Raven worked for them for almost three years. Three long years where every day blurred into the next until time itself felt like another weapon they used against him.
He was eighteen now, but the boy who had been dragged into this place had been ground down to almost nothing. What was left was held together by spite and the faint, burning thread of revenge.
He did everything no one else wanted to do. Scrubbing floors stained with things that would never come out. Carrying crates that felt like they would tear his arms from his sockets. Cleaning up the aftermath of jobs he was not allowed to speak about, stepping over blood like it was spilt wine, averting his eyes from the corpses that were already cooling. He had no choice in any of it.
'A slave, that is all I am here,' he would think, staring at the cracked floor as someone barked another order at him. 'A dog they feed scraps to so they can beat it again tomorrow.'
The men here were demons in human skin.
They killed without hesitation, broke people apart with words just as easily as with their fists, and seemed to take pride in ruining whatever they touched.
Some days, Raven was their punching bag, the outlet for every bad mood or failed job.
Other days, they used him as a mule, forcing him to haul things no normal person should even have to look at.
Every beating, every humiliation, every moment where they reminded him how little he mattered sank deep into him. It would have broken anyone else entirely, but for him, it began to form something different.
'This is not forever. I will not die here.'
Sleep became a rare mercy. Food was barely enough to keep him standing. Kindness was a language he forgot how to understand.
They kept him in the shadows, where no one would hear him if he screamed, where his existence could be ignored until they needed him again.
They stripped away the person he used to be. Every bright memory of his parents or David began to fade like an old photograph, but the pain of losing them stayed sharp. It was carved into him, a reminder of why he could not give up.
'One day,' he told himself, every time someone spat in his direction or hit him hard enough to knock him to the ground, 'one day I will make you pay for every second of this.'
He did not lash out.
Not yet.
He knew better than that.
They would kill him without hesitation if he stopped being useful. Survival came first, no matter how much it scraped at his pride.
Then, one day, something changed.
It started when a tremor rolled through the floor, strong enough to make the bottles on the shelves rattle. People shouted from down the hall, and for the first time since he had been brought here, he saw panic on some of their faces.
'What is happening?' he wondered, pausing in the middle of mopping. He had learned long ago not to ask questions, but the unease around him made it impossible to ignore.
The next few days were strange.
He heard bits of conversations when he passed rooms or when someone forgot to keep their voice down. The words made little sense on their own, but they all pointed to something big happening outside.
Something massive.
When he asked once, Richard just sneered at him. "Why do we have to tell you anything? All you have to do is serve us for the rest of your life. A slave does not need to know what's going on outside."
'Then why are you so tense?' Raven thought, though he kept his eyes down.
'Something is scaring even you.'
Two days before the awakening, the base emptied like never before. Almost everyone was sent out.
This was not how they worked.
The mafia was too strong for anyone to take head-on, so there was no reason to send out that many people unless something serious was coming.
'They are moving for a reason. And if they are moving, then they are leaving gaps. Gaps I can use.'
He did not know the details, but he understood enough to realise this was the first real opportunity he had been given in three years.
They had grown used to him being silent, to him obeying every command without resistance. They thought he was broken completely, a doll that would not even think about running.
'You think I am yours,' he thought as he scrubbed at the same stain for the third time that morning, 'but I am only waiting. And now I do not have to wait much longer.'
He had changed in those years. Whatever softness he had once had was gone. He no longer flinched when he saw a body or when someone screamed for help and got nothing but a bullet in return. He had accepted that the world was darker than he had ever imagined.
'The only difference between them and the rest of the world is that they are honest about it.'
What remained of his humanity was twisted, reshaped by everything they had done to him. He no longer dreamed about being free so he could live peacefully. Now, freedom was only a step towards what he really wanted.
Power. Enough to make sure no one could ever do to him what they had done. Enough to stand at the top so he could decide who lived and who died.
And revenge. The kind that would not just kill them, but make them wish they had died sooner.
That afternoon, with most of the base gone, Raven finally acted. He took a small rucksack from the corner of the storage room, stuffing into it whatever food he could find without drawing attention.
A half-loaf of bread. Two bottles of water. A packet of crackers that had been sitting there for months.
'It is not much. But I do not need much. I just need to get out and stay out.'
No one stopped him when he walked to the front door. No one even looked at him twice. They thought they had already won. That was their mistake.