at me, his long hair spilling across his shoulders and collarbones, that face so impossibly beautiful under the light.

"What have you prepared?" he asked, his tone still carrying a hint of curiosity.

"You'll find out soon enough."

I crouched down, bringing my eyes level with his. From this distance, the golden threads in his irises were even more distinct, like some ancient totem, circling his pupils ring after ring. I wanted to reach out and touch his face, to feel with my fingertips what kind of texture that impossibly perfect-looking skin truly had, but I held myself back.

"Before I do anything to you," I said, "I have a question."

"What?"

"Are you a man or a woman?"

He smiled. At this close range, that smile was magnified several times over — I could even make out every faint muscle fiber that pulled at the corner of his mouth. His lips were pale pink, the lower lip slightly fuller than the upper, and when he smiled, they formed an exquisitely beautiful arc.

"What do you think?" he countered.

"Your voice is male."

"Voice can be altered with surgery."

"Your body — " My gaze slid down from his face, past his long, elegant neck, over his suit-clad torso, and finally to his arms bound to either side of the chair. "I can't tell either."

"Then why don't you confirm it yourself?"

That response caught me off guard. He just sat there, perfectly open, his expression as casual as if he were inviting me for a cup of coffee. I stared into his eyes for a few seconds, searching for any trace of mockery or provocation, but those golden eyes were as placid as a pool of still water, revealing nothing.

"You don't mind?" I asked.

"You've already tied me up and taken off my hat," he said. "You're still concerned about that now?"

He had a point.

But I didn't do it. Not out of chivalry, nor out of any moral scruple — in my line of work, both those things had long since ceased to exist. I refrained because I suddenly realized something: he was guiding me. From the moment he woke up, every word he spoke, every expression he wore, had been deliberately or inadvertently steering my actions. He hadn't begged for mercy, hadn't threatened, hadn't tried to negotiate. Instead, he'd met this kidnapping with a near-cooperative attitude.

This wasn't right.

A normal person shouldn't react this way to being kidnapped. A normal person should be afraid, should be angry, should try to break free or find some way to save themselves. But he had done nothing of the sort. He was just — chatting. As if having afternoon tea with an old friend, discussing inconsequential things.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked.

"About why you're not afraid at all."

"You think I should be afraid?"

"A normal person would be."

He smiled again, and this time there was something in that smile I couldn't read. "You kidnapped me to see my face, and now you've seen it. You want to know if I really don't fear pain, and you want to test my gender. Those are your objectives, not mine. Why should I be afraid of someone who bears no malice toward me personally?"

"How do you know I bear no malice toward you?"

"Because if you did, I would already be dead." His tone was matter-of-fact, as if stating a simple truth. "Or at the very least, I'd be missing something. But you only took off my hat and asked me a few questions. My clothes are still properly on. You don't want my life — at least, not yet."

I had to admit his logic was sound. Too sound — so sound it made me feel as though he had been through similar situations countless times before to be able to maintain such a clear head in this predicament.

"You're very clever," I said.

"Thank you."

"But that won't change anything."

"I know," he said. "Do whatever you want to do. I won't stop you."

He said it lightly, the way one might say "nice weather today" or "get me a coffee." That bone-deep nonchalance stirred a nameless, inexplicable agitation inside me. I wanted to see his composure shatter. I wanted to see that calm of his break into pieces. I wanted to see fear or pain appear in those beautiful golden eyes.

That was the only reason I was standing here.

I picked up the dark blue vial from the cart. Inside was a chemical compound I had spent nearly two weeks formulating — a neuromodulator that could temporarily lower a person's pain threshold. A normal person's pain threshold fell within a certain range, and his was said to be double that, meaning conventional pain stimulus would be no more than scratching an itch through a boot for him. But this drug could recalibrate his nervous system, making his pain receptors as sensitive as a normal person's, or even more so.

Just a few milliliters, and he would no longer be able to face me with that indifferent smile.

I filled the syringe with the solution, the needle glinting coldly under the light. He showed no particular reaction to the sight of the syringe, only watched quietly as I pushed the air bubbles out, letting a single transparent droplet slide off the tip of the needle.

"What is that?" he asked.

"Something to make our test a little fairer." I moved to his side and rolled up his shirt sleeve. His skin was very pale, faint cyan veins visible on the inside of his arm, delicate and distinct. I took hold of his wrist and swabbed the crook of his elbow with an alcohol wipe.

"What if I told you this thing has side effects?" I added.

"What side effects?"

"It might make you feel pain more intensely than usual."

He was silent for one second. Then he turned his head and looked at me with those golden eyes, that damn smile still lingering at the corner of his mouth.

"Then do it."

I pushed the needle into his vein.

As the solution entered his bloodstream, I could feel his pulse transmitting through the barrel of the syringe to my fingers — steady, strong, about sixty or seventy beats per minute, nothing like the heart rate one would expect from someone being injected with an unknown drug.
I withdrew the needle, pressed down on the puncture site, then stepped back and waited.

The drug's onset time was three to five minutes. In that span, his nervous system would gradually be recalibrated, those originally dulled pain receptors awakened, growing sensitive and ravenous. By then, even a single needle piercing the skin would register as more than double the pain.

He leaned back against the chair, his gaze fixed calmly on me. Those two rabbit ears drooped on either side of the chair, occasionally twitching faintly, like creatures with minds of their own. I noticed his ears were slightly more upright than before — not from tension, but more like some instinctive, curious response.

"Now," I said, "let's see if you're really as tough as the legends say."

I picked up the smallest scalpel from the cart. The blade was only three centimeters long, thin to the point of near transparency, a tool designed for precision cutting. For someone just injected with a pain sensitizer, this blade was more than sufficient.

