Revenge14 min read
The Price of a Finger
ButterPicks11 views
I remember the first time I saw Elias Blanc close up.
"You don't look tired," he said the day he picked me out of my dull office like a new toy.
"I am fine," I answered, though my eyes were hollow from nights in hospital wards. My sister's name is Aviana Brady. She was thin as paper then, and the bills kept coming like rain.
Elias smiled without feeling. "Good. Be ready tomorrow. Come to the garage."
That was how I became his driver. That was how I began to watch a man wear cruelty like a suit.
"You like this job?" he asked once while I wiped his car's dash.
"No," I said. "But I need the money."
"Then do it well," he said, and slipped sunglasses on. "Do it like you mean it."
He was polite in the daytime. He was charity at press conferences, with neat apologies and bigger donations. But at night he gave me orders like a landlord.
"See that old man?" Elias pointed at a street cleaner once, when a pretty model had tossed a cigarette to the ground.
"Yes."
"Pick those up," the model giggled.
"Why?" she said.
"Because she is trash," Elias said, eyes cold. "Labor is honorable. Flashing skin isn't." He stood and bowed politely to the cleaner before throwing a credit card on the table. "Whoever breaks his bones gets this."
"That's insane," I whispered.
"Do you want the card?" he smiled.
"No," I answered. "I won't—"
"You will earn," he said, and the men around his laugh were hungry. That night six men beat a man who had swept streets for decades.
The reporter who tried to help was Easton Case. He stood in front of them and shouted, "Stop! I've called the police!"
"Get out," Tucker Arnold snarled.
Easton stayed. He had courage like old paper—thin and easy to tear, but still standing.
Elias performed for the cameras that night.
"I tried to stop them," he said into microphones, while an assistant touched his arm and put fake bruises on his chest. "I would never hurt an old man. We'll pay his bills. We'll create a fund."
He bowed again, and cameras ate him up. Stock went up. I stood behind him like a shadow, feeling vomit rise.
"You see how people dance?" Elias whispered to me later. "They will clap for a mask. Tell me you don't admire me."
"I don't admire you," I said. "I fear you."
"Good," he said. "Fear is honest."
When Easton wrote about Elias's side of the crime, his life fell apart. Jobs refused to hire him. He had a fiancé. She wanted safety. Charlie Buckner, one of Elias's juniors who could bargain and dress and say the right words, stepped into her life with presents and promises.
"Leave him," Charlie told her with a bottle of wine and a grin. "You deserve better."
She left Easton. They married. On the night of their wedding, Easton got messages that broke him like a cheap chair. Videos of her with Charlie, in cars, in bathrooms, in their bed. She called him "useless" in one clip while moaning Charlie's name.
"I thought we would be built on trust," Easton said to me later, his hands shaking.
"They broke you," I said.
He didn't deserve what came next. The betrayal and the blood met in a room where Easton lost himself and killed the woman who had been his love. Then he ran into the open, screaming like a wounded animal. They arrested him.
"Did Elias want that?" I asked myself in empty apartments.
He wanted to watch men like Easton lose their minds. He liked to push, and count the fall.
One night Elias invited me to swim at his seaside house.
"The world thinks I am a spoiled fool," he said as we climbed from cold water. "They don't know me. You are different. You have a backbone."
"Is that a compliment?" I asked.
"It is a promise," he said. "You will be loyal, and I will protect you."
He handed me money for Aviana's clinic without asking. "Get her the best care," he said. "I'll check in later."
The money helped. I thought I could leave, but the rope tied tighter. He watched me as if I were a puppet; his eyes were a trap. Once, on the road, he told me to run a car into a pregnant woman for five million.
He said: "Three million. Do it and you can fix your life."
I pressed the pedal—my sister's face in my head—and eased away from a child's future.
"Why didn't you do it?" Elias asked later, amused. "You would have been rich."
"Because I'm not a monster," I said.
He smiled. "You are entertaining. Keep watching."
Elias gave good gifts to keep hands from asking too many questions. I saved most of that cash for Aviana. I told her we were moving to a better life.
"One day you will get better," I promised. "I'll take you away."
She smiled. "You should find someone kind."
I fell asleep to the sound of Elias's laughter upstairs, where he entertained and tossed names like confetti.
A few months in, Elias chased his amusements to someone I loved.
Jaida Kelley was a school friend I still held like a photograph. She was beautiful like a summer's memory.
Elias decided Jaida was pretty and he wanted to own that prettiness for a while. He gave her cars, a small world of always-well-lit dinners, and then he took it away.
He wanted to test things. He gave the jewelry and then took it back. He wanted to break a woman who had known nothing harder than budgets and advertising deadlines.
