Chapter 39. The Torturer

In those many, many months he was subjected to gruesome training, Carlos had so many moments where he wished the training would end. He’d toyed with the fact that he had a choice; he could always tell the members of the consortium that he had given up and that he couldn’t go on anymore. But he’d made it clear to himself that giving up was not an option, and that had kept him going for a little while.

At some point, when the training had seemed inhumane and impossible, he’d clung to the idea that the Man in Black felt indebted to his mother and would not let him die. He’d held on to it like a lifeline, and it had kept him just secure enough to go on. But then he’d undergone survival training towards the end called “kill on sight.”

He’d been dropped off, first in a forest, then in the middle of an awful wreck of a building, and Muscles in the consortium were tasked to find him and kill him if they could—until he made his way out of the kill zone.

At that point, he’d