Face of Malice

POV: Naga

Are you the Devil?

He’d said it with a smirk, but the smirk wasn’t the sharp part. The sharp part was how casually he’d laid the blade on the table, like it didn’t matter whether I bled. 

I shrugged his hand off my shoulder.

“Does it matter? Right now we all want the same thing. And I’m the only one who can find it.”

Despite my clumsy attempt at deflecting, Specter’s question rode with us like an extra passenger on the way to the warehouse. Buckled in and quiet, breathing in the same air and fogging up the glass of the car.

My answer was like a stone dropped into a well. They all listened for the splash and pretended not to hear the depth.

Makoto drove like he trusted the road only because he had both hands on it. He didn’t look back. He never needed to.

Shelby sat tall in the passenger seat, the radio sleeping in her lap. Streetlight washed over her face at intervals. As if she’d decided to help me and now she was counting the cost in the dark.

I took the rear bench. Haru and Aki had taken a separate vehicle and headed off first to survey the perimeter. We cut the headlights two blocks out.

Makoto rolled to a quiet stop in an alley as the engine cooled. “Check.”

Shelby clipped the radio to my collar. I felt the brush of her fingers against my neck. “Check,” she said into hers.

Static sighed, then Aki’s voice skated through, dry as a laugh in the wrong room: “East perimeter clear.”

Haru’s voice followed: “Four live cameras. Same as last time we were here.”

“Stay on the perimeter,” Makoto said. “We’re going in, call if you see anything out of the ordinary.”

“Copy,” Haru murmured.

“This feels like a spy movie,” Shelby snickered into the radio. I could see Makoto’s side-eye glaring into the back of her head.

We stepped out into air that smelled like rusty steel and bleach. Makoto’s silhouette sharpened when his feet hit concrete. He moved like a blueprint walking.

Shelby walked along my side, a step behind. I let the city pour through my mouth and nose, mapping the filth so I’d catch the scent when it came.

For three blocks, my shadows skated along the edges of things, testing seams, obedient. Then the air turned and showed me its seam.

It was small at first, the way a note can be small and still rearrange a room. Thin. Clean. Out of place. Like rain stepping into smoke.

I stopped without planning to. Shelby matched me because she’d learned my halts already, Makoto’s head turned a degree, the way an animal acknowledges the wind.

“It was here,” I said, and my voice came out thinner than I liked. It’s hard to talk past a memory you want to be present tense.

We slid into a side alley. Dumpsters leaned shoulder to shoulder like tired bouncers.

I put my palm on the brick wall. Beneath it, the thread I wanted ran forward, hooked left, spilled a drop near a drain, and kept tugging with the patience of a hand sliding along a wall in the dark.

A camera above made a point of tilting its gaze away.

The scent pooled at the threshold of thr watehouse. Like music held on a single note.

“It’s this way,” I said, and Shelby drew her breath like a stitch had tightened.

Makoto studied the frame, the hinge screws, the pattern of scuffs where impatient hands had missed the mark. He looked up without moving his feet, measured roof and sightlines and the way the lane would trap noise if noise happened.

“How far can you follow the trail from here?” He was trying to keep his composure. After all, it was the first real lead he’d found in God knows how long.

I pressed my hand flat to the cold steel. The thread pressed back. South. The smell was getting stronger. It didn’t just pass through here. The blood was still here.

“South,” I muttered. “The blood is here.”

Makoto’s gaze cut to me, then to the street. He rotated the plan in his head, running through his options. “We find it.”

The docks breathed slow, the way things do when they don’t need your permission.

Containers stacked high to make canyon walls of faded color. Black water shouldered the pilings, as if rehearsing for a performance no one would attend. The smell was a mix of salt and diesel, wafting through the piers.

The thread in my chest plucked taut here. Angel blood was definitely still here. Haneul’s blood. I did my best to keep composed.