"I love him," Jaida told me one day while I drove. "But he...he says I'm childish about money."
"He's cruel," I wanted to tell her. "He's dangerous."
She laughed and leaned into Elias's hand, where he liked to feel power. Then, desperate, she came to me one night in a dress and begged to see Elias.
"Please," she said. "You're from his old school. You know him. Call him. Tell him I'm sorry."
"Jaida," I said, "don't. He does not love. He uses."
"I'll sleep with you," she whispered in the car, trying to bargain like a woman without pride left.
"Get out," I said. "Go home. Live."
She drew a knife to her throat when I refused. I ran to stop her.
At Elias's villa that night I found him with a smoking ashtray and Jaida on the floor. He struck her with a heavy vase when she told him she was pregnant.
He smashed the vase on her belly. Her blood painted the rugs. He laughed, a sound like glass breaking.
"You're lying," he said when the word "baby" left her lips.
"Please," she cried. "It is yours."
He hit her until the room was a cave of red. He touched her face like a man who had learned cruelty and made it polite.
"Did you bring her?" he asked me later, looking into my frightened face.
"Yes," I said, my voice small.
"Clean her up. Take care of it," he ordered.
We drove to an empty hill and buried Jaida like trash. Tucker Arnold and his crew laughed and spit and made jokes like a family burying garbage.
I threw up. I drove home with my hands shaking.
I thought I would run. I thought I would leave with Aviana. But Tucker sat on my chest next morning and showed me a photo of Aviana, pale and sleeping in a hospital bed, with a knife on the pillow.
"She looks like she could die," Tucker said, and laughed. "Elias wants you loyal."
"Please," I told them. "I'll do anything."
So they beat me. They beat every truth out of me. They told me to be their loyal dog.
Tucker liked to watch me with my face under his shoe and laugh. Charlie would come by with new toys and say, "Be a man, Bear. Be smart."
My body broke. My voice went thin. I promised them what they wanted: to serve without soul.
But late at night in my small room, I found a folder of videos Elias kept on a hard drive. Photos of things he had done. Names and times. He kept them like trophies.
I stole the drive. I took copies. I thought about the police and the impossible task of bringing down a man with suits and favors in all the right places.
I walked to the station at dawn. The city was still grey. I pushed the drive into my pocket and felt its weight like a heart.
They grabbed me before I could enter. Tucker's hand twisted my arm. He showed me the picture. "You know what happens if you try," he said.
They left me for dead in a warehouse and then, when they thought I was gone, a strange mercy came.
"Hey," a voice said. "He will not be gone if we leave him to die."
It was Julian Best, Elias's brother. He looked like Elias but colder. He told me a story of a man who saved me. He told me the world was full of men who killed for fun and men who protected themselves.
"I can help you," Julian said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because if Elias controls everything, someone must stop him," Julian said. "And I want my brother stopped."
It sounded like revenge at first. It sounded like the same cruel design.
But I had nothing left but a map to a dead end.
"Do it," I said. "Make him stop."
We found Elias in a cheap motel at last, coward without a mask. He tried to run. I struck him in the head. We carried him deep into an old forest where my father had once guarded trees.
We bound him. He woke with a man's blind terror.
"Am I dreaming?" Elias croaked.
"Not a dream," I said. "You did not sleep well."
The first day I took a finger. "Say what you did," I told him, and set a camera rolling.
He laughed first. "You'll feel sick," he said, breathing small and fast. "You're not a monster. I'm everything you dream."
I did not look away. I held the knife steady like someone cutting rope. A finger fell. He screamed like a train.
"Tell me the names," I told him.
He knew he had to speak. He knew he had power with his tongue even with his fingers gone.
He talked for hours into that camera. He named nights and people and methods. He told story after story like a man who could not stop polishing his crimes.
At first he lied. Then he cried. Then he begged. "I can give you millions," he said. "All the accounts. I'll help you run away."
"No," I said. "You will tell the truth."
Once he confessed enough that the camera kept a heavy weight of paper and proof, I sent a message to the police. I delayed it to send anonymously in ten days.
"Why ten days?" he whimpered.
"Because you will live," I said. "For a while. To feel the memory of your hands gone. To hear the paper call your name. To feel fear."
Those ten days were mine of planning and of nightmares. I recorded everything. I made him recite names of the people who took their orders from him. He repeated each confession like a candle burning down.
On the third day, someone asked him if he had Aviana killed. His eyes darted and pulled wide.
"I didn't," he said. "I didn't—"
"Who else could?" I wanted to scream.
He denied it, but his voice trembled.
"I never touched your sister," he said over and over. "It wasn't me."
I wanted to believe him for a harsh second. I wanted someone who could be the monster to be the monster so my guilt could stop its teeth.
