Sweet Romance13 min read
Night Garage, Mask, and the Hunter
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I never expected to taste blood in a parking garage.
"You think you can break me and walk away?" the man spat as the blade tore my coat. "You and your family owe me."
I staggered backward, fingers useless at my sides. The metal bit through fabric then flesh, and for a terrifying second I felt my own life marked by a cold, thin line.
"Stay back," I managed, voice small like a child's.
He laughed. "Too late to beg, sweetheart."
I kept my distance. He prowled, knife flashing. The garage’s emptiness gave him space; I had nowhere to hide. My heels found an edge I didn't see; I hit a curb, my head bumped a car, and the world spun. I fell against the rear bumper, breath ripped out of me.
"You're finished," he hissed, coming in.
The blade pointed at my throat. For a moment, all I could see was a bright spot of ceiling light. The name on his chipped tooth kept spinning in my mind—the same name that had ruined everything. Gavin Mariani.
Then a voice colder than night cut across the empty concrete.
"Stop."
A hand grabbed his wrist. The knife stopped midair.
I turned. A man in a mask crouched behind me, one hand firm on Gavin’s wrist. The mask covered mouth and nose, leaving eyes exposed. One eyebrow had a pale scar; the left side of his face carried thin lines like a map of old fights. He looked fragile in a way that made me think of broken porcelain—beautiful but dangerous.
"Who are you?" Gavin snarled, trying to pull free.
"Get off me," the masked man said softly to me, like he had asked me nothing. Then he shifted, slammed his other fist into Gavin's jaw. Gavin went down hard, stunned.
I blinked. "You—are you Griffin?"
He did not answer immediately. He stood, limping slightly, and walked around me toward Gavin. "I don't trade words with corpses," he said.
Gavin's fury redoubled. He lunged for the blade again and Griffin moved like a shadow that had been taught violence for years. He caught Gavin's arm, twisted it, and the knife slipped from Gavin's grip and clattered on concrete.
A sick, popping sound told me a joint was broken. Gavin wailed—high, ugly nothingness.
Griffin's hands were not gentle. He punched without mercy, each blow aimed like a measured sentence. Gavin's face turned into something else: surprise, denial, panic, and finally an animal fear I had seen only once before—in my husband's eyes, too late.
"Stop!" I said, because I thought it mattered.
Griffin stopped long enough to pick up the knife, then he leaned close to Gavin.
"I don't kill for sport," he said, voice low. "I let fate decide. One clean move and it's over."
I watched him pull the blade back.
"You're going to—" I started, and then the knife hit flesh.
The world narrowed to the wet sound and Gavin's body going slack.
I was not ready for the stillness that followed. The parking garage tasted metallic and wrong.
Griffin stood, wiped the blade on a corner of Gavin's shirt, and handed it back to me with the oddest expression—like a man who had completed a math problem and wanted reassurance he would get the right grade.
"Help me," he said.
"Help you?" I asked, fingers numb.
"I'll cover the rest. Say you saw me give him a chance."
I clicked "complete" on the task my neck had been given to survive—some system I could not explain—and a message blinked on my phone: "Transport called. You protected an innocent."
Akari Brown had messaged before I could answer. "I saw. You did it. How did Griffin look?"
I typed, fingers shaking, "Cold. Hurt."
"He's always like that," Akari sent back. "He doesn't waste words."
Griffin slid Gavin's limp form toward the shadow of a parked SUV, whispering to the body as if it could hear him, then hefted him inside. He paused and touched the forehead of a woman slumped in the passenger seat—my sister-in-law, who still breathed but couldn't move—and his voice changed, softer and strange.
"I killed him," Griffin said quietly, not to me but to the woman. "Do you hate me?"
She tried to move and only a wet cry escaped. Griffin cupped her head like a bruise and said, "If I had not come, your life would have turned to ash. You have a choice. Call the police, or be someone who keeps living."
She sobbed. "Thank you."
Griffin looked at me then. "You can leave. Take my car if you must. Drop me somewhere. Tell the transport to take him."
I wanted to ask why he had failed that time before—the one mission some months back that went wrong—but the thought of hearing the bloodied truth made me smaller. I clutched at any excuse to avoid the memory and said, "You can get into my car."
He sat beside me like an old, precise bruise, and we drove away.
At the exit, a car sat across the lane. A light tapped on the window. Elliot Crawford leaned against it, casual as a gravestone. My body locked up.
"You two," Elliot said, tapping his knuckles on the glass. "Take off those masks. You're interfering with an investigation."
Griffin placed a hand on the door, ready. "We are not here for you."
