Swamp Murder

Swamp Murder. 76

Zhan's Pov.

Wang didn't answer. He moved like a man carved from winter. His fist found his brother's face and the blow landed clean, no theatrics, no hesitation. The man who'd tried to excuse himself by saying he'd "tried to protect everyone" crumpled against the rail and swore.

"Is she my daughter?" Wang asked, cold as the metal under our feet.

"Yes," Lusi said, voice thin. Every ounce of confidence she'd worn when she came aboard was gone, replaced by something small and pleading.

"Why did you drug me that night?" he demanded.

Her answer came like a slap. Your mother told me to do whatever it took to bind you, to make you forget the fag, to win you over.

The words fell into the night, crude, petty, revolting. Lusi tried to twist it into some story about survival, about family pressure, but it never rang true. The motive was base and small: power, sex, a desperate attempt at control that reeked of the very ugliness we'd come to punish.

Wang's lips twitched into something like a smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Good thing it didn't work," he said simply.

There was no grand catharsis. No trumpet fanfare. Just the ocean and the faint thud of music far below, while the ones who deserved it were either strapped in iron or sent down to the black water.

I turned away from the rail and sat on the nearest chair, the wood damp under my palms. My hands were shaking, not from the cold but from the thing that had finally been done. Watching the water close over metal felt like watching a wound close; relief and horror braided into one.

Wang's brother lay panting on the deck. Lusi sat, small and sullen, her earlier bravado dissolved into something too fragile to touch.

Dre and Ezra moved like ghosts, each processing the same brutal arithmetic: names meant consequences; consequences meant choices.

"I don't know if this makes us better," I said quietly, to no one and everyone. "But I know we can't un-see what we've done."

Wang met my eyes for a beat, and for the first time, there was no armor around his gaze, only exhaustion and some quiet, terrible satisfaction.

"I'm sorry about my brother," he said.

I swallowed. The night outside the little pool of light we'd made on the deck felt enormous, and the line between justice and something darker felt thinner than ever. We had started this to keep each other safe. Now the cost of that safety was written in iron and salt.

I watched the whole thing with a kind of numb focus, like my head had been hollowed out and left to echo.

Wang unzipped the duffel and pulled out three syringes, the plastic caps clicking small and final. He didn't hesitate. One into his brother's arm, slow, precise. One into Lusi's arm. The third he held for a breath, then drove into the soft flesh at the base of her neck.

They went limp differently. His brother's breath hitched and slowed; Lusi's eyes fluttered once and went glassy. Neither screamed. It felt clinical, like surgery performed in a room that had run out of mercy.

Wang slid the syringes back into the bag with the same calm. Then he walked below deck and disappeared into the cabin. For a long minute, there was nothing but the faint thrum of the engine and the slap of waves against the hull.

When he came back up, I realized the yacht had changed course. The shoreline we'd left glowed in the distance; now the lights moved toward us again. The stern cut through the black water with a different urgency.