The warehouse inhaled like a beast, all metal and shadow and the scent of old smoke. For a long beat, everyone in the room listened to the way Aaron's breath met Fernando's—thin, sharp, full of things that were not words.
Fernando smiled, the cracked kind that showed he'd already decided how this would end. "Prove it, then," he sneered. "Pull the trigger and be done with it. Be the son your mother made you to be."
Aaron's finger tightened. The gun felt like a shard of night in his hand—cold, precise, inevitable. He didn't look away. He looked at Fernando the way a man looks at a wound he knows how to close; not with mercy, but with duty.
"Say her name," Fernando spat, defiant even with blood on his lip. "Say it like you mean it. Say she deserved what she got."
That, more than anything, lit the last fuse. A hard thing in Aaron's chest—anger, grief, the slow, ancient hunger for justice—snapped. He shoved the barrel closer until the heat of the metal was a promise against Fernando's skin.
"You will not speak for her," Aaron said, voice low and hollow as the room. "You will not waste air on her name." His thumb pressed. The world narrowed to the single clean note of the shot.
The crack bounced off steel and wood and the rafters chewed the sound until it became a thunderclap. Fernando's body jerked; the cigar burned out against his fingers. For a second, he seemed younger—surprised, human—like the mask of arrogance had been knocked loose and something fragile had bled through.
He slumped forward in the chair, eyes glassing, the menace gone from his face the same way smoke clears from a room. The guards made a sound—half shock, half the instinct of men who'd been ordered not to move. Ken stepped in like winter: efficient, clinical. He snapped his gloves on, eyes never leaving Aaron.
Aaron didn't watch Fernando fall to the floor. He watched the arc of the gun in his hand, how steady his own wrist was, how little of him felt triumphant. The shot had been a clean thing—necessary, basalt-hard—but the aftermath was a weight that landed on him immediately, heavy and absolute.
For a breath he kept standing there as though the room would applaud. It did not. The only sound was the drip of something dark from the corner of Fernando's mouth and the distant slap of waves against the dock. Ken moved, hands sure and fast, untying Fernando, checking the pulse, the small rituals of men who'd seen too much. He shook his head once.
"Done," Ken said, and it was a statement with no heat.
Aaron's knees nearly buckled. He slid down the side of a crate until he was crouched on grainy concrete, gun in his lap. Ken crouched opposite him, face unreadable in the lamplight.
"What now?" Ken asked, practical, already thinking two moves ahead.
Aaron closed his eyes. The image of his mother—warm hands, a laugh that pulled sunlight through the room—arrived like a wound. He felt the old hollow in his chest fill with something unfamiliar: not relief, not satisfaction, but an echoing emptiness that matched the silence of the warehouse.
"Now," he whispered, "we make sure nothing left of him stands. We dismantle him. Every ledger, every contact—burn them. We take his reach and tear it into threads." His voice was a promise to the dead and a threat to the living. "And then I go tell Mina."
Ken's hand found his shoulder—brief, anchoring. "I'll handle the men. You clean up the rest. We move quick, or the city will smell blood and come asking questions."
Aaron nodded, mechanically. He pushed to his feet, the cold settling into him like armor. When he walked past Fernando's body he did not look back. He had wanted the death to mean something—retribution, an end—but the price was already visible: a harder man, a quieter laugh, a life leveled by one deliberate choice.
Outside, the fog swallowed the warehouse doors as if the city itself wanted to hide what had happened. Inside, two men set to work with the calm of people who understood the calculus of power: one shot had closed a chapter; the next pages would be written in strategy, discipline, and the slow work of erasure.
Aaron lifted the gun one last time, wiped it with the hem of his coat, and placed it back in its holster. There was no triumph in his motion—only a hollow, sacred diligence. He had pulled the trigger. Now he had to live with the echo.