I walked up to him, raised the blade, and let the light reflect a line of white glare off its edge. His gaze followed the movement, his expression still calm, but I noticed his pupils had dilated slightly — the body's instinctive preparation for impending pain. No matter how strong his will, physiological responses could never be fully controlled.

"Left hand or right?" I asked.

"Are you left-handed or right-handed?"

"Right-handed."

"Left hand, then," he said. "I'll still need the right to hold a sword."

I didn't know if he was joking or serious. But since he had chosen the left, I found a flat spot on the inside of his left forearm and pressed the blade against it. The moment the metal touched his skin, his arm gave a slight shiver — not from pain, just from the cold.

Then I pressed down.

The sensation of the blade slicing through skin transmitted through the handle to my fingers, crisp and delicate. I made a cut about five centimeters long, controlling the depth to around one centimeter, just enough to pass through the epidermis and dermis to the edge of the subcutaneous fat. Blood welled up almost immediately, bright red, running down his arm and dripping onto his suit trousers.

I looked up at his face.

He was looking at me.

His expression showed no change whatsoever. No furrowed brow, no twitch at the corner of his mouth, not even a shift in his breathing. He merely glanced down at the bleeding wound on his arm, then raised his head again and looked at me with those calm golden eyes.

"That's it?" he asked.

I felt a flare of heat rush up from my chest.

Not because he didn't react. But because his reaction was too abnormal. I had injected him with a dose of drugs sufficient to make a grown man howl in agony, carved a five-centimeter gash into his skin, and he acted as if he'd been bitten by a mosquito, without even a frown.

I looked down at the wound on his arm. Blood still flowed, the edges of the cut clean and smooth, proof that my hand had been steady. The skin around the wound had already begun to redden slightly — a normal sign of localized inflammatory response. Everything indicated that he was indeed injured, that his nervous system had indeed received pain signals.

But his brain wasn't processing those signals.

Or rather, his brain processed them in a way entirely unlike anyone else.

"Interesting." I set the scalpel down and grabbed a piece of hemostatic gauze from the cart, pressing it to his wound. "Truly interesting. The drug didn't work on you?"

"It worked," he said, his voice still calm. "I felt it."

"But you showed no reaction."

"What reaction should I have shown?"

"Screaming. Struggling. Cursing. Begging me to stop. That's what a normal person would do."

He tilted his head, his long hair sliding over his shoulder, the gesture lending him an air of innocence. "But I'm not a normal person."

He was right. He truly wasn't normal.

I pressed the wound for a while. Once the bleeding slowed, I removed the gauze and dressed the cut simply with medical tape. He cooperated the entire time, even lifting his arm slightly when I wrapped the tape to make it easier for me. That cooperative attitude irritated and fascinated me in equal measure.

"Your threshold is indeed higher than a normal person's," I said, setting the used tools aside. "Higher than I imagined. The drug lowered your threshold, but you can still tolerate this level of pain."

"So your test failed?"

"No." I straightened up and looked down at him. "The test has only just begun."

I caught a flicker in his eyes — not fear, but something closer to anticipation, as if he were waiting to see what else I could bring out.

That discovery made my heart race.

I picked up the small vials from the cart, inspecting each under the light. One pale yellow, one clear and colorless, one with a barely perceptible pale blue tint. Three different formulations, three different mechanisms of action, but all with the same ultimate goal — to make him feel pain unlike anything he had ever felt before.

"Do you know what the essence of pain is?" I asked, drawing the solution into a syringe.

"Electrical signals transmitted by neurotransmitters," he said.

"Correct, but not entirely. Pain is a subjective experience. It's determined by signal intensity, but also by how the brain processes it. Your brain naturally filters out most pain signals, as if it were fitted with a built-in filter." I held up the first syringe, swirling it under the light. "And these drugs are designed to dismantle that filter."

He watched me quietly.

"This one is a receptor sensitizer." I aimed the needle at the light and pushed out a few drops. "It will make your pain receptors respond more intensely to stimuli. The last injection lowered your threshold. This one amplifies the signal. The combined effect of the two — "

"What will happen?" He finished my sentence, his tone carrying a strange kind of interest, like a scientist inquiring about a colleague's experimental results.

"It will make the pain you feel four times that of a normal person."

He was silent for a second. Then he said something I would remember for the rest of my life.

"Let's give it a try, then."

When he said those words, that enigmatic smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth, those golden eyes still looked at me with perfect calm, as if I weren't about to subject him to four times the pain of an ordinary person but were simply inviting him for a cup of tea.

In that moment, a thought surfaced for the first time — a thought that frightened even me.

I wanted to make that smile disappear.

I wanted to see what those eyes looked like when they lost their calm.

I wanted to see this breathtakingly beautiful face show pain, fear, pleading — even just one of those expressions.

My fingers tightened around the syringe, then slowly relaxed.

"What's your name?" he suddenly asked me.

That question caught me off guard. From the moment the kidnapping began, he had never asked my name, and I had never volunteered it. In our line of work, a name was both the least important and the most dangerous thing. The less known, the better.

"Why do you ask?"

"Because you're an interesting person," he said. "And interesting people are worth remembering."
I looked at him, and he looked at me. The hum of the fluorescent lights filled the silence between us.

"Valentine," I said.

It wasn't my real name. But strangely, the moment I said it, I wished it were.

He gave a slight nod, as if tasting each syllable of the name. "Valentine," he repeated, his voice low and pleasing. "A good name."

Then he turned his bound arm over, actively baring the veins on the inside.

"Go on, Valentine," he said. "Let me see how far you can go."

