Chapter Text
Felix had been watching him for weeks.
Not because the young man would be difficult. His routine was as transparent as glass. But when a job came down from those high places, where evil hid behind clean names and expensive suits, there were always layers to cover.
It wasn’t just about ending a life. It was about eliminating risk. Tying up loose ends before they could unravel.
Felix target had simply quit his job. A junior analyst, bright-eyed, brilliant. Too brilliant, really. Maybe he’d noticed something in the numbers, glimpsed the wrong names on the wrong ledger. Maybe he knew nothing at all. Maybe he’d pieced together everything. It didn't matter. He was a risk.
A contract was created. Felix took it. Preemptive problem solving, they called it.
And so the stalking began.
He tracked the boy through the same routes every day. Morning coffee from the shop with cracked blue tiles. Long hours in the library, his notebooks brimming with tidy script. The cheap apartment, two flights up, locks too old to matter. He was predictable. Always punctual, Always perfectly following a routine.
And then there was the volunteer work. Three nights a week, sometimes four, down in the underbelly of the city. Where the alleys housed drugs and sex work, medical care was just a pipe dream and the shelters patched together with wire and prayer. Where survival of the fittest ruled the streets.
He handed out broth, patched torn clothes, listened to the stories the world didn’t want. He smiled at addicts whose teeth were long gone, wiped the faces of children no one claimed. He touched people the way saints were supposed to, like every soul mattered.
It was perfect. A place of thieves, dealers, men who traded in flesh and silence. The kind of place where disappearances didn’t raise alarms. The kind of place where a corpse in the gutter could be explained by anything from a deal gone wrong to a grudge between gangs.
Felix catalogued it all with cold detachment: step count, street crossings, which lights the boy trusted, which alleys he avoided. He memorized the rhythm of his gait, the habitual pause when unlocking his door, the way he checked his pockets twice before entering the subway. Every detail was useful. Every detail made the trap tighter.
On nights when the boy walked alone, shoulders drawn against the cold, Felix ghosted two paces behind in the shadows, never closer than a reflection in a shop window, never further than the edge of sound. The boy never looked back. No one ever did, not when Felix was working.
And Felix built the plan in his head, the blind spots, the broken cameras, the perfect stretch of shadow.
He caught himself marking details that had nothing to do with efficiency. The way the boy laughed too loudly with friends. The way he lingered to pet a stray, murmuring to it like they shared a secret language. The way he carried hope like a lantern no storm had yet managed to snuff.
But those details were useless. They didn’t belong to Felix. They belonged to the job.
There was no room for error. Felix didn’t allow it. Failure wasn’t an option. He wouldn't be the one to bare the consequences. Someone else would. Someone who mattered. Someone he could never let any of this touch. So he worked diligently. Made perfection his calling card.
And the perfect execution was almost ready.
The trap had to look messy.
That was the irony of it. The neater Felix plan looked on paper, the dirtier the reality would be. Someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A predatory encounter gone too far. Another body in a city that didn’t bother to count them.
Every part of that narrative laid out with surgical precision.
The location came first. A blind stretch beneath a fractured neon sign, the only witnesses the rats tearing through the garbage cans. Too far from the main street for anyone to hear. Too close to the soup kitchen to raise eyebrows if trouble found a volunteer. A place where a man could be broken for long minutes or even hours before anyone might pass by.
Then came the tools. Each needed for the story they would tell. A knife, sharp but clumsy in design, its edge too uneven for the precise cuts. A length of wire, frayed enough to leave the right kind of burns against skin. A bottle, already cracked into jagged teeth, to be smashed and scattered across the ground. A cheap dildo, long and heavy enough to be able cause a lot of damage if used carelessly, paired with a condom. And, tucked into a separate pouch, a used condom collected from a trash can on the other side of town. Some poor soul, that would scapegoat if ever traced. And a worn shoe. To stamp a single bloody footprint into the damp alley mud.
Elements, that tell the story of the worst kind of violation. A violation no one would care about. Not in this part of town. It was cruel. It was perfection.
The sequence ran through Felix head again like a silent mantra. Overpower first. He needed bruises, defensive wounds, a bone fracture or two, to make the struggle believable. Simulate rape second. The perfect reasoning for an attack. Then the stabbing. Deliberately sloppy, uncoordinated, fueled by blind rage and panic. Not really to kill, but deadly nonetheless. And lastly, the run, the deliberate scattering of evidence: the glass bottle, the staged condom, the bloody footprint in the mud.
Felix stared into the mirror of a cracked shopfront window and let himself breathe, just once. Inhale. Exhale. The reflection showed freckles pale against sharp cheekbones, blond hair tucked under the shadow of his hood, a softness that was a lie. From the outside, Felix didn’t look like much of a threat. He was slight, a lean frame, almost delicate. Black denim, quiet sneakers, hands in his pockets.
A shadow pretending to be human. A kind of presence that didn’t draw notice, not because it blended in, but because it willed itself invisible.
He tugged the gloves tighter against his wrists and let the mask of humanity slide off.
At 21:46, footsteps began to echo.
At 21:47, the boy turned onto the road, unaware.
