Two days of listening to the creaking of the chains that reached down from the ceiling and clung to his wrists, his shoulders numb through their elevation.

Two days of pure torture.

A single spotlight had been trained on him from the far corner of the room, the bright LED bulb making it impossible for Sykes to sleep. That, along with searing agony of mutilation.

His right eye was the first thing that Wyatt removed, an on the nose reference to the old saying,

An eye for an eye.

Sykes had howled in agony as Wyatt had carved it out with a sharp, serrated blade. After that, Wyatt had left Sykes in the dangerously capable hands of Tony Mason. The man had previously settled on a cushy job in the other bar. Until Sykes’s betrayal had relit the fire within him, and the man who Sykes had replaced as the Riders’ problem solver, had returned to happily settle this one.

Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, Mason had systematically begun to strip Sykes of his identity. The first thing he stripped from Sykes were any tattoos of the Riders patch. Unfortunately for the burly traitor, he had four tattoos, which Mason seared from his skin with a blow torch. Then came the fingerprints, which he took off with a handheld circular saw. To stem the flow of blood, Mason roasted a metal screw fixture over a blowtorch, and with every knuckle he sliced through, Mason quickly followed it up with the red-hot metal.

The heat melted the skin together, cauterising the wound and ensuring Sykes stayed alive.

Despite his pleas for death, every time it seemed as if the pain was sending Sykes to a more comfortable state of consciousness, Mason zapped him with a taser, jolting his body back to life and causing Sykes to excrete beyond his control.

Mason ignored it, his focus primarily on reducing Sykes down to the husk of a man that he’d turned out to be.

Mason only needed to ensure that the fingerprint was removed, not that his work was particularly tidy, and over the course of an afternoon, he’d cut through ten fingers with varying care.

Some of them were still intact, with Mason perfectly slicing the tip off like a waiter de-foaming a pint of lager.

Some of the fingers had been butchered entirely.

As the sun began to set on his second day of torture, Sykes was a broken man. Frail from the lack of sustenance and weakened by his inability to sleep. The pain had pulsed through his body for nearly forty-eight hours, and he was broken.

His eye socket was a bloody chasm, the dried edges turning a dangerous dark green colour.

His hands were a mishmash of jagged bone and blood splatter.

His shirtless torso was riddled with bruises and burn marks.