"You will come with me," Elliot said. "Down to the station."
I floored it, heart a fist against my ribs. "Go!" Griffin hissed, hand on the door.
Elliot jumped into his car and followed. For a breathless minute my strategy was nothing but reflex: drive, take the pedestrian stairwell, run. When Elliot’s car reached the slope, it let loose and barrel-rolled—someone had left it in neutral. Elliot had leapt out of it and already stood at the top, blocking the stair exit before we could escape.
He ran down the steps like a man chasing a thief, using elbows, knees, everything. He was fast. He slammed into Griffin, threw a crushing knee into his chest, and the fight began.
"You're under arrest," Elliot said, and then his hands said something else. He moved too fast, the strikes precise and expert.
I had never seen someone fight like that. He was not making noise to scare—you could feel the calculation of every move.
Griffin was hit and he took the hits like a practiced man; each shock crossed his face, and he nearly dropped. He tried to get back up and Elliot kicked him from behind, hard, to the temple. Griffin fell. I lunged at Elliot again and again until he had me pinned with the mask torn and half my coat shredded.
"Enough," he said, and then something impossible happened. He took off his own jacket and wrapped it around me, zipping it up. "Don't look down. I didn't see anything."
His voice was rough. He pushed me to the ground like someone who had been given a mission: keep her safe.
We were both spent. Elliot walked to the BMW, looked at the blood and Gavin's body, then returned. "Hands on the pavement," he said.
Griffin spat. "I'm a hunter. I don't surrender."
"Then be a fool," Elliot replied. "Because the law is quicker than you think."
"It isn't about law," Griffin whispered. "It's about balance."
Elliot's handcuffs flashed. He cuffed both of us. "You're suspected in a homicide," he said.
I let my limbs go slack. I could barely breathe.
They took us in.
"You're bleeding," an officer said as they guided me through the station's fluorescents. My face felt raw and sharp.
"She was attacked," Griffin said. "She is a witness."
"Sure," Elliot said under his breath. "We will see."
The interrogation room was small and made of glass. Elliot stood on one side; another officer took the other. People watched behind one-way mirrors. The lights burned bone-white.
"Tell us what happened," Elliot said, calm, watching me like one watches a candle that might go out.
I told it the way it had happened—every jag, every moment of Gavin's knife, the curse on his lips, Griffin's intervention. I left out things I could not say: why my husband had been involved earlier, how orders had come from a system I couldn't explain, how I had clicked "complete" like pressing a button to survive.
"The man who killed him said he let fate decide," Elliot said, and I saw no surprise in his eyes. He had suspected something.
The transport took Gavin's body after a late-night inventory. The more I thought, the more a cold spot opened in me: killing was only the surface. Gavin had been a man of power who hurt people. He wasn't the only one.
Later, in an act that felt like being pulled by a hook, I agreed to go on camera. Elliot wanted witnesses to help tie the case together. The news vans were waiting. People gathered like moths. Someone in the crowd recognized me. Cameras flashed. I felt every eye as a needle.
I told the story. "He attacked me," I said. "Gavin Mariani attacked me. He hurt my sister-in-law. Someone stopped him."
The crowd reacted—gasps, whispers like wind. A woman cried and covered her mouth.
A week later, they held a public hearing to address the crimes Gavin had left in his wake. It was not a courtroom trial—he was dead—but the city organized a public inquiry into his business, his violence, and the network that protected him. The room filled with reporters, neighbors, survivors, and a police delegation headed by Elliot Crawford. Mayor’s men were there, camera crews, online streamers with their phones alive.
Boris Lopez, Gavin's partner in a shell company, sat at the front table with a legal team. He looked hollow and practiced like a scarecrow dressed for a funeral. In the two weeks after Gavin's death, investigative teams had uncovered ledgers, hidden accounts, photographs—proof that the man had used money to silence women, pay off enforcers, and buy influence. Boris had signed some of those transfers.
"Mr. Lopez," the commissioner said as the room quieted. "Explain the transfers."
Boris smiled the smile of a man who believed smiles could erase truth. "Those were business payments," he said. "Normal operations."
"Then explain why victims were paid to keep quiet," the commissioner shot back. "Why were payments labeled as 'settlement' and routed through companies you represent?"
The camera focused on me. I had been asked to speak—and this time I would not let things stay in the shadows.
I stood. The microphone was cold in my palm. The gallery leaned forward like a field of stalks.
"I was attacked by Gavin Mariani in a parking garage," I said, voice steady in a way that surprised me. "He slashed my coat and tried to kill me. He has hurt others. He is not the only one."
Boris's jaw tightened. He turned toward me with a practiced contempt. "Are you trying to defame my company?"