The fluorescent lights in the cold room buzzed overhead, their glow striking the colorful little vials and refracting strange and beautiful patterns of light. I stood where I was, syringe in hand, looking at this man bound to a chair yet sitting as though upon a throne, and a realization struck me.

I had thought I was hunting him.
But from start to finish, it never truly seemed as if I were the one taking the initiative.

That realization was like a fine needle, piercing with precision into a region of my brain that had never been touched before. I didn't let it show. I simply pushed the contents of the syringe into his vein, stepped back, and began the real wait.

This time the drug took effect faster. In barely two minutes, subtle changes began appearing across his body — the capillaries at the skin's surface dilated slightly, lending his complexion a deeper flush than before. The color of the iris around his pupils seemed to darken, the golden threads growing more pronounced. His breathing quickened faintly; the shift was minute, but against his tightly bound torso it registered with stark clarity.

I knew the drug had reached full potency.

This time I didn't reach for the scalpel. A blade was a cold weapon — the pain came sharp and faded fast, insufficient to sustain stimulation on his already sensitized nervous system. I needed something more persistent, more comprehensive.

I removed the brass knuckles and set them back on the table. Fists were not the answer — not yet, at least. I wanted to proceed step by step, like a patient artist facing a blank canvas: lay down the base color first, build layer upon layer, and only at the end would the full picture reveal itself. I looked at him bound to the chair before me, the light falling on his pale skin, on the wound I had just left on his arm, a little dried dark red seeping at the edge of the bandage. He gazed back at me quietly, his two black rabbit ears drooping through his hair, soft and harmless. From the bottom shelf of the tool cart, I retrieved two slender electrode wires connected to a palm-sized control box — a modified transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator, originally medical rehabilitation equipment, now recalibrated by me in both frequency and current output range.

"Electric shock?" He tilted his head when he saw the electrode wires, his voice devoid of fear, carrying only an academic curiosity.

"Yes." I secured the electrode pads to the inside of his exposed left forearm, right beside the incision wound, about three centimeters apart. "Continuous low-frequency electrical stimulation. It won't damage tissue, but it will keep triggering your nociceptive nerve endings."

He nodded, as if to say understood.

I turned the dial on the control box, starting from the lowest setting. The device emitted a faint buzzing sound, the indicator light jumping from green to amber. A visible light twitch ran through the muscles of his forearm — the involuntary muscle contractions caused by electrical current stimulating the nerves. His fingers curled inward briefly, his nails scraping a faint sound against the metal armrest. Then he glanced down at the jumping muscles in his arm and raised his head again to look at me.

His expression still unchanged.

I kept turning the dial. The frequency of the buzzing climbed half a tone higher, the indicator light shifting from amber to orange-red. The current intensity had nearly tripled from the starting setting. His entire forearm began to tremble violently, the muscle groups writhing and thrashing beneath the skin like a nest of startled snakes, his fingers opening and clenching uncontrollably, the knuckles whitening from the force. There was an almost imperceptible hitch in his breathing — less than a second. If I hadn't been staring at his chest, I wouldn't have noticed it at all.

I stopped the dial and waited three seconds. His arm gradually quieted, only the fingertips still faintly trembling.

"Did it hurt?" I asked.

"A bit more than the blade just now," he said, his tone as calm as someone commenting on the flavor of a dish.

I pushed the dial to maximum. The buzzing sharpened abruptly into a piercing whine, the indicator light turning a glaring red, the current flooding into his nerve endings at the highest frequency and greatest intensity. His entire arm snapped rigid in an instant, every muscle spasming simultaneously, veins bulging on the back of his hand, his fingers splaying open to their widest angle as though forced apart by an invisible hand. This time his breathing showed clear disruption — the rise and fall of his chest nearly doubling in amplitude, the pulse visibly hammering in the hollow above his collarbone.

But he still made no sound.

Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. I shut off the device. The electrode pads peeled from his skin with a faint snapping sound, leaving behind a small patch of reddened marks. His arm fell limp, hanging at his side, his fingertips still quivering faintly, a thin sheen of sweat glistening on his skin.

He drew a deep breath, then let it out slowly. And then he smiled.

"You turned it off too soon," he said. "I could have kept going."

I stared at the red marks the electrodes had burned into his arm, at his fingertips still faintly trembling, at that perfectly intact smile on his face. Adrenaline surged wildly through my veins, my heartbeat slamming against my eardrums. I had to draw a deep breath to steady myself.

He wasn't afraid of electric shock. Or rather, the pain brought by electricity still fell within his tolerance range. The drugs had already lowered his threshold to that of a normal person's, or even lower, but his willpower — his psychological endurance of pain — clearly far exceeded the ordinary.

So, change direction.

From the cart, I took down a palm-sized metal case and opened the lid. Inside lay six neatly arranged fine stainless steel needles, each four or five centimeters long, about the thickness of a syringe needle. These needles wouldn't cause permanent damage, but driven into the nail beds, joint gaps, or along the edges of the ribs, they produced one of the most primal types of pain signals — the kind most difficult for the brain to ignore. Deep somatic pain, acting directly on the periosteum and deep nerve plexuses.

He watched me take out the first needle from beneath the brim of his hat, his gaze falling on that slender length of metal and lingering for two seconds. I noticed his pupils contract slightly — not fear, but more like threat assessment, the way a cat, faced with an unfamiliar object, first determines whether it will move.

I walked up to him and half-crouched, bringing my eyes level with his. From this distance I could see the direction of every golden thread circling his irises, could count the number of his lashes. He was looking at me too, his gaze focused and calm, as though what was about to happen had little to do with him.

"Your hands are very beautiful," I said. "Long fingers, evenly proportioned joints. Hands very suited to playing the piano."