The boy’s steps rang too bright for this street. Shoes still clean, jacket zipped against the cold, eyes carrying that look Felix had seen a hundred times before: someone who thought they could bring light into shadows. Volunteer badge peeking from his bag, as though it might shield him from the truth of where he was.
Felix watched from the dark, perfectly still, pulse steady in his throat.
At 9:48, the boy bent to set a stack of flyers against a doorway. Felix moved.
At 9:49, Felix struck.
A hand around the mouth, another locking the wrist, the body yanked backwards into the alley before a sound could arise.
The young man’s muffled cry broke against Felix’s palm. He struggled, desperate, nails raking at gloves, shoes scraping concrete. Felix let it happen. He gave him the fight, the chance for those bruises and larcerations to be real. A sharp stomp broke the bones in the foot. A twist and a yank at the arm pulled ligaments past their limit.
The pain lancing through the adrenaline finally slowed the struggle. The wire stopped it entirely, cutting into skin just enough for angry red marks to rise and movement to be impossible.
The young man kicked, bucked, eyes wide with panic. Felix saw the hope drain away, saw the rising terror when the inevitability became obvious.
The intimate violation came next. A condom rolled over cheap silicone, the press rough, painful, aiming to tear. The boy sobbed into the gag Felix tied between his teeth, body shuddering against the intrusion, mind breaking.
Felix did not think. He did not allow himself to feel. His motions were clinical. A story was being carved into flesh, and he was only the instrument writing it.
When it was time, the knife came out. Felix angled the blade wrong on purpose, too shallow, too ragged, cruelly imprecise. The first stab aimed too high, and the boy screamed into the gag, thrashing weakly. Another, angled just off where a professional would strike to kill. A third, low in the side, meant to bleed him out slowly.
His body sagged against Felix, shaking, pleading eyes locking onto his as though some mercy might be found there.
But Felix’s face was stone.The work had to be done.
The final step of the plan, the run.
The Bottle was shattered, shards scattered near the body. Used condom dropped into the dirt. The footprint. Shoe wiped and discarded later. Gloves burned. Knife cleaned. The young man dying in the background.
At the end, he reached into his pocket and drew out a small glass vial, unscrewing the cap with steady fingers. From inside he removed a single downy chick-feather, bright yellow, soft, too fragile for this place. Holding it by the quill, he dipped it into the pooling blood. Deep, dark red spreading through the fluff. Then, carefully, he slid it back into the vial and sealed it. The vial vanished back into his coat.
Every detail ticked, every possibility covered. He left nothing of himself in that alley, nothing but the quiet shape of another senseless crime for the city to mourn.
By the time Felix reached his apartment, his mask had begun to crack.
He shut the door behind him. The lock clicked. And then ... nothing.
He stayed right there, one step past the threshold, darkness pressing in close. Jacket still zipped, boots still laced. He should move. He should clean. He should do a hundred things to erase the trail of tonight. But his body refused.
Silence rang louder than a scream could.
The boy’s muffled cries echoed in his ears, looping without end. He could still feel the slack weight of a body struggling against the inevitable, the sharp stutter of breath as pain gave way to despair and hopelessness. His own heartbeat had been steady through all of it. But now it staggered, uneven, too fast and too loud for the quiet room.
Felix pressed his back to the door and slid down until he was folded into a ball. His head leaning back against the wood. The cool surface grounded him just enough not to float away, but the phantom warmth on his hands kept dragging him back under. He rubbed them against his thighs, hard enough to sting through the fabric. Still not clean. He flexed his fingers, cracked the joints one by one. Still not his hands.
Minutes passed. Or hours. The clock ticked from the counter.
He tried to focus on the small things. The way the faint draft from the window curled against his cheek. The hum of the refrigerator. The sting of his nails digging into his thighs. Anything but the memory of that alley. Anything but the sound of wordless begging.
His chest heaved. In, out. In, out. Not enough. Never enough. He curled tighter, arms around his knees, head pressed into the space between. For a terrifying second he thought he might cry, but the tears never came. His body didn’t grant him that mercy.
Instead, the numbness spread. Heavy. Cold. A weight that pressed him into the floorboards until he wasn’t sure he existed at all.
And then he rose, meachanically, like puppet pulled up by its strings. His feet carried him to the kitchen. His hands reached for the flour, the sugar, the baking powder. He didn’t tell them to. They just did.
Soon, the silence filled with the scrape of bowls, the thump of dough against wood, the repetitive motion of kneading. His breath caught the rhythm. Push. Fold. Turn. Push. Fold. Turn.
The stick of dough clung to his palms, different from blood, but similar enough to make his stomach twist. He worked it harder and harder, until it smoothed under his hands.
The oven’s click finally broke the stillness. A spark, a hum, a wave of dry heat curling out. The air shifted. The flat no longer smelled like iron.
By the time the first cake rose golden in its tin, Felix hands started to shake. Not because salvation came, but because he was burying his guilt. Sealing it under the crust of baked treats cooling on his counter.
By dawn, the kitchen was lined with cakes, perfect and golden. Felix sat among them, eyes empty, hands still, waiting for peace to come.