Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
"It was a way to redirect the anger," I explain. "All that fury I'd been carrying since childhood, all that impotent rage at a system designed to protect the powerful at the expense of the weak. I could either let it poison me from the inside. or I could channel it into something productive. Something that would actually make a difference."
I think about the network I've built over the past few years, the other men who share my particular moral clarity, the resources we've pooled to ensure that the worst predators don't escape consequences simply because they can afford better lawyers than their victims.
"Derek was an indulgence," I admit, and I feel a small flicker of something that might be embarrassment at the confession. "He's not the kind of target I usually pursue. The Scales is reserved for the most dangerous predators, the ones who operate at scale, the ones whose wealth and influence make them untouchable by conventional means. Child traffickers. Serial rapists who buy off prosecutors. Men who've built empires on human suffering and convinced the world they're philanthropists."
Scarletta's breathing has changed, deeper and slower, like she's processing what I'm telling her at a level beneath conscious thought.
"Derek was personal," I continue. "He was small, insignificant in the grand scheme of the evil I've dedicated my resources to eliminating. But he touched you. He hurt you. He violated your trust and your body, and then walked away like you were nothing, like what he did to you didn't matter."
I feel my jaw tighten at the memory of what I found when I started investigating him, the pattern of women he'd manipulated and assaulted under the guise of BDSM education, the trail of psychological damage he'd left in his wake.
"I don't regret what I did to him," I say. "If anything, I regret that I couldn't make it last longer. But I'll admit that it was an emotional decision, which is not something I typically allow myself. Emotion clouds judgment. Emotion creates mistakes. The Scales works because it operates on logic, on evidence, on careful verification that every target has genuinely earned the justice we deliver."
I think about Volk on the sister island, the real reason I'm here this week, the monster whose suffering I've been monitoring on the secondary screen wall while I've been orchestrating Scarletta's pleasure.
By now the fire ants have likely done their work. The venom builds in the bloodstream, attacking the cardiovascular system, causing tissue necrosis and systemic shock. If he's not dead already, he's very close.
The cameras were glitching earlier, the footage degrading in ways I couldn't immediately explain, but the biometric tracker showed his heart rate spiking into dangerous territory before I left the control room to come to Scarletta.
Dimitri Volkov built an empire on the bodies of trafficked children. He funded orphanages as recruitment centers, used his shipping company to move human cargo across borders, bought politicians, and prosecutors, and police commissioners to ensure his operation remained invisible to anyone who might interfere.
His death won't bring back the children he destroyed. It won't undo the trauma of the survivors who escaped his network. But it will stop him from hurting anyone else, and it will send a message to others like him that money and influence can't protect them from the consequences they've earned.
That's what The Scales is for.
That's the bliss I mentioned to Scarletta, the particular satisfaction of watching a predator realize that his power means nothing, that all the resources he accumulated to shield himself from accountability have failed him completely.
She's still pressed against my chest, still listening to my heartbeat, still processing everything I've told her. I wait for the questions I know are coming, the horror that should be dawning in her eyes, the realization that she's naked in the arms of a man who tortures and kills people and calls it justice.
But she doesn't pull away.
She doesn't scream.
She just breathes, slow and steady, her body relaxed against mine like she's found somewhere safe to rest.
The air in the aftercare room feels different now, charged with something I can't quite name. I've just confessed to being a serial killer with a moral code, and she's lying against my chest like I told her I enjoy stamp collecting.
I exhale slowly, the breath carrying more weight than it should.
"I get it," I tell her, and I mean it in a way that surprises me. "The shame you described, the feeling of being fundamentally broken because of what goes on inside your head. I feel it too."
My hand moves through her hair without conscious decision, the strands sliding through my fingers like water.
"I'm probably insane," I admit, and the words taste strange in my mouth because I've never said them out loud before. I've thought them, certainly. I've run the diagnostic criteria in my head late at night when the satisfaction of a completed hunt starts to fade and I'm left alone with the reality of what I've done. But speaking them to another person feels like removing a piece of armor I didn't realize I was wearing.