At that moment, Oliver stood.

The motion was slow and deliberate, each stage of it measured and final - the straightening of his knees, the shift of his weight, the adjustment of his posture as he rose to his full height and turned away from where Lovi was still kneeling on the concrete, sobbing into his own hands.

He began walking toward the exit.

Not quickly. Not with any visible urgency. Just walking, his footsteps echoing through the warehouse with the steady, unhurried rhythm of someone whose work in this space was finished and who saw no reason to remain any longer.

And the moment Lovi registered that Oliver was leaving - the moment his brain processed through the haze of tears and terror that the one person in this warehouse whose mercy might have meant something was walking away - he lost whatever remained of his ability to restrain himself.

"I’m sorry!" he screamed, his voice cracking and desperate and so raw it barely sounded human. "I’m so, so sorry! Please don’t do this! Don’t leave me here like this! I didn’t know - I swear I didn’t understand how serious this was, I didn’t know what I was actually doing, please just - "

His words dissolved into incoherent begging, half-formed pleas bleeding into sobs that made it nearly impossible to distinguish one word from the next.

Oliver did not stop walking.

Did not slow. Did not turn his head. Just continued toward the door as though the sound behind him was no more significant than wind moving through the warehouse.

"Master Bushman!" Lovi’s voice shifted targets, pivoting desperately toward the only other person in the room who he believed might intervene. "Please! Please don’t do this to me! I’m terribly sorry! I’ll do anything - anything you ask - just please don’t let this happen!"

Master Bushman stood exactly where he had been standing when he delivered his report to Oliver, and for several long seconds he did not move or respond in any way. Then, with movements that were calm and practiced and entirely devoid of hesitation, he reached into his jacket and withdrew a dagger.

The blade caught the warehouse light as he pulled it free - long, sharp, purposeful. Not ornamental. Not symbolic. A tool designed for a very specific kind of work.

He looked down at Lovi with an expression that carried no anger, no satisfaction, no emotion at all beyond the flat certainty of someone about to complete a task that had been assigned and accepted.

"It seems," Master Bushman said quietly, "that you do not understand the severity of what is happening to you right now."

Lovi stared up at him, his face pale and streaked with tears and blood from where he had been striking his head against the floor.

"Do you know what you did tonight?" Master Bushman continued, his voice still calm. "What you attempted to do? The crime you were seconds away from committing when we arrived?" He tilted his head slightly. "That is not something that carries negotiation, Lovi. That is not something anyone can plead their way out of or bargain their way past. What you did - what you were going to do - that carries a death sentence. And it will be carried out. No matter how much you beg. No matter what you offer. It is going to be done."

Lovi’s breathing became ragged and uneven, panic flooding through him in waves that made coherent thought almost impossible.

But desperation has a way of producing strategies that rational thinking would never arrive at, and in the space between one panicked breath and the next, Lovi’s mind latched onto the only thing he had left that might possibly matter.

Money.

He leaned forward slightly - as much as his trembling body would allow - and dropped his voice to a whisper that was meant to carry only as far as Master Bushman’s ears.

"I have money," he said, the words tumbling out fast and urgent. "Tangible money. More than you think. More than enough to - to make this worth reconsidering. I will give you all of it. Every single piece. Just let me go. Please, Master. Just let me walk away from this and I will make it worth your while in ways that - "

Master Bushman’s expression did not change.

He took one step closer to Lovi, crouching down so that they were at eye level, and when he spoke his voice was so quiet it barely qualified as sound.

"What part of ’death sentence’ are you having trouble understanding?"

And before Lovi could process the question - before his brain could catch up to what was about to happen or his body could react in any meaningful way - Master Bushman’s hand moved.

The dagger drove forward with surgical precision, burying itself completely in the right side of Lovi’s chest.

Lovi’s eyes went wide.

Not gradually. Instantly. His pupils dilated to their maximum extent and his mouth opened in a soundless scream that took several seconds to find its voice, and when it did the sound that emerged was something between a wail and a gasp - high-pitched and broken and soaked in a pain so immediate and overwhelming that it erased every other thought from his mind.

Blood bloomed across his shirt, spreading outward from where the blade had entered.

And before he could comprehend what had just happened - before the agony could settle into something his nervous system knew how to process - the second dagger entered the left side of his chest with the same brutal efficiency.

This time he screamed immediately.

A raw, animalistic sound that filled the entire warehouse and echoed off the walls and ceiling with a resonance that seemed to go on forever.

Tears poured down his face. His body convulsed involuntarily, every muscle seizing in response to the trauma, and he would have collapsed entirely if not for the hands that suddenly gripped him from either side.

Two of Oliver’s men - large, expressionless, moving with coordinated precision - had stepped forward and taken hold of Lovi’s arms. They lifted him bodily from the floor, ignoring his screams and his thrashing and the blood now pouring freely from both wounds, and they carried him across the warehouse toward the nearest wall.

When they reached it, they slammed his back against the concrete with enough force that the impact drove both daggers deeper into his chest.

Lovi felt his flesh tearing from the inside.