what they wouldn't do | DAREDEVIL

ninteen

            IN GENERAL, MATT MURDOCK preferred to fight hand-to-hand over using a weapon. The temptation to lose control was already great enough when Matt was fighting criminals with his hands; anything that made it easier to inflict damage only made the chance of slipping and going a step too far more likely. However, if his adversary was the one who chose to bring a weapon into the fight, Matt wasn't necessarily above using it against them. When it came right down to it, there were a lot of things he wasn't above.

In this particular scenario, the two men on the roof had brought knives to a fight they had already been certain they were going to win: two of them against someone much smaller, someone they had already injured. So the use of Sarah's kitchen knife—serrated and much sharper than the ones the two men had brought with them—seemed only appropriate, and as Matt knelt in front of the taller of the two men and pressed the blade against his skin, he found no sympathy for him.

"What does Ronan want with her?" Matt asked, his voice deadly calm. He had already asked him the same questions he had posed to the other man: who Ronan was working with, what he had hired them to do, where they were supposed to meet him. Unfortunately, he'd been unable to shed any more light on those topics than his partner had.

"No clue," the man said immediately, but his heart jumped a few ticks. Matt pressed the blade of the knife—which was already coated in a good amount of the man's blood—harder against his throat.

"Don't make me ask you a second time."

"What do you think, man?" he spat out, his pained tone turning frustrated. "He didn't say outright, but...shit. The way he talked about her, it—it's not hard to take a guess."

"And you have no problem delivering someone to a fate like that," Matt noted, clenching his jaw, moving on before he could dwell on that part too much. "Are you two the ones who have been following her?"

"No. No, I swear I'd never seen her before tonight," he said frantically. "We got an address and a key, that's it. Anything else going on with that chick is Ronan himself doing it."

"How do you know he hasn't hired other people?"

"Ronan? That guy doesn't have enough money for that."

"Enough to catch your interest, though."

The man would have been smart to not answer. Unfortunately for him, he made the mistake of continuing to speak—apparently with the hope of swaying the vigilante who was currently pinning him against the brick wall at a painful angle.

"It sounded like an easy job," he ground out. "We didn't—we didn't know you'd be here, we wouldn't have—"

His words turned into a strangled his of pain as Matt kept the pressure of the knife even, but tightened his hold on the man's arm and twisted it harder.

"So, you only came because you thought she would be alone and easy to get to," Matt said, his voice low and harsh. "You really think that's helping your case?"

Matt breathed in deep through his nose, trying to ignore the way everything in him was itching to beat this man to a bloody pulp. It had infuriated him to hear the two of them eagerly discuss their plans for Sarah as they had tracked her across the roof, so confident and gleeful in their mission: two grown, armed men against one injured woman they had assumed was alone. It had made him angrier that they had almost been right, that she almost had been caught alone. That if they had gotten into her apartment before she'd been able to call him, he never would have gotten to her in time.

And farther down, a small, irrational part of him just wanted to hurt the two men for bringing the devil in him out to fight in front of the one person whose trust he had been trying so hard to keep. And if Sarah's heart rate and speechless shock before she left the roof were any indication, he might have just lost that trust.