Leon pointed at the burly man sprawled across the ground.
“Do you know what he does for a living?”
The girl stayed silent.
“He sells white powder. Everything moving through this neighborhood passes through his hands. Before your father broke his leg, he might’ve even bought from him.”
The girl tightened her grip on the crumpled banknotes until her knuckles turned ghostly white, as though the bones beneath her skin were about to break through.
“I know.”
Her voice was barely audible, soft as the buzzing of a mosquito, as if she were afraid that even the alley walls might overhear her.
Yet there was no hesitation in her eyes, no struggle, no attempt to deny it.
Only resignation.
The resignation of someone who, at twelve years old, had already calculated every possible path in life and realized every single one led straight into the abyss.
In the end, she had simply closed her eyes and chosen the shallowest pit.
Jesus Christ… was she really only twelve?
She was so small and thin that she looked like a strong wind could snap her in half.
Her adult teeth probably hadn’t even fully grown in yet.
“But he’s the only one willing to give me money.”
Leon slowly stood up.
He walked over to the bound drug dealer, grabbed him by the chin, and forced the mud-covered face upward.
“Look at me carefully. Remember this face. If you ever cause trouble for this kid again, I’ll find you.”
His voice lowered into something dangerously calm.
“And when I do, I’ll dismantle your bones one by one.”
The dealer didn’t respond immediately.
His eyes carried the kind of stubborn defiance only possessed by people who had already lost everything worth losing.
Leon tightened his grip slightly.
“This isn’t the first time you’ve seen me. You know I move around these streets all the time. If you retaliate against her, I’ll come back for you.”
The drug dealer suddenly stopped trembling.
Then he grinned.
Several yellow teeth were missing from his mouth, and muddy water dripped through the gaps as he spoke in an almost unbelievably sincere tone.
“You don’t understand.”
He coughed hard, mud and spit clogging his throat and turning his voice hoarse and wet.
“You don’t understand how this neighborhood works. You think I’m the bad guy? You know what the others do around here? They’d throw a sack over a girl this age, drag her away, and sell her to the Happy Houses in the South District or the underground brothels down at The Docks.”
“There, she’d get passed around by dozens of people every day. If she met quota, she got food. If she didn’t, she got whipped. Three months… hell, for someone her age, maybe only a few days before she’d be completely ruined. Then they’d dump her body in some alley like trash and wait for the corpse collectors. The body probably wouldn’t even be worth money.”
“And me?”
His voice suddenly rose, filled with genuine grievance.
“I only keep her for myself. I even give her money. I give her money! She needs my product, but I don’t just hand over product… I give her cash too. More than anyone else around here would give.”
“With that money, her father survives a few more days. A few more days, understand? In this place, surviving one extra day already counts as winning. You think that’s evil? Around here, what I’m doing is charity.”
The dealer looked at Leon expectantly, as though he genuinely believed he deserved praise.
“I’m a good man. Don’t you think so?”
Leon stared at him silently.
Mud-covered face.
Bloodshot eyes.
Rotten yellow teeth.
And beneath all of it, a sincere expression that screamed:
I’ve already been kind enough.
Why are you still dissatisfied?
The horrifying part was that the man wasn’t lying.
He truly believed he was a good person.
In his mind, limiting the girl to a single “customer,” beating her less than others would, and throwing her a few filthy dollars genuinely counted as mercy in Gotham.
From the bottom of his heart, he believed he was good.
Leon laughed.
Not the bright, practiced smile he had rehearsed in front of a mirror.
Not the fake saintly smile he used around civilians.
This was the kind of laugh born from seeing something so absurd that anger stopped being enough to describe it.
A laugh dragged out by rage.
Jesus Christ.
Gotham really did have a talent for destroying normal people’s understanding of the world.
Leon grabbed the dealer by the collar and slammed him against the wall hard enough for brick dust to scatter into the air.
“You think you’re a good person?”
The dealer’s jaw creaked painfully in Leon’s grip.
“You think being the only one sleeping with her counts as mercy? You think tossing her a few dirty dollars makes you virtuous? If you see a stray cat on the street and decide not to butcher it, are you gonna ask God for extra credit too?”
Leon shoved him even harder into the wall, rough brick scraping flesh from the man’s cheek.
“You’re not good. You’re just a slightly smarter animal. You want a cleaner version of filth so your conscience hurts less, but since you can’t afford anything better, you downgrade the product instead.” Follow the newest chapters on novelping dot com.
His eyes were cold.
“You’re not a good person. You’re just a calculating beast.”
Leon released him and took half a step back before glancing down at the man’s legs.
“You’d better memorize what I just said like scripture. If you touch her again, I’ll come back. I know exactly how gangs deal with traitors, and I move around these streets too, brother. Don’t assume I’m such a ‘good person’ that I can’t do it.”
His foot hovered above the dealer’s thigh.
“I heard a human femur can withstand around eight tons of pressure. I think if I stomp down with everything I’ve got, your leg’ll probably turn into powder. Want to test it?”
That finally broke the dealer.
Tears and snot mixed with the mud coating his face as he screamed in terror.
“No! You can’t do this! If I’m crippled, I can’t work tomorrow!”
“Don’t you think you’re a good person?”
Leon asked softly, almost gently.
“Good people should make sacrifices.”
The dealer’s lips trembled violently, but no more words came out.
Leon pulled the torn wallet from his pocket and stuffed every dollar inside directly into the girl’s hands without even counting it.
The money was wrinkled, muddy, stained with blood, and covered in everything rotten at the bottom of Gotham.
The girl looked up at the teenager wearing the crude mask.
“Will you come back tomorrow?”
Leon nodded once.
“I will.”
She didn’t say thank you.
In Gotham, those words were too expensive.
More expensive than antibiotics.
More expensive than painkillers.
More expensive than a human life.
Poor people couldn’t afford them.
Leon escorted her to the alley entrance and watched her tiny figure disappear into the endless maze of corrugated-metal shacks.
The slums looked like stacked coffins, each one containing someone who wasn’t quite dead yet.
He stood there silently for a long time.
Then he spat onto the ground.
“This fucked-up justice.”
The wind blowing in from the shantytown carried the smell of rust, mold, and something sweetly rotten.
Far away, the broken streetlamp continued flickering weakly on and off, as if Gotham itself had never truly been illuminated—but had never completely fallen into darkness either.