Phei was somewhere else.

He slammed Kyle to the floor with enough force to crack the parquet beneath his spine like thin ice.

Straddled his chest.

The ruined left side of Kyle’s torso made a sound under Phei’s full weight like a bag of dry sticks being stepped on by a draft horse — a wet, grinding CRRRRRACK as the already-shattered ribs drove deeper into punctured lungs and heart sac.

Phei began punching.

Methodically. Rhythmically. One hand, then the other, then the first again. Each punch landed on a slightly different spot on Kyle’s face and each punch broke or reopened something with surgical, merciless precision.

BANG! CRUNCH!

The orbital rim went on the fourth — the bone caving inward with a sickening wet crunch, driving shards straight into the eye socket and rupturing the eyeball in a burst of clear fluid and blood.

BANG! CRUNCH!

The jaw on the sixth — hinged outward with a loud POP, then hung loose afterward like a broken hinge, the lower half of Kyle’s face no longer sitting where it was supposed to sit, every word now impossible.

BANG! CRUNCH!

The nose on the seventh, and the eighth, and the ninth, each strike rearranging cartilage that had already been rearranged, each strike pushing the nose further across toward the ear until it stopped being a nose and started being a flattened, pulped suggestion of one, cartilage grinding against cheekbone with every blow.

Phei’s eyes had gone wet.

He did not know when it had happened.

He did not bother to wipe them. The tears tracked down his own cheeks silently, mixing with nothing, because Phei did not cry usually like some bitch but was somehow, impossibly, crying now facing the person who took the only that ever made meaning to him after his parents, apart from the piano and his music — he was hot, furious tears that only made the beating worse, because every drop of his own pain was fuel for the next fist.

"You should have stayed punching me, staffing me into lockers, everything, you should’ve stayed on me, Kyle."

A punch cracked like a gunshot. Kyle’s head lolled to one side and a tooth fell out of his mouth and rolled along the parquet, trailing strings of bloody saliva.

"You should have stayed on me."

A punch. Kyle’s nose finished its journey sideways with a wet crunch and the whole front of his face went slack beneath it, the cartilage now a flattened ruin mashed into the pulp of his cheek.

"If you wanted to be cruel — if you needed to feel big about yourself — if you needed to stomp on someone smaller — you had me. I was right there. Every day for whole ten years of your life. You could have bullied me more. Beaten me more. Broken me more. Spat in every lunch I tried to eat like you and your boys always did. Destroyed every piece of clothing I owned. Ripped every bracelet off my wrist. Stomped every one of them into every drain you could find. I WAS FUCKING THERE! Like I had always been when you did all that to me!"

His voice cracked on the last word. He punched straight through the crack and kept going, knuckles splitting wider with every impact.

"And I would have taken it all, Kyle. I did take it for years after all. I took it for almost nine fucking years before her. I. Was. There. You had all the charity case you could ever need."

Another punch.

Something structural in Kyle’s face finally gave up. The entire left cheek collapsed inward, following the earlier crushed arch, and the pulped tissue around it began to leak in slow steady trickles from four different openings — blood, clear fluid, and something thicker that might have been brain matter seeping through the cracks.

Kyle made a sound.

It was not begging anymore. It was past begging. Begging required enough of a functioning mouth to shape words, and Kyle’s mouth was no longer shaping anything — just a ruined, hanging ruin of torn lips, loose teeth, and exposed bone.

It was a wet continuous keening.

Pleeeeaaaaase — pleeeeeeease — pleeeeeee —

Drawn out. Looping. The only word he remembered how to make. A helpless, animal drone that bubbled and broke every time a new punch landed.

"But Selene?"

Phei’s voice finally broke fully.

"Why did you put your filthy fucking hands on Selene?"

Another punch — this one so hard Kyle’s head bounced off the floor and left a bloody imprint.

"You were everything, Kyle. Everything. A coward. A bully. A small cruel boy with too much money and a family name that protected you from ever having to be a real person. A drug dealer in a polo shirt. A sneering piece of nothing fucking trash. You were everything ugly a Legacy heir can be made into. Every ugly thing. But you were never a rapist."

A punch.

"You were not a rapist."

A punch.

"You were not a murderer."

A punch.

"So, what the fuck were you doing on that roof, Kyle? Why did you take her away from ME!"

Kyle’s remaining eye had rolled up into his skull. His mouth hung open and the keening was barely a sound now, more a wet, ragged shape his breath was making on its way out. Blood was pooling beneath his head on the parquet in a widening red halo that grew with every heartbeat.

A single bubble formed at his ruined lip, inflated, burst. Another formed behind it. His chest barely moved. He was going. Slipping into the dark where the pain would finally stop.

"Eira."

Phei did not look up.

Eira was there before he finished the word. Small wings, crystalline body, not a hint of hesitation anywhere in her. She drifted down onto Kyle’s chest and pressed her tiny palms against the ruined cave of his chest, and the glacial blue-white light that threaded out of her fingers did the exact work she had done for Anderson months ago — not mercy, never mercy, only necessity.

She fused enough shattered bone and torn tissue to keep his heart beating and his lungs inflating, sealing the worst arterial breaches and leaving the smaller ones to weep slowly, stabilising him on the edge of consciousness without giving him any of it back.

The caved chest filled slightly. The punctured lung re-inflated with a wet sucking sound. The hairline bleed at his temple slowed to a dignified seep.

But the face — the methodical ruin of his face — she did not touch.

She looked up at her Master’s wet-eyed, blank expression once, wings flickered, and withdrew three feet into the air — silent, patient, ready to repeat the procedure whenever she was next required. Ready to drag him back from the brink every single time he thought the hell was over.

Kyle’s remaining eye rolled back down. Focused, shakily, on Phei.

The keening thinned back into a recognisable word.

Pleeeeease —

Phei grabbed the front of the silk dressing gown.

Pulled Kyle up by it into a half-sitting position against the wall. Held him there. Put his own face within inches of Kyle’s ruined one. His free hand — the one that had done most of the damage — was split at three of the knuckles, white bone visible through the torn skin, blood running down his fingers in steady lines.

He did not appear to have noticed.