"I'm trying to tell the truth." I held up a photo—one the investigators had given me: a ledger line with Boris Lopez's signature, a transfer labeled 'silence' and a date. "This is from your company's account. This is how you bought people."
Murmurs ran through the room. Phones lit like a swarm of stars. Reporters whispered into recorders.
Boris stood. "This is hearsay," he said. "You have no proof I ordered anything. Gavin handled things himself."
"Isn't that what you say when you are guilty?" a woman in the front shouted.
Boris flinched, then smoothed his face into that corporate smile. "I want a formal investigation."
"Then we will have one," Elliot said, and the room almost cheered.
The inquiry shifted into a spectacle. Survivors stood and told things that left nothing but a trail of shame. A former assistant read messages—not paid, not 'settlement'—but clear threats sent after being promised discretion. A young man produced pictures of a party with Gavin and Boris, where a woman had been carried out unconscious.
Boris muttered denials. At first he looked arrogant—the kind of arrogance built on money and untouchable status. He tried to maintain control: "You are making allegations without proof."
But then the evidence kept coming. Bank statements. Wire transfers. A recorded voicemail—Gavin's voice, rough, telling a woman to accept a hush payment. It was old, but the timbre was unmistakable.
The room tilted toward fury.
"They thought they could buy silence," I said into the microphone, and every word was a hammer. "They thought money could erase what he did. But people do not disappear like receipts."
Boris's face changed. The composure cracked. First he tried to conceal it—his hands clenched, barely visible. Then sweat bloomed across his forehead. He looked around as if someone else could steal the evidence from the air.
"You're lying!" he barked suddenly, loud enough to cut through the murmurs. "This is a smear campaign!"
"No," I said, and I let the truth roll out like a tide. "This is what survivors have kept inside for years. They kept quiet because they feared worse. They are not silent anymore."
The crowd reacted. Phones raised. Footage streamed live. The online chat exploded.
Boris's denial shifted to pleading. He looked to his lawyers, to the cameras, to no one and everyone. "This will ruin me," he whispered, and that whisper became a choking animal.
I did not stop. "You were complicit," I told him. "You signed the checks. You cleaned up the mess. You thought you could protect the man who broke lives."
He laughed once, a brittle bark. "You have no idea what I had to do to run a business," he said. "It's easy to sit and judge."
"Then explain this," Elliot said, sliding a packet toward the table where Boris sat. "Emails. A trail of orders from you."
The room's atmosphere shifted from curiosity to condemnation. Reporters called legal counsel. Neighbors who had admired Gavin and Boris's philanthropy felt betrayed and turned their heads away in the televised feed.
Boris's face cycled through stages: shock, denial, negotiation, then collapse. "You can't—these are lies," he muttered. He reached for his phone as if a last-minute call would save him, but his hand shook so badly he dropped it.
"What do you want?" a reporter asked him. "Do you want to apologize?"
"No," he said at first. Then, eyes wild, he begged: "You don't understand. We were saving jobs. We were—"
"By breaking people," I said, and the room applauded—not the warm clap of approval, but the sharp, biting sound of judgment.
The hearing had become punishment. Not in the form of a gavel or a sentence, but in a public, merciless unmasking. Boris's investors pulled back within days; his company's shares plummeted. The mayor canceled a page of donations. The press followed his every move; the online comments carved his name into a million verdicts.
At a public town hall, hundreds gathered. People lined up to press their injuries into the record. A woman who once had accepted money from Boris could not stop shaking as she spoke. "They paid me to be quiet," she said. "Then they called me a liar when I tried to stop them."
Boris sat at a table under bright lights, watched by a hundred faces and thousands online. He was no longer the smooth man at charity dinners. He was raw. He tried to defend himself until his voice cracked into silence.
A crowd formed outside the building. Some held signs; some simply stood. When Boris emerged, the press swarmed. People shouted. Someone threw a paper cup; it hit his shoe and burst. A few of his old associates walked away on camera.
The worst moment for him came when a young woman—a survivor—stepped forward and looked him in the eyes. "You took my voice," she said simply. Boris's face went from defiance to implosion. He reached for synaptic escape—blame, lawyers—but none of that closed the mouth that the woman opened.
He made a last attempt to salvage anything. At a live televised panel, he broke down. "I'm sorry," he mouthed, but the camera caught the words as shallow and false. His apology had no weight because his actions had weight. He tried to make bargains: charity, restitution, promises that fell like paper.
He crumbled in public. A security guard watched him go, and the crowd's reaction was not mercy. They had watched his empire's cracks widen until there was nothing left but a man who signed his name across other people's pain.