But Aviana had marks like a rope had been too close to her throat. There were cameras of a small boy, a guard, a man moving away from the room. Things did not add up. I looked at Julian. He looked exhausted. He looked like a man who had also been used as a tool for blood.
On the last morning, I left the gun on the table and offered a choice.
"Cut off your feet and crawl to the highway to beg for life," I said. "Or starve and eat what I leave. Try to live as you forced others to live. The camera will roll till you choose."
He begged, begged, begged. He called me a brother, a friend, a savior.
"Please," he said, "I have millions. I can stop this. I'll sign papers. I'll give you everything."
"Not everything," I said. "You will look at your hands and know what they paid for."
I heard a dry click and I closed my eyes.
I woke to silence. The forest was too quiet.
The email I delayed went out. The nine a.m. news began with a headline I had not planned to love: "Elias Blanc Found: Confessions and a Body." The city woke like a pot boiling over.
The public punishment is what broke the world Elias had built.
"Where is he?" the mayor asked when the police chief stood with a thin face.
"At a forest cabin," the chief said. "And there are recordings."
"Bring him now," the mayor said.
They found him like a fallen emperor.
When the police dragged him—half-shaved, with only three fingers on one hand and two on the other—into the courthouse square, they had no idea of the storm they would open.
The square was full. A crowd had already gathered, with phones held up like a forest of hungry birds. Cameras from dozens of networks pointed at the black van. People pointed. Children clutched their mothers' hands.
"A public statement," a reporter shouted. "We need to know the truth!"
Elias's father was there, pale and wearing a too-thin jacket, the kind men wear when they're very rich and very guilty. He touched a silk handkerchief to his jaw and stared at nothing.
"Do you have any comment?" a woman shouted from the back.
Elias looked around like a trapped animal. His mouth opened and closed.
"Tell them," Julian hissed, his own face hard as a stone. "Make them see what you did."
A hundred faces leaned in. Someone in the crowd started to cry. Others shouted for blood. A teenager in a hoodie held a banner: "No More Monsters."
They made him stand on the courthouse steps, under the banners of law and order. The reporters circled like sharks.
"Why did you do it?" Easton Case asked, his voice thin but steady. He was there—alive, though scarred—and he kept his radio mic close.
"It was...a game," Elias said, and his voice was small like a child's. "I wanted to see...what people are like when they break."
"Did you order Jaida killed?" a woman demanded. Her face was red with grief. Her voice shook. "Did you?"
Elias's eyes snapped. His face changed. He recoiled like a man struck.
"I—I—" He clutched at his shirt where a surgeon's stitches had once been. "I didn't. I didn't—"
"Then who did?" someone screamed.
His father hissed. "Elias, shut up!"
"You told them to bury her," Easton said quietly. "You told them to hide her. It's on tape."
"No," Elias said, shaking, "that's not—"
The crowd reacted like a tide. "Liar!" a voice called. People began to chant. "Liar! Liar!"
Phones recorded everything. A man stood on the steps and began to read the names Elias had said into the camera. Each name landed like a small stone.
"Arrest them!" someone demanded. "Arrest them all!"
Elias's eyes rolled wide. He had been the puppet master in a clean suit, but now he trembled in public, his lies shattered and drying on his skin.
He switched expressions: mock apology, then denial, then blank terror.
"I didn't—" he tried again.
"You are a coward," Easton said, and the reporter's voice steadied as if he'd found a stronger bone under his grief. "You used people. You bought mercy and you bought silence. This square knows now."
Elias's father staggered back as if struck. People around him whispered that money could not buy back bones or names. A woman in business suit spat on the ground. A man snapped pictures and held them high. Children asked their guardians why a man who seemed so polite had done such things.
Elias began to make noises, guttural and uneven. He placed his palms against his face and sobbed. The sound was small but it cut through the crowd's roar.
"Why did you let him go?" someone yelled to the police, furious that such a monster had lived long enough to plan.
"This will be an investigation," the chief answered, but his voice was thin.
Elias reached out toward his father as if asking for protection. People moved back, their faces hard. He was no longer a prince. He was a man with his fingers missing and a hole where sanctity should be.
A woman who had been at the senior center where the first old man had worked stepped forward and spat at Elias. "You said you'd help," she said. "You lied."
Phones kept recording. Someone uploaded a clip of Elias admitting his crimes earlier, the very confession I had forced. It spread like wildfire. His public image, nurtured by press releases and fake scars, burned in an instant.
He tried denial. He tried to bargain with promises of money. He tried to cry. The crowd did not listen. Even his father could not lift him.
"How many people did you ruin?" Easton asked, and Elias's face fell into his hands.
