Lucian's POV
Disgust is an animal. It crawls along the skin and roots itself in the gut, and once it grows, it wants to devour. When the door swung open and he stumbled in, reeking of weak human and cheap drink, the animal inside me snarled and showed its teeth. Evelyn's uncle was well built for a human, but he still looked smaller than I had imagined, the light did not flatter him, only exposed the greed and the permanent cowardice that had always sat behind his eyes. He fumbled and blinked, and the smell of him made my skin crawl with disgust
"What.… what do you want from me?" the man croaked, voice thin with the practiced tremor of a frightened animal. "I'm just a poor old man. I have nothing. Nothing to give you, just let me go and I promise I'll...." He fell into begging like a man falling into a trap he had thought was empty.
I actually listened to the words and I felt contempt. Men like him do not deserve to live, not after daring to touch her. "You dare beg to be spared?" I said. My voice was slower than the sound of his breath, deliberate enough to make him flinch. "Your life was damned the moment you laid your filthy finger on Aveline."
At the name his face went blank, then scared, then defensive. "Aveline?" He strained his memory like an old rope. "I....no, no, I don't think I've ever met...."
"Your niece," I cut in "The girl you raped night after night and then pretended to care for. The one you branded with lies and doctors' papers to keep your hands clean in public." The words hit him like cold water. The color bled from his face and confusion crumpled into horror. "Evelyn," he whispered, as if the name might be a shield.
He collapsed the floor, suddenly transforming to a man full of apologies and excuses. The pleas tumbled out of him in a jumble, claims of mistake, that he'd never intended to, that debts had driven him, that he had been drunk, that he had done what anyone would to survive. He panicked and begged like a trapped animal, all the old lines "I didn't mean to hurt her," "I swear I never...." His voice was a mess of feeble justifications.
I let him speak until the air itself seemed clogged with cowardice. There is a point to listening, when you want to understand every rot in a thing before you cleanse it. The pleading was predictable. The shameful choreography of it, practiced and thin, was almost comical if it hadn't been poisoning a life for so long.
Finally I spoke. "Let's play a game," I said. The words were quiet, soft enough to sound almost like a kindness. "First thing first, take off your clothes."
He stared at me, incredulous. "What?"
"I don't repeat myself," I said. "Especially not to disgusting little pieces of humanity like you. Obey, or die asking me to repeat." The warning landed like a punch. The man's face crumpled. a terrified look on his face. He was not brave. He was never brave.
He undid his belt with shaking hands, shedding his cloth until he stood naked, shrunken in the doorway. It was a sight that stripped away whatever scraps of dignity he'd ever pretended to own.
"Now go into the street," I said, and I pushed the door open for him. "Tell everyone. Every single thing you have done to your niece. Gather a crowd. The more who hear you, the less urge I might have to kill you."
"But...." he stammered
"No," I interrupted. "You go, or you die this instant" I broke the threshold and shoved him forward. He ran into the street, naked and ashamed, and I followed slowly, savoring the way the world tilted under his feet as the truth began to hunt him down.
At first his confession was awkward and gasping, he spoke in fragments, stumbling over rationalizations, admitting how he had forged notes to hide what he'd done, how he'd told anyone who asked that Evelyn was ill, like a thing to be pitied. He spoke of selling her to a pack as though it had been a business transaction, that he had "solved debts" with her life.
Neighbors paused at doorways. A baker set down his bread. Children clustered at windows. The trickle of gossip swelled like a dam opening, people stepped out, at first a handful, then dozens. As the naked man panted and confessed, the crowd grew, thick and human and furious. They heard of his forged papers, the fake doctor's note, the nightly horrors he'd kept in a locked room under the guise of guardianship. They heard about the man who had used a child as currency.
At first they murmured in disbelief, then in anger. People threw curses, people marched forward with questions and then with hands full of the simplest street justice, spit, rotten fruit, the blunt toss of whatever their hands found. The man's voice grew hoarse. He tried to spin, tried to place blame on debts and desperation, but the crowd was hungry for accountability and would not be sated by excuses.
The square filled. Men who had looked the other way joined the chorus of disdain, women who had never called for justice now found their voices and called for him to be made to feel the weight of what he had done. Youths jeered. Old women clucked in the way of those who had seen such men before. The naked man's knees buckled, shame and exposure turning him inward.
Time dripped. The spectacle became the town's center for a while. People pressed in, craning, leaning in to hear every sordid detail. The uncle's sentences became a litany of of admission, he could not stop himself now. He confessed the fake diagnosis he'd forged and the signatures he'd bought. He spat out names of those he'd bribed to look the other way. He confessed how he raped and abused her every night. The crowd's anger ripened into a dangerous, electric fury
I watched, at first content to let him dismantle himself with his own words. But as the crowd's noise continued to swelled, my patience thinned. Public shame had its uses, but there are rituals I prefer to finish with myself
I moved then, fast as a thought and nearly as quiet. The air closed in on him, the crowd's hum folding as if something had sliced the sound. One instant he was there, his confession a thin, useless sound, the next... his head was gone, falling to the ground with a loud thud. I had cut off his head in one clean swipe of sharp claws and the blood gurgled out violently till his body dropped to its knees too.
The crowd's reaction was immediate, gasping, stepping back, the scream of surprise and fear. Some yelled cries of triumph, others retched or knelt, faces turned sick under such a gory sight. The moment was absolute and cold. I laughed, low and fierce
"You should have known better than to touch my servant," I said, my voice carrying clean across the square. People stared, trembling, the crowd divided between horror and a sort of savage approval.