We wandered further in, Makoto’s pace quickening as Shelby and I followed not far behind. My breath rationed to keep the scent loud enough not to lose. Ten paces of silence.

Shelby tapped the bottom corner of a crate. “You’re sure it’s here?”

I was too focused to answer. We ghosted past a forklift sleeping with its forks lowered, as if someone had taught it manners. A coil of rope had turned itself into a nest. I could taste the air’s seams the way a blind hand reads a wall for doorframes. The scent’s thread didn’t strut. It continued.

For a stretch of beats, the world agreed not to be hostile. Makoto’s shoulders lowered an eighth of an inch. Shelby’s breathing went from holds to slow releases. Even my chest got the idea there might be a way to be alive without pretending it meant anything grand.

Then the air reconfigured.

The hum had a new note. Smooth. Expensive. Intent.

Engines. Two of them, answering each other.

We froze without rehearsal. We knew it instinctively who it was. Malice.

Headlights stitched white lines across the lane from both ends, sewing us into a pocket of light. Two black cars slid in, one from each mouth of the corridor, their engines purring an apology they didn’t mean.

Doors opened in choreography. Men got out with the discipline of people who’d practiced murder under fluorescent lights until they could do it with their jackets on. Suits that fit, shoes that didn’t scuff, hands that rested near weapons with the intimacy of long relationships.

And then he came out last. Men like him always did. Not because theatrics mattered, but because order did.

He had a sleek black suit and black hair slicked back with a care that was ritual-like. Cigarette held like punctuation. Rings at his knuckles caught the light and tossed it back. His smile took its time arriving and then sliced the scene as neatly as a blade.

The air bent around him. Confidence does that. You can fake it with voice and gesture, but the real thing makes the night itself step aside to let you pass. Even my shadows stirred and then stilled, the way dogs go cautious when something bigger steps into their yard.

Makoto’s weight rolled to the balls of his feet. Shelby’s hand moved near her sleeve on instinct, then decided to wait. In some rooms, motion was a confession.

The man didn’t speak right away. He figured silence was a leash if you’re the one holding it. His gaze brushed Makoto, assessed him, priced him. It lingered on Shelby with appreciative contempt, like a collector forgiving a scratch on a diamond because the color pleased him. Then it found me and held.

He smiled a real smile, the kind you don’t practice because you don’t do it for anyone else.

“Thought you’d come,” he said, voice like smoke. “I’m Laurent. Not that any of you will live long enough to remember.”

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The words were stamped into the air like serial numbers.

He announced himself the way storms do; not as warning, but as weather.

Laurent let the name settle, then kept going, eyes never leaving mine. “So that bastard Jinho wasn’t hallucinating. He said the Devil would crawl back into this world.”

The cold that lived at the base of my spine woke up. Not recognition. Not kin. The shock wasn’t that he named me, it was that someone had known about my arrival, like my existence had been a schedule they were keeping.

Shelby’s brow drew down. “Who the hell are you?”

Laurent laughed, a low exhale that traveled with the smoke. “The man who decides who dies, and who gets delivered alive.”

His right hand tilted like a conductor acknowledging the violins. Guns came out of his enforcers’ jackets.

He lifted his cigarette a breath’s width and pointed the ember at me as if to underscore a point he’d already made to himself.

“You two.” He glanced at Makoto and Shelby. “You die tonight.” His sharp gaze slid back to me. “You stay breathing. Lucky for you, the Original Sin must remain intact.”

Words have weight when someone speaks them as if they’re reciting inventory. Original Sin. Those words were not meant to be uttered by mortal mouths.

The shadows at my feet writhed, a reflex. Instinct said lunge, but something else in me said do not move because there was a woman next to me whose head he could split open with one command.

Laurent didn’t flinch at my shadow that flickered out and back like a thrown knife reconsidering. He laughed, delighted, and in some ways it was worse than fear. “That confirms it,” he said, savoring it.