The punishment was not a single blow. It was layer upon layer: exposure, isolation, collapse, the shedding of every role he'd once used as armor. He begged for pity and found only the echo of the people he had wronged.
There was a moment when he tried to come to me—at the steps of the building, under the whir of cameras and the glare of phones—and I saw him completely undone. He fell to his knees and reached toward me as if a prayer would mend the things his money had torn.
"Forgive me," he said. "I didn't mean—"
"You meant it enough to cover it up," I told him. "You meant it when you wired the money. You meant it when you smiled at the charity gala."
He wept then, a thin sound that hardly matched the damage. Around us, people filmed, posted, and spoke. The internet called him a monster. Investors left. His name was not purged by one man's phone call; it was cleaned out by the public tide of faces and voices.
Boris's reaction had gone from smugness to disbelief to anger to pleading to collapse. The public reacted in waves—shock, then furor, then a cold satisfaction as justice, albeit messy and imperfect, unfolded. Cameras recorded his face as it broke.
After that, the legal machinery moved faster. Prosecutors opened cases against those who had conspired with Gavin. Multiple indictments followed. The city promised reform. The women who had been paid hush money found support networks and legal counsel; they began to tell stories not for clicks, but for closure.
I watched it all with a hollow, peculiar feeling. The public punishment satisfied something hungry inside me, but it did not stitch the hole left by my husband's absence. It did not bring back the nights he smiled at old interviews. It did not lighten the weight of being a single parent now.
Meanwhile, Griffin had disappeared into the city's shadow. Elliot had questions that never found full answers. The cameras found him once outside a subway station—he looked as if wind had carved his face into stricter lines—and he said one thing before the train whisked him away.
"Whatever you believe about me, remember: I balance the ledger," he said.
Elliot stood in court sometimes as cases moved forward. I watched him with conflicting feelings. He had smashed a mask into my face and wrapped me in his own jacket moments later. He had arrested me, but he had also been the first to push openly against a network that had protected criminals.
Over months, the city shifted. Names disappeared from plaques. Donations were rescinded. People who had supported Gavin or Boris tried to distance themselves and found the distance had cost their reputations.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, my life kept being simple and unbearable in the same breath. I drove my son to school. I worked nights. I answered messages from Akari and emails from new detectives. I called Griffin on my lonely days, but he rarely answered. When he did, he said only a few things: directions, warnings, a line about dawn being thin.
"You owe me nothing," he said once. "You only owe yourself the chance to keep living."
"Why do you hunt?" I asked.
"Because some debts are paid in blood," he said.
"Will you ever stop?" I pressed.
"No," he said. "Not until the ledger is balanced."
Months later, on a gray morning when frost had skinned the city, there was a hearing to confirm indictments against co-conspirators. The room smelled like coffee and paper. Reporters filled it. Elliot sat with his arms folded. Boris had been arrested for obstruction and a string of related charges; he sat sullen in the back. A gallery of people who had been silent for years watched.
When the judge read the list and the charges, cameras caught the faces of survivors in the front row. Some wept. Some watched hard as if counting pages of their own life.
After the hearing, people pressed toward us. A man who had once done business with Gavin came forward and apologized, voice small. A neighbor brought flowers to give to the woman who had been carried out of a party. A volunteer group offered to pick up the cost of counseling and legal fees.
Outside, Elliot watched the crowd. Griffin appeared at the edge of the press line, mask on, silent as a book closed. He held out his hand to me for a fraction of a second—an acknowledgment, not a gesture of intimacy. I took it because it felt like holding a scalpel to a wound and finding it already sealed.
"Are you all right?" he asked quietly.
"As well as one can be," I said.
He nodded. "Then keep going."
When everything faded—the cameras, the fury, the hearings, the small kindnesses—I kept one thing. Griffin left me a mask he called "a ledger." It was nothing like his. It was thin and unassuming, with a small scratch across one eye slot. He told me, "Balance is sometimes ugly. But you decide how you live in the space after."
I pinned it on the wall above my son's bed. Some nights when I couldn't sleep, I looked at it and remembered the night in the garage: metal, breath, the flick of a blade, and a man who would unmake and remake a life with his hands.
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked myself once, quiet in the dark.
The mask watched my answer like a patient jury. The city's roar was the same as always—news cycles that swallowed people whole and spat out their names as tomorrow's nothing. But sitting there, with the mask above us and my son snoozing, I felt a small, hard ember: truth told, the public's judgment, and a hunter who would not relent.
The ledger was balanced enough for now. I closed my eyes and let the night be.
The End
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