"I can play the piano."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"Play for me sometime."

"Alright," he said. "If there is a next time."

I took hold of his left hand. His skin was warm and dry, the knuckles curling slightly in my palm before unfurling once more. I turned his hand over, back facing up, and selected his index finger — the nail neatly trimmed, the edges smooth, the nail bed a healthy pinkish white. He looked down at my hand, a trace of inquiry in his expression, as if analyzing what I was about to do.

I aimed the needle tip at the junction where his index fingernail met the nail bed. That spot held the densest concentration of free nerve endings in the entire finger. Any slight change in pressure would be amplified into a violent pain signal — let alone now, when his nervous system had been tuned by two rounds of drugs to its most sensitive state.

The moment the needle tip touched the edge of the nail groove, his finger instinctively flinched back. The movement was minute — so minute that if I hadn't been staring fixedly at his hand, I never would have noticed. I used my other hand to hold down his wrist, my thumb pressed against his pulse point, feeling the rhythm of that blood vessel beneath the skin. Steady. Sixty or seventy beats per minute. No sign of acceleration whatsoever. It stood in stark contrast to the instinctive recoil of his finger — his body was retreating, but his heart was not.

"If it hurts, you can cry out," I said. "This place is well soundproofed. No one will hear."

He didn't answer. I slowly pushed the needle tip forward. The steel needle pierced the nail groove, passed through the dense connective tissue, and reached the root of the nail bed. The joints of his index finger locked up abruptly, the muscles in his finger beginning to convulse violently. His whole hand tried to form a fist but was pinned firmly down by my grip. A tiny bead of blood seeped out from beneath his fingernail — bright red, gleaming moistly under the light. I felt the pulse at his wrist finally undergo a substantive change — the beats growing more forceful, the interval between them shortening slightly, yet the rate still within normal range.

He just looked at me, breathing evenly, lips lightly pressed together, the golden threads in his irises shimmering faintly under the lights. He glanced down at his own finger, at the steel needle driven into the nail groove and the blood bead seeping out, as though observing something happening to another person's body, then raised his head again. That smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth, its arc unchanged in the slightest — neither forced nor deliberate, as if his facial muscles were entirely immune to the influence of pain.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"Yes," he said.

That brief and honest answer stunned me for a moment. He didn't deny the existence of the pain, didn't put on a brave front and say "no." But his tone when he spoke was no different from saying "nice weather today" — flat, casual, even carrying a trace of conversational ease.

My heart beat several paces faster. A strange emotion churned in my chest — was it frustration? Deeper fascination? Anger? Or some unnamable, indescribable excitement? I wanted more. I wanted to see him break. I wanted to be the first person to make Don Sonnellino beg.

I withdrew the first needle. Blood trickled down the edge of his nail and dripped onto his suit trousers. Despite himself, he drew a breath — very soft, as if brushed by a cool breeze — and then exhaled it slowly. I switched to a second needle and aimed for his middle finger. This time I gave him no time to prepare, driving the needle tip directly into the depths of the nail groove.

His middle finger spasmed sharply inward, the muscles of his arm tensing again, but beyond that, no reaction. Third needle, ring finger. Fourth, pinky. Fine beads of blood oozed in sequence from the four fingers of his left hand, trickling down the knuckles and gathering into slender red streams across the back of his hand. Throughout it all he made not a single sound, not a single furrow of his brow. He simply watched his own hand, his gaze as still as a frozen lake.

I picked up the fifth needle from the metal case.

This needle was longer and thicker than the others, its tip fitted with a tiny barbed structure. It wasn't meant for stabbing — it was meant for twisting. Once driven into deep tissue, rotating the needle shaft would cause that barb to tear at the surrounding nerve fibers, producing a kind of pain entirely different from cutting, electric shock, or piercing — a dull, diffuse, unrelenting tearing pain. This pain wouldn't make a person scream, but it would make them sweat, feel nauseated, even experience a sense of impending death.

I stood and moved to his side, undoing the top two buttons of his shirt collar to expose the hollow above his collarbone. The skin there was very thin, nearly translucent, the pale blue branches of veins visible winding beneath the surface. Between skin and bone lay an exceedingly thin layer of muscle, and beneath the muscle ran the branches of the brachial plexus — the main neural network extending from the cervical spine to the shoulder and arm.
The line of his collarbone was exquisitely beautiful, flat and sharp, forming an elegant bony ridge beneath the skin. The light fell on that exposed patch of skin, glowing with a warm, ivory-like luster.

"Here," I said, touching the needle tip lightly to a spot above his collarbone, "is your supraclavicular nerve, a branch of the cervical plexus. If I place the needle here, the pain will radiate from your shoulder through the entire left upper limb. You'll feel as if your whole arm is being torn apart."

He tilted his head slightly to the other side, exposing more of his neck. His long hair slid off his shoulder and gathered behind the back of the chair, his rabbit ears drooping quietly on either side. The message conveyed by this posture threw me into a momentary daze — he was cooperating with me, even granting me greater ease. That subtle gesture quickened my pulse more than any words could.

"You've studied anatomy?" he asked.

"A killer needs to know where the human body is most vulnerable."

"Then you should also know," his voice was calm and gentle, "that five centimeters above the clavicle lies the carotid sinus. Excessive pressure there can cause a sudden drop in heart rate, even cardiac arrest. You need to avoid that area when inserting the needle."

He was teaching me. Sitting bound to a chair, blood still dripping from his fingers, and he was giving me anatomical guidance in that same mild tone. I didn't know whether to feel rage or absurdity — or perhaps both.

The needle tip pierced the skin above his collarbone.

