Felt the blades shifting within him, ripping through tissue and muscle in ways that his brain could not fully process because the pain had moved past the point where pain functioned as useful information and had become something closer to white noise - a constant, screaming static that drowned out everything else.
Blood gushed from both wounds now, running down his chest and soaking into his clothes and dripping onto the floor in steady streams.
One of the men reached into a bag at his side and withdrew something long and metallic.
A nail.
Not a small one. Not the kind used for hanging pictures or assembling furniture. This was industrial - ten to fifteen inches long, thick and brutal and designed to penetrate materials far harder than human flesh.
The second man produced a hammer.
Lovi's brain processed what he was seeing approximately half a second before it happened, and in that half-second his entire body went rigid with a terror so absolute it felt like drowning.
