In the next corridor, two men came together, knives in hand, overconfident. Rhodes almost considered it a kindness.

He shifted to the side at the precise moment, grabbed the first man by the shirt, and pulled him forward. The second man couldn’t stop the movement. The blade pierced his partner’s body.

Rhodes used the opening.

He smashed the attacker’s nose against his knee. The sound of the cartilage giving way mingled with the muffled scream. The knife changed hands. A single, precise blow pierced the throat of the man who was still writhing on the ground.

The hallway was still again.

With each body that fell, something inside Rhodes didn’t find relief – it organized itself. Because this wasn’t catharsis. It was closeness. Each death highlighted how close Bea was. How much Nico had decided to surround her like an object, a bargaining chip, prey.

Blood dripped down his hands. He didn’t wipe it away. He felt no revulsion. No heaviness. Only clarity.

At the end of the corridor, a faint light escaped through the cracks of a makeshift shed, set up in the heart of the junkyard. From inside came muffled voices. A deep laugh.

And beneath it, almost imperceptible – a sound that pierced Rhodes like a direct blow to the chest.

A muffled cough.

Bea.

He knew. He wiped the blood that had splattered across his face with the back of his hand, straightened his posture, and pushed the door open slowly.

Without haste, without hesitation.

The shed opened up before Rhodes.

In the center, under the yellow light of a lamp hanging by a worn wire too frayed to inspire confidence, Bea was tied to a chair. Her wrists were bound behind the backrest, her ankles together. A dark bruise spread across her left cheek. Her lip was cut. Dried blood lay on her chin.

Alive.

That was enough.

Around her, three armed men stood guard, poorly positioned, too nervous to appear professional. And further away, leaning on a wooden box, Nico observed everything with the relaxed smile of someone who believed he was in control of the situation. There were cigarettes scattered beside him. Ashes on the ground. Carelessness.

Rhodes took a step into the shed.

Good evening, gentlemen.

The voice came out low. Almost polite. It wasn’t a greeting, it was a belated warning.

The first shot came too quickly for Bea to understand where it had come from. A dry, short, definitive sound. The man on the left fell as if someone had switched something off inside him. A dark hole opened in his chest. The gun slipped from his fingers and hit the ground with a sound too small for someone who had just died.

She couldn’t blink.

Rhodes was already in motion.

The second man ran, knife in hand, shouting curses as if noise were courage. Bea tried to close her eyes. She couldn’t. Everything inside her was too trapped to run away – including her gaze.

Rhodes did not back down.

He grabbed the man’s arm in mid-air and twisted it. The crack of the bone echoed through the shed, clean, irreversible. The knife fell. Rhodes caught it in the same motion, without any hurry, and plunged it into the man’s throat with almost careful precision. The body slumped against him before falling to the ground, heavy, useless.

Bea felt her stomach churn.

She was trembling all over. It wasn’t just fear. It was something deeper. Something that mixed shock, exhaustion, and a certainty too strange to be comforting. As if all of this was happening because there was no other possible way out.

The third man began firing blindly, shouting. Bullets ricocheted off the metal, sparks cutting through the air. Rhodes advanced nonetheless. Without hiding. Without accelerating. As if he already knew that none of those men could stop him.

He grabbed the man by the collar and slammed his head against an iron pillar.

Once. Twice. Three times.

The sound changed. The body gave way. The wall was stained a thick, dark red.

Silence.

Only Rhodes’ breathing – heavy, controlled – and the nervous crackling of the lamp swaying above them.

It hurt to breathe. It hurt to exist. Still, Bea looked up – Rhodes. He turned his face toward her, and that’s when something broke completely.

The violence simply vanished. It didn’t diminish… it ceased. His shoulders relaxed a millimeter. His gaze, once too sharp to be human, was now entirely focused on her. Absolute attention. Total presence.

“Bea.”

The name came out softly. Almost gently.

That pierced her more deeply than any blow.

Before he could get any closer, the metallic sound echoed behind him.

Nico emerged from the shadows laughing, as if it were all a staged spectacle for entertainment. The long knife gleamed in his dirty hand. His crooked smile exuded cheap arrogance and poorly disguised desperation. His eyes wandered over Bea with disgust and possessiveness, as if she were still something that belonged to him.