This time his reaction was markedly stronger than before. When the needle tip passed through the subcutaneous tissue and made contact with the nerve plexus, his entire left shoulder convulsed violently, as if jolted by electricity. The muscles of his arm snapped taut in an instant, his fingers splaying open then clenching into a fist, the knuckles emitting faint cracking sounds. His breathing finally underwent a substantive change — not in rate, but in depth. The rise and fall of his ribcage grew deeper, as though he were compensating with diaphragmatic breathing for something being depleted. His lips parted slightly, revealing a glimpse of the neat teeth within.

Beads of sweat appeared at his temple, sliding slowly down the hairline of his temporal region, finally disappearing into the long black hair that fell loose now without the hat to hold it. The skin above his collarbone glistened with a fine layer of moisture under the light.

But he was smiling. Even with sweat beading on his forehead, even with his shoulder trembling uncontrollably, that damn smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth.

I stopped once the needle had penetrated two centimeters. The tip was just touching the outer membrane of the nerve plexus — any deeper and it would directly damage the nerve fibers. Then I pinched the base of the needle and began to rotate it, slowly.

The needle turned about fifteen degrees in the skin above his collarbone. His body went rigid — not a localized muscle contraction, but full-body. From his wrists bound to the armrests to his feet planted on the floor, every movable joint seized up in the same instant, his spine straightening ramrod-stiff, the back of his head pressing against the chair. His teeth clenched together, the line of his jaw turning sharp and defined.

I kept rotating. Thirty degrees.

His pupils dilated. Those golden eyes deepened and darkened under the light, the patterns on his irises rippling outward ring by ring, like the surface of disturbed water. His chest rose and fell faster now, the carotid artery visibly hammering in the hollow above his collarbone, its rate at least a third faster than before.

But still he made no sound. No cry, no shout, no plea for me to stop — not even a stifled groan.

I withdrew the needle, the movement slow and gentle, letting that tiny barb deliver one last tear through his subcutaneous tissue. His shoulder jerked again, and then his whole body, like a bowstring suddenly released, sagged back against the chair and slowly exhaled.

Blood seeped from the puncture point above his collarbone, trickling down the groove of his clavicle and staining a small patch of his white shirt collar red. He turned his head back. Sweat-damp strands of hair clung to his cheeks, tiny droplets of moisture catching on his lashes, making him look as though he had just been crying. Two faint blushes had appeared on his cheeks, and the color of his lips had deepened from pale pink to something closer to rose.

That face, in this state, was even more beautiful than before. So beautiful it felt like someone had punched me hard in the chest.

It was only then that I realized — from the moment he had woken up until now, nearly forty minutes of various stimuli had failed to elicit even a single cry from him. Pain sensitizers, electric shocks, needles driven into nerve plexuses — these methods that would make anyone break had been deployed one after another, and his only reactions had been deep breaths and a light sweat.

I watched him slowly recover from this heightened stimulation — sweat-damp hair clinging to the side of his neck, the wound above his collarbone still slowly oozing blood, his complexion faintly flushed, yet those golden eyes still bright and focused, the light in his pupils showing not the slightest dimming.

"You really are as tough as the legends say," I said.

"Thank you for the compliment."

"That wasn't a compliment. It was a question."

I walked over to the cart and picked up the towel hanging from its side to wipe the blood from my fingers. Dark red stains quickly bloomed across the fabric — impossible to tell whether it was his blood or my sweat. I stood with my back to him for a few seconds, letting my breathing return to a steady rhythm, then turned around. My gaze swept over the remaining items on the cart, finally landing on an unremarkable metal injector tucked into the corner. What was inside that — that was my true trump card. I picked up the metal injector from the corner of the cart.

It was far heavier than an ordinary syringe, the casing made of titanium alloy with a matte finish, cold and balanced in my hand. Through the transparent window on the side of the barrel, the liquid inside was visible — an almost colorless, extremely faint blue, its viscosity noticeably thicker than water. When tilted, it left an oily trail slowly sliding down the inner wall.
This thing had taken me nearly four months to formulate. It wasn't a matter of money — the raw materials were simply too difficult to obtain. One key ingredient came from a toxin extract derived from a deep-sea cone snail. The legally circulated global annual supply was measured in milligrams, and to scrape together enough for this one syringe, I had called in every underground connection I had accumulated over a lifetime.

Its mechanism of action was entirely different from the previous two injections. Those had both worked on the pain conduction pathways — lowering the threshold, amplifying the signal, essentially dismantling the "filter" he was born with so that his nervous system would behave like an ordinary person's. But this one was different.

This one would act directly on his central nervous system — on the thalamus and the insular cortex, the core regions where the brain processes pain signals. It would alter the configuration of sodium ion channels on neuronal cell membranes, causing every pain signal reaching the brain to be multiplied exponentially. At the same time, it would inhibit the release of endogenous opioid peptides, stripping his brain of its natural ability to self-anesthetize.

To put it simply: the pain an ordinary person felt would, inside his brain, be amplified to unbearable levels. And his own body's production of endorphins and enkephalins — the natural countermeasures against pain — would be suppressed by the drug, rendering them useless.

This was no longer about "letting him feel pain the way a normal person does." This was about turning him into someone more sensitive to pain than anyone else.

I turned to face him.

He leaned against the back of the chair, his bound body tilted slightly, his head resting against one side of the chair back. Sweat-damp strands of black hair clung to the sides of his face and neck, a few locks stuck to the dried blood trails above his collarbone, the half-congealed blood forming dark red patterns. His left hand was still dripping blood; beads of it gathered slowly at his fingertips and fell to the cement floor beside the chair, forming a small patch of dark wetness. His right hand was relatively unscathed, though a red ring from the rope friction marked his wrist.