Engines again. Additional choreography. Another car coasted up behind the nearer sedan, doors opened. More men spilled out. Two of them dragged out our accomplices.

Aki arrived first, chin up, blood bright on her cheekbone, smirk bent but intact. The thing that makes predators grin was still in her eyes. Haru came after, wrists held too tight in a man’s hand, lip split, but his gaze was calm and attentive.

Laurent swept a hand like he was unveiling a painting. “I dislike loose ends. Now we’re symmetrical.”

Aki spit blood onto the concrete like a punctuation mark. “Let them kill me, just find Vinnie,” she called past the muzzle in her ribs.

The man holding her rewarded her with a twist of the wrist that hurt. She smiled harder. Shelby gasped, her hand rushing to cover her mouth.

Haru didn’t speak. He didn’t fidget. He looked at me with that silent curiosity he carried even into this kind of situation.

Makoto’s jaw tightened a fraction. He didn’t consider Aki’s request, but I could tell his mind was racing to find a way out of this.

Laurent savored the fear that seeped through the air. Then he clapped once, soft. The man nearest Shelby stepped in and glued a pistol to her temple.

Something in my chest tried to climb out of my mouth. The shadows under me surged like snakes pushing to be born.

“Try it,” Laurent said coldly, his eyes not leaving mine. “Let a shadow twitch and she dies before you can call it back.”

His smile edged toward tender, which is to say cruel in a way that felt personal. He took a long, content inhale from his cigarette, then angled his face so smoke drifted past me.

“How fascinating.” He leaned a degree closer, voice lower. “You could kill us all on the spot—to hell with these four. But for some reason you won’t…”

Laurent was right. I could let everyone die here to capture him. It was just a price to pay in exchange for finding Haneul. But my shadows stilled. They wouldn’t move even an inch.

Makoto made a sound like a click with his tongue and teeth. It wasn’t speech. It was decision. He lifted his chin a notch to find Laurent’s eyes. “You’re anticipated we were coming,” he said evenly. “Did Specter sell us out.”

Laurent glanced at him sidelong, amused as if a cat had spoken algebra. “Specter? So that little rat’s gotten himself into the mix.” He gestured wider with the cigarette, smoke writing lazy script above our heads. “No, but to indulge you…Tonight I let the Devil understand that this city has accountants now. He exists on a ledger. He gets debits and credits like the rest. And I’m the one coming to collect.”

“You’re Malice,”I said. My voice was steady. “Where’s Haneul.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Laurent replied, amused. “Ah, must be that angel.”

Aki scoffed. “God, you’re insufferable.”

My blood boiled under my skin.

“Boss,” one of the suited men near the nearer car said, low. He didn’t point or look, he aimed his chin in the way professionals do when they don’t want to interrupt the performance they’re in.

Laurent didn’t turn. “I saw it,” he said, which meant he hadn’t needed to. He breathed in again, content.

Makoto pivoted half an inch so he could keep Laurent in his periphery and still watch the angles that mattered. “You said you were gonna kill us,” he said. “If that were true, why bother with your grand speech.”

“You mistake endurance for inevitability,” Laurent replied. “I told you my name because it amuses me to gift you clarity before I kill you. Also because it changes nothing.” He smiled.

Shelby’s hands were loose at her sides because anything else would earn her a bullet behind the ear. “What on earth is Malice trying to achieve?”

Laurent’s eyebrows lifted, impressed by the audacity, not the question. “A future.” He let the word sit too long.

He shifted his attention back to me the way a cat returns to the bird it’s decided to eat last. “You smell her, don’t you? That’s why you came here. Not because of noble arithmetic.” He stepped close enough I could pick out the cinnamon thread in his cologne under the smoke. “I thought you would.”

I could have told him obsession is a kind of intelligence.

You just have to change what you measure.

But as I stared into the face of Malice that night, there was a gun on Shelby’s head, two on our friends and a dozen more on our space. And my shadows wanted to be righteous instead of useful.