Cartel Warning

The room is spartan, well lit by white LED lamps surrounding a plain steel frame bed.
Multiple cameras surround the bed, all aimed at its occupant.

The boy stared at Tatiana, silent. His body is restrained, arms and legs spread apart with many loops of duct tape. The Russian smiled, looking on as his chest rose and fell, rose and fell.

Gently, Tatiana pried a strip of duct tape off of the roll and flattened it against his lips. His eyes followed her hands.
She repeats this action again. Unfiltered screaming was simply too unpleasant upon the ears.

"You're quite calm, kid". Tatiana says, rummaging through her toolbag.
"Parents must've raised you well".

Her hand grasped the handle of the combat knife.

"They really shouldn't have tried going to the federales with such harmful info on El Ceasare."

His eyes widened. She watched as his body started to struggle, bicep and thigh muscles swelled as the boy strained uselessly against the restraints. She stepped onto the mattress, knelt down, her knee planted on his chest. Tatiana placed one gloved hand upon his forehead and forced it back against the headboard of the bed frame. His neck, pale white and beaded with sweat. It glistened from the light of multiple lamps.

Her other hand held the knife. The blade descended slowly, carefully. It came to rest on his throat, gently indenting the skin. Through the knee on his chest, she felt his heart racing, pounding like a jackhammer. She could imagine the circulatory motion of his young blood, racing through arteries and veins, delivering oxygen to his brain, that brain filled with the terror of knowing his death was there.

She pushed, and skin gave way to steel. Hot wet fluid splattered against her chest, her hands. The skinny body under her own twisted. A pained, wet gasping gurgling welled up from the open gash. She tilted the head to the side, the knife sliding in and out.

She felt the body under her go limp.

The boy was unconscious, in a few seconds dead. She let go of his head, letting it flop back onto the mattress. The front of his shirt was an exclamation point of wet, fresh blood. She took the bloodstained knife and sliced away at the rest of his neck, grimacing as she searched for a gap in the cervical vertebrae. Finally, his head came off in her hands.

She held it close to one of the cameras. On the other side of that live broadcast, his parents were watching. Held captive, horrified as their only child was slaughtered like some dumb farm animal. She gripped his jaw and pantomimed a speech, like a ventriloquist with a doll.

"Hey there, I died because my parents were rat traitors, and my fate is what will happen to anyone who opposes El Ceasare and the Sun Command Cartel!"

She placed the head onto the boy's bare stomach and switched the cameras off.

It was tough work being a freelance executioner, but it really did pay well.