His condition had deteriorated considerably compared to before, but those eyes remained bright and lucid. He noticed the syringe in my hand, his gaze lingering on the titanium casing for a moment before shifting to my face.

"That expression of yours," he said, "looks like you're about to show me something remarkable."

"It is remarkable."

"Better than that barbed needle just now?"

"Much better."

He gave a slight nod, leaned his head back against the chair, and exposed the long line of his neck and the small puncture wound still oozing blood above his collarbone. His rabbit ears had drooped completely now, lying against the sides of his arms, the tips slightly curled, the downy fur matted into small damp clusters from sweat. He looked somewhat tired, but that smile at the corner of his mouth still hadn't disappeared.

"Before the injection," I crouched down to bring my eyes level with his, "I want to ask you a question."

"About what?"

"About why you don't fear pain."

He tilted his head, his ears swaying gently with the motion. "You think there needs to be a reason?"

"Normal people have reasons. Some are born with a high threshold — a genetic mutation. Some are trained over time, their nervous systems gradually desensitized through repeated pain stimulation. Some have congenital conditions that prevent them from feeling pain at all. But you're different." I fixed my gaze on his eyes. "Your body can feel pain. Your neural reflexes are normal — you flinch when pierced, your muscles spasm when shocked. The pain signals reach your brain, and your body reacts. But your emotions — your subjective experience — remain completely unaffected."

"It sounds like you've already reached a conclusion."

"I want to hear it from you."

The silence lasted about five seconds. The lights buzzed overhead. Faintly, from somewhere far above, came the sound of wind at ground level. This abandoned cold room felt like a forgotten corner buried beneath the civilized world. He lowered his eyes, his lashes casting a shadow across his face, and the smile at the corner of his mouth shifted into something different — no longer that enigmatic, unfathomable smile, but an expression closer to remembrance.

"My childhood," he said, "was spent in an underground clinic."

I said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

"The Sonnellino family thirty years ago was not what it is now. In my father's generation, the family built its foundation on trafficking human organs. Underground clinics, illegal transplants, live harvesting — everything you can imagine, they did. I didn't see sunlight before the age of six. I lived in a sterile ward three floors below ground, the operating room right next door. Every night, I could hear the sounds coming from the other side of the wall."

His tone was flat, as if narrating a documentary he had watched long ago.

"Then one day," he said, "the operating table was pushed in front of me. Someone had decided my body was more valuable than others'. Corneas, kidneys, bone marrow, part of my liver — my blood type is the universal donor type, and my HLA profile is extremely rare, compatible with almost anyone. They wouldn't take everything at once; that would kill me. They simply took one thing at a time, at regular intervals, and then waited for me to slowly recover, waited for the next time."
He paused, then raised his eyes to look at me.

"That process lasted three years."

My fingers tightened involuntarily. I knew how cruel the underworld could be — I had even personally taken part in some of its aspects. But the image of a six-year-old child being repeatedly cut open over three years, having organs removed, and then waiting alone in a sterile ward for his wounds to heal — that picture still sent an ineffable coldness through me.

"Pain, to me," he said, "stopped being a threat very early on. It was simply a state of existence — like breathing, like a heartbeat. You can't fear every heartbeat. You simply grow accustomed to it."

"What happened after?" I heard myself ask.

"After that, when I was nine, a power shift occurred within the family. My father's faction was purged. Everyone responsible for the underground clinic was executed. The new leadership brought me up from underground, cleaned me up, put me in a suit, and began teaching me how to be a 'Sonnellino.' But I had already changed. When they rescued me, I still had drainage tubes in my body, and I was smiling."

He smiled — the exact same smile that was on his face now.

"They thought I had gone mad. Perhaps they were right."

He lifted his head again, those golden eyes regarding me, calm as deep water.

"So you can understand," he said, "that pain, to me, is a very private matter. It doesn't frighten me. It doesn't make me yield. It doesn't even make me uncomfortable. It simply — feels familiar."

I looked at him. At the bloodstains on his collarbone, the beads of blood dripping from the four fingers of his left hand, the wound covered by gauze on his arm. Until this moment, I had thought I was a cold enough person. But hearing him recount that past so casually, I felt as though something were lodged in my chest.

Not sympathy. I wasn't worthy of sympathizing with anyone, nor did I need to. It was a deeper, more selfish emotion — jealousy. Jealousy toward those who had left scars on his body, jealousy that they had carved such profound marks into his life, while I was merely a latecomer, trying to crack a fissure in his placid surface with these insignificant means.

"All these things you're telling me," I raised the syringe before his eyes, "are you trying to make me go soft?"

"No," he said. "I'm just answering your question. Whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it."

There was no provocation in his voice, and no plea for mercy. He was simply stating a fact: do whatever you want, keep going, I won't stop you, and I won't beg.

I stood there clutching the syringe for a few seconds. Then I stepped forward, found a spot on the side of his neck not stained by blood, and pushed the needle tip into his jugular vein. As the solution slowly pushed into his bloodstream, I watched the pale blue liquid diminish incrementally inside the transparent barrel, like a sliver of compressed sky being injected into his body.

Needle out, cotton ball pressed, step back.

This time the onset took longer. Its target lay deep within the brain, and it needed to cross the blood-brain barrier to reach its destination. I leaned against the cart, arms crossed, waiting in silence. He sat quietly too, the occasional slight twitch of his drooping ears the only movement.

After about eight minutes, the changes began.