People began to step forward with small notebooks and recorded voices—maids, drivers, women who had been bought, men who had been forced to watch. One by one they named nights, rooms, words.
Elias's composure crumbled. He licked his lips as if they might return to their polite smile, but they stayed raw. He went from being sure to stunned, to denied, to pleading.
"You're the monster," someone said from the crowd. "You always were."
He swayed and then collapsed to his knees, hands still stained with whatever memory of power he could cling to. The police led him away, but their faces were not proud. They were tired from the idea that money had kept him alive so long.
The cameras recorded his arms, where the missing fingers showed like grave markers. The crowd's voices fell into a hush when Easton held up the recording and said, "We have his confession. We have proof."
Elias's pleading only made their anger louder. Someone yelled, "Let the law do its work!" Another voice screamed, "Make him feel what he made others feel!"
The spectacle was public. The world had watched him be stripped of the mask. He had no safe room to retreat to. He was a small, bloody man begging on steps where judges once pronounced orders.
The power pales when exposed to light. That day, the light burned him.
"Do you feel anything?" Easton asked quietly as they led Elias away.
"What?" Elias choked.
"Remorse," Easton said. "Do you have it?"
Elias's mouth opened. He made eating sounds like a person without air. He didn't answer with words.
They took him to a hospital before charges. He screamed sometimes, unprovoked. He muttered names. He snapped at his own hands and tried to bite them. After he was moved to a secure psychiatric unit, he attacked his brother Julian and managed to bite into his throat in a sudden, deadly frenzy. Julian slumped like a struck statue. The cameras caught the emergency doctors running in, and the police cuffed Elias again, noisy and unstable.
In the days after the public scene, the town felt different. People used the words "monster" and "justice" and sometimes they sounded like synonyms.
I watched on TV as the news repeated the same footage: Elias on the steps, the crowd shouting, Easton holding up the confession. I felt the harsh heat of it like a fever.
I had made him confess. I had given the police the proof. I had watched him lose his hands and his dignity, and in the end, he broke completely.
After the crowd left and the news vans cleared away, someone asked me in the street, "Do you feel better?"
I looked at Aviana's face in the crowd. She was pale but alive. She held a small paper cup of tea like a badge.
"No," I said, and my voice was thin. "I don't know if better is a measure."
A woman from the center came up and touched my arm. "You did the right thing," she whispered. "You saved others from him."
"Saved?" I echoed. "Or traded one monster for another place in the dark?"
She squeezed my arm and just said, "You stopped him."
That night, I burned the last of the tapes I had not given to the police. I watched the fire eat the plastic and thought of fingers and vows and small hospital rooms with Aviana sleeping under thin sheets.
The city's appetite had been fed. Elias was in a place where he could not hurt others. But his name would still hang around like a shadow.
A week later, in the psychiatric ward, Elias attacked again and killed Julian. The headlines read like a broken song.
The law said he was insane. The law wrote it down. He was not fit to stand trial in any normal sense.
I went back to the hospital to see Aviana. She took my hand and squeezed.
"Will you be okay?" she asked.
"I will try," I said. "But things are different now."
She smiled with the small, brave smile of someone who had watched me do something terrible for the right reason.
"Tell me about the watch," she said suddenly. "The old watch your father left you. Is it real?"
"It is," I said, thinking of my father's hands. "I keep it in my pocket."
We sat together in silence. Outside, the city breathed. The news anchor ended another segment by saying they'd keep following the case.
I put my hand in my pocket. My fingers closed on the watch's cold metal. I felt the weight of it and I promised myself—no more games.
I had cut a monster down with ugly hands. I had watched the public pull his mask away and shout. I had seen the world flip when a confession went from private to public.
And still, when I closed my eyes, I could hear the sound of the DV camera. The clicking of its play button. The way Elias had tried to make his world clean by confessing like a man trying to polish a bloody coin.
"Do you regret it?" Aviana asked softly.
"No," I said. "I regret the cost."
She leaned her head on my shoulder. "Then that's all we can do."
"Maybe," I answered.
The last thing I remember before the ward's lights dimmed for the night was the DV's small red light in my memory, and the smell of wood smoke under the moonlight.
The world broadcast his fall. The next morning some child would point at a picture of his face and ask, "Who is that?" Adults would answer with words like "sick" and "punished" and "madness."
But in the quiet, with Aviana asleep and the watch warm in my palm, I knew the truth: some prices are paid in hands, some paid in years, and some paid with the small private records of a man's confession.
I kept the DV's image in my head, and I kept the watch in my pocket. If anyone asked me later, I'd say, "I did what I had to, for a sister and for a man named Easton who stood with a camera when others left."
"Was it justice?" someone might ask then.
I would look at the watch and the scar under my shirt and say, "It was an answer."
The End
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