“Look at that…” she dragged out the words. “Who would have thought the doll came with bodyguards?”

He spat on the ground.

“Who the hell are you? Where’s that old son of a bitch?”

Rhodes straightened his body slowly. Blood trickled from his knuckles. A half-smile appeared – cold, empty, clinical.

“If you’re talking about her father…” he said, “I have no idea where he is.”

Bea’s stomach sank.

How did he know?

Nico laughed too loudly, trying to regain his size.

“This has nothing to do with you. Family debt isn’t transferable, playboy.”

Rhodes took a single step forward.

The space has changed.

“It has everything to do with me,” he said, hIS voice low. “Because you touched her.”

Bea’s wrist burned as if it had been touched from the inside.

Nico pointed the knife at her. His hand was trembling now, unmistakably.

“Then back off. It’s not your debt. You don’t know who you’re messing with!”

Rhodes tilted his head, almost curiously.

“I know exactly,” he replied. “And you’re already dead. You just haven’t realized it yet.”

Nico shouted and lunged forward.

The blade sliced through the air. Rhodes dodged at the last second, grabbed his arm, and twisted until the sharp crack echoed. Nico roared, pathetic, but still managed to tear Rhodes’ rib in a quick, shallow cut. Blood stained his shirt.

Rhodes didn’t blink.

Nico’s head slammed against a pile of scrap metal. A punch to the stomach. Another to the face. The sound was wrong. His body gave way, spitting blood, until, in a desperate push, Nico managed to break free and limp towards the side exit.

“You have no idea what kind of hell you’ve bought yourself…” he murmured, his voice faltering.

Rhodes didn’t go after him.

He turned to Bea and knelt before her. His bone-breaking hands touched her face with almost reverent care.

Her fingers trembled for a fleeting instant, not from doubt, but from restraint, as she brushed away the hair clinging to her skin. Rhodes assessed each mark as if reading a silent report of failures. The bruise. The cut. The dried blood. All recorded. All filed away.

“Everything’s fine,” he said softly. “I’m here.”

The voice did not promise comfort. It promised permanence.

And it was there, still tied up, bruised, bleeding, that Bea understood something that made her swallow hard: what he was doing to the world wasn’t protection. It never was. It was domination. Control. Extermination.

But what he did to her was, and that was much more frightening.

Even broken, even trapped, his treatment of her caused something inside Bea to rearrange itself in a way that was too wrong to be called relief. Hell had come after her and had decided to stay.

For a second, she thought she was hallucinating. Her mind always did that when despair grew too much: it created impossible images, better versions of reality, only to tear them away later. But no. His eyes met hers, steady, present, and something inside her gave way with a silent snap.

Rhodes was there – alive, kneeling, blood on his wrists.

He approached as if the rest of the shed had ceased to exist. He ignored his own wound, the open cut on his side, the blood slowly trickling down his warm skin. Pain was a detail now. Bea saw his chest rise and fall too quickly, the tension in his jaw, and understood, even before he said anything, that he had arrived there believing it might be too late.

And yet he came.

The contrast was stark – the same man who minutes before had turned that place into a slaughterhouse now moved his hands too slowly, as if they were made of already cracked glass. His fingers moved up to her face, lightly touching the bruise, the cut lip.

The touch was so gentle it hurt.

Bea’s body was frozen. Not out of fear of him, but because her mind was still trapped in that dark space she always returned to: the place where nothing ends well, where being saved seems like a statistical error.

The silence of the shed was heavy. The smell of blood, gunpowder, and rust turned her stomach. Bea saw the cut on his stomach, his torn shirt, stuck to his skin with blood.

There, fear truly overwhelmed her.

“You’re hurt,” she tried to say. But the words wouldn’t come out. Her throat closed up, as it always did when something too important happened.

Even wounded, Rhodes seemed unshakeable. A pure predator. But with her… with her, it was something else. Something nameless.

Without saying a word, he began to undo the bonds from her wrists. His fingers were firm, precise, almost clinical, and yet too careful. Each gesture seemed to carry a silent message: you are safe now. Even if the whole world isn’t.

When the last chain gave way, Bea’s body trembled.

Not just because of the accumulated fear. But because of the brutal adrenaline rush. Because of the belated realization that someone had come for her. Not out of obligation. Not out of debt. But because they wanted to.