His pupils began to dilate. Not the subtle expansion from before, but a sustained, uncontrollable widening, the golden irises compressed into a narrow ring, like the last sliver of light during a total solar eclipse. His breathing turned shallow and rapid, the rise and fall of his ribcage nearly double the earlier frequency. In the hollow above his collarbone, the carotid artery could be seen pounding violently beneath the skin. Sweat reappeared on his forehead, more and denser than before, rolling down his temples and soaking his sideburns.

His fingers began to tremble. Not one or two fingers — all ten were shaking, his nails rattling against the metal armrests in a fine, rapid staccato.

"How do you feel?" I asked.

"A little... different." His voice showed a hint of instability for the first time, like a radio picking up a weak interference signal. He drew a deep breath, trying to steady his vocal cords, but the exhale carried a faint tremor.

"Different how?"

"It's like... all my senses have been turned up." He closed his eyes for a moment, his lashes quivering. "The fabric of my clothes touching my skin... the metal edge of the chair against my wrists... the sound of your voice..."

"Too intense?"

He didn't answer, but his throat moved. A swallow. He was wetting his throat with saliva because he felt dryness — a classic stress response after the pain system had been highly activated.

I picked up the smallest scalpel from the cart and walked toward him. My footsteps echoed dully on the cement floor, and when he heard the sound, his shoulders visibly tensed.

That was a first. The first time he had shown a defensive physical response before I had even done anything.

I crouched down in front of him, holding the scalpel within his line of sight. His gaze fell on that blade, thin as a cicada's wing, and his pupils dilated even further, his breathing quickening once more. His fingers clenched the armrests, knuckles whitening. The earlier wounds on his fingers split open again from the force, fresh red seeping out.

"Nervous just from seeing the blade?" I asked.

"This drug — " he drew a breath, " — is indeed quite effective."

His voice was still straining to stay steady, but I caught an exceedingly faint breathiness woven into it. Not panting — it was him using sheer willpower to suppress something that wanted to tear free from his throat.

I pressed the blade against the inside of his right forearm. That patch of skin had suffered no prior injury; it was smooth and intact, the fine hairs reflecting a soft luster under the light. The moment the blade touched his skin, his entire arm convulsed backward violently, the metal armrest clanging from the impact. This was the first time he had reacted so intensely the instant the blade touched his skin — before this, even on the most sensitive areas, he had been able to remain essentially still.

"Cold," he uttered a single word, as if offering an excuse for himself.

I didn't expose him. I simply used my left hand to pin his wrist down, securing his arm to the armrest, and began to cut.

The moment the blade edge bit into his skin, he made a sound.

Not a scream, not a wail — an extremely short, stifled groan. Most of the sound was swallowed back, only a small fragment escaping his throat, like a choked gasp forced out while someone had their hand around his neck. His teeth clamped down on his lower lip, biting so hard the lip instantly lost all color, turning a patch of stark white.

My hand didn't stop. The blade extended across his skin at a uniform speed, opening a gash about eight centimeters long. This time I cut deeper than any cut before, piercing straight through the dermis to the deep layers of subcutaneous fat. The wound edges parted cleanly, revealing the pale yellow fatty tissue beneath and a glimpse of dark red muscle fiber. The blood was delayed by a second or two before welling up — hot and viscous, running down his arm and dripping onto his black suit trousers, spreading into a large dark stain.

 

His body was trembling violently. Not just his arm — his entire upper body was shaking uncontrollably, as if a bitter wind had blown through the marrow of his bones. His breathing became chaotic and broken, the rhythm of inhale and exhale lost, replaced by fragmented, tremulous gasps. Sweat rolled from his forehead down the bridge of his nose, then along the side of his nostril into the corner of his mouth, mixing with the blood seeping from his lip — he had bitten through his own lower lip.

I withdrew the blade and stepped back to look at him.

His head hung low, long hair veiling most of his face, his shoulders heaving violently, his ears drooping listlessly. The fresh wound on his right arm still oozed blood steadily, running down his wrist to the ropes and staining them dark red. His fingers clutched the armrests with desperate force, nails digging into the textured metal surface, his knuckles an unhealthy greenish-white.

Then he lifted his head.

There was a clear trail of blood on his lower lip, beads of it dripping down his chin. A very thin layer of moisture glazed his eyes, making those golden irises even more translucent, like amber stones submerged in clear spring water. His breathing was still trembling, but he looked at me, and then —

He smiled.

Not the whole, effortless smile from before. His lower lip was split, and smiling pulled at the wound, making his brow furrow faintly in pain. But he forced the corners of his mouth upward through it all, shaping them into a crooked, blood-streaked arc.

"Not bad," he said, his voice hoarse and faintly trembling, but every word distinct.

The hand holding the scalpel froze in mid-air.

I knew the potency of that drug. I had tested it on animals myself — a Doberman weighing fifty kilograms. After the injection, a mere needle prick to the front paw had made it shriek in a way I had never heard before. And he had taken a cut deep into the muscle layer, and his only response was a swallowed groan and a bitten-through lip.

It wasn't that he felt no pain. Quite the opposite — the pain he was feeling right now was more intense than what anyone else would feel. He hurt so much he was shaking. He hurt so much he was sweating. He hurt so much he had bitten through his own lip. But he simply wouldn't scream, wouldn't beg, wouldn't break.

His willpower was not a wall. Walls had limits — apply enough force, and you could always knock a wall down. His willpower was an ocean. You could throw anything into it — stones, knives, fire — and it would only ripple once before returning to stillness.

I stared at his face, smeared with sweat and blood, a beauty that made one want to kneel and want to destroy it all at once. I began to understand why the rumors about him always carried a tinge of fear. Because when you truly stood before him, when you saw that he could smile no matter what he endured, you felt a powerlessness that sank into the very marrow of your bones.

