Well, well, well. Look who's crawling back to me. I thought you were too busy reading Herobert's shitty story—or maybe you skipped it to stick with me, and if you did, you made the right call. Although it would be fucking awesome if you read the chapter where he killed a shitload of people. Yeah, he always acted like a fucking saint, but that fucker's a genocidal maniac, too. And he was always judging me. Fucking hypocrite.
But anyway, here you are, and that's what matters.
"Miguel, so what were you doing while that Herobert piece of shit was busy getting his cheeks clapped in jail and throughout his whole journey?" you'd ask me, and the answer is pretty simple:
Being fucking miserable as well.
After the whole shitshow at Katya's place, I went to her beach house, buried her, and from that point on, I don't know what happened before or after. But I felt like shit the whole time.
And the day that fucking Herobert came was no different: I remember waking up in the middle of the night, and everything was still dark. Back then, I used to sleep with a pillow on top of me 'cause I'd gotten used to Katya sleeping with me. I'd also tie one of her sweaters around my neck 'cause it smelled like her, and I didn't want to forget that scent.
I didn't want to forget anything about her.
Then I saw the closed door and remembered that she often arrived in the middle of the night. I imagined her opening the door and slipping inside quietly so as not to make any noise.
"Why are you still awake, Miguel?" she'd say when she saw me. "You called some whores at this hour, didn't you, you perv? Are they still working this late?"
Fucking brat.
But something like that was never gonna happen again. Just thinking about made me so fucking mad that I punched the wall—and it hurt way more than you'd think. It wasn't the first time I'd done something like that, and my hand was already pretty fucked up from it.
And yet, I kept hitting the wall and myself as hard as I could 'cause I hadn't had the fucking balls to tell her not to get into the SUV.
I hit myself harder and harder.
I remembered her hair covered in blood, her dead eyes, her pale skin.
I kept hitting myself harder and harder, pulled my hair as hard as I could, and wept. I threw myself onto the floor and cried until I lost my voice. I could barely hold my hands up; they were so battered that blood was dripping from inside my gloves.
After who knows how long, I stood up and went to the bathroom. I walked down the hallways and saw that the walls were covered in cracks and blood.
In the bathroom I saw myself in the mirror. I was very skinny and pale, I had long hair but a lot of bald spits 'cause I had pulled my hair out so many times. And I also had scars all over my body. Almost all of them came out after I transformed, and I honestly don't know how I'm still alive after that. I remember very little of what happened that day, but I do remember that my body was in pieces. I believe my magic was so powerful at that time that it kept me alive and healed me in the end. I don't know. No matter how much I've researched it, I've never found shit.
Maybe I was the first to use that much power, but honestly, I don't think so. There must have been people like that before, but no one gives a shit about magic these days, and that's why it's getting harder and harder for me to find any information about it.
Fucking idiots.
Anyway, I took off my gloves, and the prosthetics I wore on my missing fingers fell off right away. My hands were swollen, misshapen, and covered in blood.
Oh, right. I never finished telling you what happened with the clown gang and how I ended up forming Death, did I?
Well, I think this is the perfect moment to tell you.
We left off where Darius had sent me to kill the last member of "The Forgotten" gang, but it had all been a fucking trap, and they'd caught me.
They put a Bephelometh collar on me and took me to who knows where. Along the way, they mocked me and described how they were going to torture me for days—and I knew it all too well. I had kidnapped so many people, and now it was my turn to be the victim.
But I laughed at that moment.
"I'm already dead," I told them 'cause they were not gonna spare my life and there was nothing I could do to save myself. "You worry about getting caught and betrayed. I'll be able to sleep now."
They beat me and stopped mocking me 'cause they knew I was right—that for a criminal, being alive is a sentence, and death is a relief.
We got at their safe house, and right away I heard the music, the laughter, and the screams. I had heard those sounds so many times before, but now they seemed different. My legs were trembling, yet I walked as if nothing was wrong. They took me to a room where there were other people; they stripped me naked and tied me to a chair. I didn't even try to break free, 'cause I knew I was tied so well I'd be useless.
They started by beating the shut outta me, and then they electrocuted me with a car battery—all while cheering and laughing. I screamed in pain, but I didn't say a word to them.
"Oh, what a man," one of them scoffed. "But sooner or later, you're gonna crack."
"Left or right?" another one asked me, and I said nothing. "Right, then," so he grabbed my right hand, placed a pair of poultry shears at the base of my thumb, and squeezed as hard as he could. The shears weren't very sharp, but I could feel them cutting through the skin and pressing harder and harder against the bone. I screamed in pain as he squeezed, released, and squeezed again harder and hard, until the bone cracked and my thumb fell off.
They took more fingers from that hand and from the left one. I watched as they cut them off and threw them on the floor, stomped on them, and laughed; at that moment, I found it hard to believe they were mine—that they were *my* fingers—as if none of what was happening was real. Yet in the end, I looked at my hands: on the right, I was left with two fingers—the little and the ring one—and on the left, three: the thumb, the index, and the ring one.
My hands ended up looking like shit, which is why I always kept them hidden under my gloves. Wearing gloves makes you look badass, plus you can hide the prosthetics; the ones I had were pretty basic and would move whenever I moved my hand. Still, I couldn't exert any force or carry anything with them. That's why I'd grab things with my left hand.
"Go heat up the knives," one of them told another, and he left; after a while—during which the guys there gave me another brutal beating—the other one came back with the knives glowing red-hot.
"Left or right?" he asked.
"Left," I didn't know what he was going to do with that knife, but after they tore off my right thumb, I didn't have the balls to stay quiet anymore."
Then he drove the knife into my left eye and violently moved it left and right. I screamed and thrashed my head to take out the knife and try to save my eye.
Now let's go back for a moment to that day when I was in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. I took off my eye patch and saw a mass of scars and scorched skin where my eyelid should have been—in fact, I don't even know if I have an eyelid left, 'cause I can't open it. I touched that area with my finger and felt a hollow space, 'cause there was nothing in my eye socket.
I washed my hands, cleaned off the blood, and left the bathroom. I walked into the living room and sat on one of the couches, even though it was covered in a shitload of bags, wrappers, and half-eaten food. A lot of it already smelled rotten.
And there I waited for Herobert to arrive. His aura was much weaker than usual, but I could feel it drawing closer little by little.
At that moment, I felt a sense of déjà vu, because it wasn't the first time that had happened. Back when they caught me—after they'd already messed up my eye and kept on torturing me—I had felt that same aura approaching until it reached the door. And then, just like that day at Katya's beach house, Herobert opened the door and walked in. He was a kid, just like me, but he was as powerful as Alpha—and as powerful as I was. I thought he was the leader of some new gang or something, since I'd never seen him before. But he saved me, like the fucking hero he was—I think they had just given him that title at the time.
The funny thing is, the second time I saw him coming in, he looked way worse off than I did—filthy, gaunt, and with a dirty beard. He smelled like sea, sweat, and dried blood, and was covered in bandages.
You know something? From the moment I got into that beach house, I knew someone would find me eventually—that the police or Katya's dad would come looking for her there. But days and weeks went by, and nobody came. I hated them so much for abandoning her, for not giving a shit about someone like her. I swore I'd kill them all for leaving her so alone. Just think how alone she must have been to go out and befriend a fucking criminal. We spent months traveling around the world, and nobody looked for her; nobody asked where she was, or if she was okay.
And now that fucking Herobert piece of shit was coming to take me away from her. So, right then and there, I gathered all my magic and jumped at him to beat the living shit outta him.