Thorne tossed the lighter onto Brat, and in the time it took to breathe, the world around him blurred down into heat and light. Flames swallowed him faster than he thought.
A raw cry tore out of his throat, bouncing through the dim, dust-filled warehouse like a broken prayer. Pain pulsed in waves, yet even that pain felt distant beneath the weight of something heavier - fear, confusion, the familiar ache of betrayal.
Boss watched, a smile carved lazily across his lips, as though Brat's agony were nothing more than entertainment. A performance. A spectacle crafted solely for his amusement.
He didn't blink. Didn't flinch. Didn't hesitate. He simply enjoyed the sound - Brat's scream, cracking and fading under the fire's hungry roar.
Thorne stood beside him, expressionless, unmoving, his eyes as silent as dead stars. No sympathy. No hesitation. It was just obedience. Stoic, cold and absolute.
---------------------
Brat never understood it. Never understood why they followed Boss the way they did. Why they bowed, obeyed, broke themselves just to satisfy a monster. They could have escaped. They could have fought him. All of them together could have crushed Boss with brute force alone. And yet… they didn't. They never even tried.
Once - only once - Brat had asked Thorne why none of them ran. Why they stayed. Why they endured.
And Thorne, normally a man of unshakeable calm, had stiffened. His eyes had flicked toward the shadows as though expecting something terrible to crawl out and punish him. A shiver slipped through him, barely visible but real.
"You can't," he said.
Just that. Two words. Final. Absolute. Words that shut every door and left every question unanswered.
Brat had barely time to repeat the question when Thorne changed the subject, forcing the conversation away like a man might swat at a burning coal before it scorched him.
Brat never asked again. The question at that moment seemed to bear too much weight, too much danger, and was too suffocating. And probably, deep inside, he was also afraid of the answer.
But the strangest part - the part that gnawed at him like a dull blade - was that he didn't understand himself either. He could have run. Any day. Any night. Dozens of chances slipped by like shadows beneath open windows and cracked doors. He could have vanished into the world and never looked back.
But he didn't.
Every time the thought whispered through his mind, his heartbeat stuttered, his legs trembled, and something inside him froze-something invisible, heavy, suffocating. He didn't know what it was - fear, loyalty, or something worse.
He knew that every return would result in beatings so severe he would drift at the edge of consciousness, but he always went back. Without reason.
It was as if chains he could not see wrapped around him each time he tried to imagine escape.
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As the flames curled around him, the keen edge of the pain began to soften. His screams weakened, thinning into hollow breaths barely capable of carrying sound. The burning dimmed, like candles guttering in the wind. His limbs went weightless, distant, all but forgotten. His mind wavered, dissolving at the edges.
He could feel himself slipping.
In that flickering moment, a memory fluttered - fleeting, distant, unscarred by pain. A family in a park. A mother laughing. A father tossing their child in the air. An image of warmth he had watched from afar, a moment he had envied without fully understanding why.
Ever since then, he had wanted something normal. Something gentle. A family that held him not with chains but with love. He didn't crave riches; he didn't need power. He just wanted arms that welcomed him home.
But that dream never came. He drowned instead in sixteen years of torment, drug through a world that only chewed him up and spat him out.
And now, as fire blurred the edges of his vision, he wondered if this ending was mercy: to at last join the parents he'd lost, to at last stop fighting - to stop hurting.
He wished - he truly wished - that he had died along with them at the time. That he had been spared the ensuing years.
His breath turned thinner, quieter. The world fell away from him. His heartbeat fluttered like a dying flame.
One last thought rose, soft as a whisper:
Mom… Dad… I'm coming.
Then complete silence ensued.
A deep and endless darkness enveloped him, swallowing sound and thought alike.
Brat died.
A painful, tormenting end after a life of suffering.
Death by fire.
But then - like a dream cracking open - he opened his eyes.
He blinked, slowly, confused.
Everything about him was white. Brilliant, yet not stark. Soft, endless, stretching far beyond sight. A void with no walls, no ceiling. There was only pure, blank stillness.
"Where… am I?" he muttered, peering around in slow circles, searching for anything familiar.
Nothing. Only white.
He lifted his hands. His skin was whole. Smooth. Unburned.
"Am I alive?" he whispered.
But the memory of fire flickered through him, too sharp, too real to deny.
"No… I can't be."
Then, slicing cleanly through the silence, a voice drifted across the void.
"Hello, Ethan."
The voice was beautiful - soft as wind, warm as sunlight. Its tone wrapped around him and eased something tight in his chest.
He spun around, searching for the speaker. At first, he saw no one. Only the endless white.
But when he turned again - she was there.
A woman sat on a golden throne that hadn't been there a moment before.
She was breathtaking, a vision too perfect to belong to any mortal world. Her hair flowed in waves of pale gold, shining like sunlight on water. Her eyes were clear blue, bright yet gentle, deep enough to drown in.
A long blue dress draped elegantly over her form, fabric glowing with ethereal light. Golden and diamond jewelry adorned her-bracelets, necklaces, rings - each one catching the void's light as though the jewels themselves were alive.
With her legs crossed, her posture was relaxed yet regal. One elbow was propped on the arm of the throne, supporting her head as it leaned to one side. There was a soft smile on her lips - a beautiful, almost unreal smile, the sort that would unravel kingdoms if she so desired.
She was beauty incarnate, grace given form, a presence that made endless white feel warmer simply because she existed within it.
And she was staring at him. Smiling at him. As if she had been waiting.