I set the scalpel back on the cart and took a new steel needle from the case. This needle was longer and thicker than the last, its tip without a barb, but the surface of the needle body had been specially treated — coated with a layer of micron-level burrs invisible to the naked eye. When this needle pierced tissue, it wouldn't cleanly and neatly separate fibers the way a smooth needle would. Instead, it would tear, abrade, and scrape past every cell in its path, ruthlessly activating every single nociceptor.

I walked behind him and swept his long hair to one side, exposing the nape of his neck. The skin there was very pale, very thin. Along the midline, the contour of his spine was visible, and between the first and second cervical vertebrae lay a natural hollow — the location of the Fengfu acupoint, where the greater occipital nerve emerged from the deep fascia.

"Where this time?" he asked. His voice came from the front, carrying a slight echo.

"The back of the neck."

"Is it going to hurt a lot?"

"Yes."

He nodded, the motion very slight, and then tilted his head forward, offering more space at the nape. The long hair slipped through my fingers and gathered over his shoulders. The two rabbit ears extended through the strands, their downy edges brushing against my wrist.

The moment the needle tip touched the skin at the nape of his neck, his entire back seized up. The muscles flanking his spine rose like two snakes, from his shoulders all the way to his waist. Beneath his shirt, the contours of his musculature emerged with sharp clarity. His build was not slender — the suit concealed a great deal — and the lines of his back muscles were well-defined, the kind of lean, trained physique acquired only through long-term conditioning. I could see the outline of his shoulder blades faintly protruding beneath the shirt, and along the centerline of his spine ran a sunken groove, extending from the nape of his neck into the shadows deep within his collar.

I pushed the needle in.

The needle tip passed through skin, subcutaneous tissue, the fascia of the trapezius, finally arriving in the vicinity of the greater occipital nerve. In an ordinary person, this process would only cause an ordinary pricking pain. But his nervous system had been tuned by the drugs to its highest sensitivity, so when the needle tip touched the outer membrane of the nerve, his body underwent a violent, uncontrollable spasm.

His head snapped backward, the back of his skull colliding with my chest. His two ears, jolted upward by the backward motion, traced arcs through the air before falling back down, one of them landing on my arm. Warm, soft, the downy fur bringing a faint, tingling itch as it brushed against my skin. His hands clenched the armrests so hard his knuckles cracked audibly. His bound ankles kicked against the legs of the chair, producing a dull metallic clang.

But he still didn't scream.

I pinched the base of the needle and began to lift. Not pulling it out, but angling it upward at a very shallow degree, letting those micron-level burrs tear back and forth through the fascial layers around the nerve. This kind of pain was dull, diffuse, and relentless — like someone scraping a rusty, blunt knife repeatedly across your nerves.

His breathing shattered into fragments. Inhalations were cut off midway by spasms. Exhalations were chopped into segments, forced out of his throat in rough, breathy gasps. His back pressed tightly against my chest, and through his shirt I could feel the scorching heat radiating from his skin and the violent trembling wracking his frame. Sweat ran down the nape of his neck and dampened my fingers.

"Valentine." He said my name.

It was the first time since the injection that he had spoken a complete sentence. His voice was hoarse and trembling, like a wire bent to its absolute limit yet still refusing to snap.

"Mm?"

"Your hands... are very steady."

I froze.

At a time like this — after being injected with three different drugs, enduring dozens of forms of pain stimulation, a burred steel needle still embedded in the back of his neck — what came out of his mouth was a compliment about the steadiness of my hands.

This response defied logic, defied any rational assessment of the situation, defied every normal human reaction in any conventional scenario. A person being tortured should not praise the torturer's technique, any more than a deer should praise a hunter's marksmanship. This ability of his to seize the initiative in any extreme moment sent a violent wave of losing control crashing over me — I was the one who had tied him up, but it never truly felt as if I was the one in charge. He appeared bound to the chair, yet he could always overturn the situation with a single sentence, turning me from the abuser into the one being appraised.

I pulled the needle from the nape of his neck and walked around to face him, planting both hands on the armrests on either side of the chair and leaning down to stare into his eyes from close range. I stood half a head taller than him — this angle was enough to create a physical sense of pressure. The back of his head rested against the chair, his golden eyes looking up at me from below, his lashes beaded with fine sweat, the wound on his lip still seeping blood. The golden threads in his irises were extraordinarily distinct under the light, deep and serene, like a pool of deep water illuminated by moonlight. Even though his body still trembled faintly from the residual pain, his gaze remained steady.

I smelled blood and sweat, and the lingering woody fragrance behind his ears — the three scents mingling together, becoming a disorienting, heady perfume in this cramped underground space.

"What will it actually take for you to beg?" I heard my own voice, rougher than I'd expected.

He tilted his head, his ears swaying gently, as though seriously contemplating the question. Then he smiled and gave his answer. "You could try more extreme methods. But I wouldn't hold out too much hope if I were you."

I straightened up, stepped back twice, and turned around to regulate my breathing. There were still several tools left on the cart that I hadn't used — nerve probes fine as strands of hair, a sonic generator capable of producing specific frequencies, a whole set of blunt impact tools in different materials. I could keep going. I could peel away the layers of his will's defenses one by one and see how long he could truly hold out. But a thought suddenly surfaced from all the chaotic emotions, clear and cold: Maybe this is what he wanted all along. Maybe he is sitting here enduring all of this not to prove something to me, but to prove something to himself. Maybe pain, to him, is not just a familiar old friend, but a way of verifying that he is still alive.

That thought sent a rush of unease through me unlike anything I had ever felt.

I placed the needle back into the metal case and shut the lid. The metal contact produced a crisp, ringing sound that echoed for a long time through the empty cold room.