She stood up slowly. Her legs were weak, her balance unsteady. She stood before him, her eyes fixed on the details her mind tried to record as proof that this was real: the blood on his shirt, his still-tense muscles, the way he remained alert even while looking at her as if she were the only important thing in the whole world.

There was something between them. A thread stretched too tightly, vibrating in the air. Almost suffocating.

She didn’t ask about the injury.

Her hands moved on their own, as if her body knew what her mind still refused to accept. With trembling fingers, she unbuttoned his shirt.

Warm skin, cool blood.

The cut wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. But it was real. Enough to prove how much he’d risked to get to her.

“We need to take you to the hospital…”

Her heart raced, not from desire, not exactly, but from something more cruel: guilt. That familiar feeling of being a burden. Of someone bleeding because of her.

And then she saw, on the side of his ribcage, marked on his skin like an old scar or a tattoo done in too much anger, was her name.

Her name.

It wasn’t delicate. It wasn’t beautiful. It was deep. Definitive. As if it had been forcibly engraved onto the body itself.

The world stopped.

The shock was physical. A sharp blow to the stomach. His mind tried to deny it, to rationalize it, but there was no way. The shape of the letters. The depth of the mark. He always knew who she was.

From the beginning, nothing had been by chance.

Bea’s hand instinctively rose to her wrist, where the burning sensation still stinged beneath her skin. She looked desperately, as if expecting the words to appear right then and there.

But there was nothing.

Only heat. Pain. Emptiness.

“My name… on you…” her voice came out low, broken, almost an apology. “From the beginning… you knew.”

Rhodes looked away for a moment. A slight gesture. The corner of his mouth tense. Even wounded, even covered in blood that wasn’t just his, every inch of him radiated danger.

The presence was overwhelming. Suffocating.

And Bea felt the familiar whirlwind rising: confusion, fear, the almost morbid urge to flee before it destroyed her.

She wanted to ask everything. She wanted answers. She wanted to run.

But her mind kept repeating one question, in a cruel echo: if you know everything about me… why isn’t your name here?

Her pulse burned as if trying to answer for her.

And even though she was scared, even though she was broken inside, Bea couldn’t take her eyes off him. At the marks, the wounds, the way he positioned himself between her and the world as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

And deep down – in that place where depression couldn’t completely lie – she knew: nothing between them was simple.

And even worse… none of it was safe.

But it was real.

“You’re the one who needs a hospital,” Rhodes said.

Just that.

No explanations. No justifications. As an unquestionable fact.

Before she could respond—or protest, or point out the blood still trickling from his stomach—Rhodes zipped up his shirt with a brusque gesture, concealing the wound as if it were irrelevant.

As if he were irrelevant.

Then he pulled her into a hug.

It wasn’t gentle in the usual sense of the word. It was firm. Total. An embrace that asked no permission and left no room for escape. His chest was warm, solid, too real, and for a moment Bea simply stopped thinking. Their hands were locked together, her face against his shoulder, the smell of gunpowder and iron mingled with a perfume she recognized without knowing where from.

Before she realized what was happening, he lifted her up.

She picked her up as if her weight didn’t exist. As if she were too precious to touch the ground of that place. Her body protested too late; there was no strength to argue, no will. She simply let it happen.

The shed began to move away.

It was only then that she saw.

The bodies.

Scattered across the cement floor like discarded pieces. Some in impossible positions. Others with their eyes still open, empty, frozen in the last second of life. Blood everywhere – on the floor, on the walls, on the memories she knew would never go away.

Her stomach churned.

Bea instinctively buried her face in Rhodes’ neck, as if she could erase it simply by not looking. But even with her eyes closed, the images etched themselves behind her eyelids. Every step he took echoed inside her head.

All of this... for me.

The guilt came heavy. Familiar. Suffocating.

Outside, the night’s chill hit her suddenly. The distant sound of rain. The biting wind. Reality slowly returning. Rhodes didn’t slow his pace. He didn’t hesitate. He opened the car door with one hand and carefully settled her in the back seat with an almost impossible level of care for that man.

As if the whole world could be violent, except towards her.

The last thing Bea remembered was the sound of the door closing. His face for a second, steady, attentive, still there.

Then… nothing.