Azriel's Point Of View
Diego began to weep, real tears cutting clean, frantic tracks through the dark red smudges and grime on his cheeks. He pressed his knees hard into the grease-stained tile, trembling so violently his teeth rattled in his jaw. The sound he made was low and animal, the kind of noise a man makes when he has already accepted his own ruin but cannot stop begging anyway. It was the sound of a man who understood, on some primal level, that language itself had failed him, and only noise remained.
Somewhere beneath the terror, a smaller, more pathetic sound surfaced too… the hiccupping gasp of a child who knows the punishment is already decided and pleads only out of instinct.
I recognized it instantly. I had heard it before, in other rooms, from other men, and it never failed to strike the same hollow chord in me, one that felt less like sympathy and more like recognition of a pattern long since worn smooth.
