I pushed the rubble off her torso. Hands shaking. Breath uneven. Every movement felt like dragging guilt up from a grave. Each splintered board I tossed aside came with another curse under my breath, another bitter string of blame aimed straight at myself.
She died because of me.
Because of my games.
Because I pulled that trigger without thinking—without imagining the price.
And then came the truth.
Not slowly. Not mercifully.
It hit like ice in the gut.
There was no torso.
No lower body.
No crushed ribcage.
No mangled legs pinned beneath debris.
Just the upper half. Neck. Shoulder. One arm still connected like it didn't know it was missing everything else.
My mind clawed for a reason. Anything. Maybe the rest of her had been crushed to pulp beneath the rubble. That would make sense. That would be fair, in a cruel, predictable way.
So I kept digging.
Kept tearing through the splinters and shattered boards like a madman, eyes darting, breath catching in my throat. But there was nothing. No remnants. No limbs. No blood. No broken flesh.
No body.
She wasn't crushed.
She wasn't torn apart.
She was just… missing.
How?
If the roof collapsed on her, there should have been something left. Anything. Blood splatter, shards of bone, flesh flattened into ruin. But the rubble was clean. Too clean. Like it had fallen around her, not on her.
I turned to the walls. Looked for bloodstains, for spray patterns, for the grotesque signature of cannon fire. But the walls were bare. No gore. No streaks. No signs of a blast ripping through a body.
And that's when the dread settled in. Cold. Heavy.
The cannon hadn't done this.
I hadn't done this.
She was like this before I found her.
Before the rubble.
Before the collapse.
Before me.
She was already broken.
And that was somehow worse.
Because it meant someone else had done it.
Someone had taken her apart with precision. With time. With purpose.
Left her there like a discarded experiment—half a body still trying to remember how it once felt whole.
And I had thought I was the monster.
I dropped the last piece of rubble and just stood there, staring at her.
Trying to piece together a horror that didn't leave blood on the walls.
Trying to understand how a person becomes a ruin without a trace.
Then the sound came.
The snoring.
That foul, rasping drawl that rattled through the air like rot through bone. Of course it was him—the demon still sprawled across the captain's bed like he owned the filth he slept in. Who else could it be? Who else could sleep so soundly with the scent of death thick in the room?
Who else could be this cruel?
But even as the hatred boiled behind my eyes, even as my hand twitched with the urge to end him right there, I turned away.
I wasn't done.
Not yet.
She was still incomplete. She deserved more than this. More than being left forgotten under dust. She deserved more than this hell. And I—at the very least—I could try to give her a final moment of dignity.
So I kept searching.
Scavenging like a rat through the wreckage, digging through splinters and shattered rum bottles, pulling back moldy cloth and broken glass. Hoping—praying in the ugliest, grimiest sense of the word—that I might find something. A leg. A hand. A single piece of her to remind the world she was whole once.
But there was nothing.
Nothing but dust and the echo of my own breath catching in my throat.
Her parts weren't in the rubble.
Weren't hidden beneath boards or buried in debris.
She had simply… vanished.
And that left me with only one possibility.
I turned toward the bed. Toward him.
The demon.
Still snoring. Still breathing. Still existing.
Maybe he had them. Maybe he kept what was left of her like a souvenir. A prize. A trophy. Something to remember the screams by. Something to stroke and smile at in the dark. The kind of man who cuts someone in half and keeps the rest not out of need—but out of want. Out of some twisted, guttural obsession.
Maybe the rest of her was here.
In this room.
Somewhere I hadn't dared look yet.
Maybe… just maybe… he hadn't finished with her at all.
Maybe... just maybe.. he wasn't what I thought he was.