"There is a time for everything, Sacha."
I didn't understand what he was saying. How could he have discovered what I had done, why only now was he retaliating with vehement acrimony the likes of which often was only inspired by drunken rage?
"A time to live, a time to die. Have you ever read that passage in the Bible?"
I could not breathe, and therefore replying was not something I could readily do. Years ago, he, this same man that stood above me, had stepped on my breastplate so hard, kicked it with such violence that it cracked into multiple hairline pieces of a jigsaw. I was never taken to hospital: the funding that the Butterfly brought in was not, at that time, sufficient to merit a doctor's trip for something that was not obviously about to kill me. Because of this, it had never healed correctly, and it had been easier to break this time with his heel than it had ever been before. Breathing in hurt as it expanded, and out while it moved again, leaving my panting, winded on the cold, abrasive asphalt composing the alleyway behind the old Victorian building.
"No?"
How had he found out about him?
"A time to weep, a time to laugh. A time to mourn, and a time to dance. So on, et cetera."
Ecclesiastes Three.
The blunt, steel toe of his boot was sent into my ribs. They were already bruised, sore and aching, and now one of them cracked clean in two, making me shout with the sharp pain as bone split, nerves jolted, and the jagged end of the bone itself seemed to tear into my insides.
"A time," he spat out, now once more driving into every inch of my body he could with wild, beating kicks, "To know," and now between every other word there was a foot in my side, shattering me from the inside. "When to shut up, and accept, someone's, help, and charity, and good. Fucking. Graces. To raise you!"
The alleyway spun around me, while pain and shock crawled through my limbs, and I was aware that my cheeks were wet with tears, a torn lip sending blood down my throat that had me spluttering in attempts not to choke in addition to the foreboding asphyxiation.
"What was his name?"
A cough, and I forced myself to roll onto my side, spit onto the sidewalk. I was soon on my stomach, Jordan on my back with his knees, grabbing a handful of my hair and bashed my skull downwards in an attempt to coerce an answer.
"It's his name, or a false one on your own tombstone! Sacha Demidov will have never come to America because I will wipe," more bashing, more pain, concrete to forehead striking me numb, "Every, last, thread of your pathetic existence from this planet! Who is he?"
"Jordan-" I wheezed, but it was not the name he wanted to hear, and I could feel my nose shatter as it was rammed down this time.
"That's my name! Not his! Don't fuck around with me! Tell me who it was!"
Who it was? It was not a question I felt I could answer with just a name alone. He was perfection, he was grace, and he was angelic beauty descended to take me back home in sweet, blissful moments when visits were stolen during nights underneath the harsh glow of fake neon lights and between brick buildings that pressed us in against one another in rapturous symphony.
His name was not going to pass my tainted, bloodied lips while they quivered in inhaling air that now came with vibrant pain throughout my entire body.
"You're mine." Words that were poisonous hissed from the devil's tongue on top of me, directly into my ear, accompanied by the press of a cold circle to the back of my bruised skull. "Not his. Mine, you filthy whore, and if you don't tell me his goddamned name, you little faggot, I'll do to you what I've done to all the rest of you pathetic bitches that stole from me." A click penetrated the thick fog that was surrounding my senses.

"I'm yours," he said to me, whispering it into my ear while stroking my chest through the mesh that covered it, fingers passing over the tattoo that was embedded beneath the hollow of my collarbone. "Yours, all yours, Sacha…"
The manner in which it had been said, such passionate affection in the heat our skin created despite the surrounding cold of oncoming spring in the city, frost that rimmed windows in the fake light of night, had me believe, and perhaps in stupefied reverie since I had clung to them.

"I'm his," I stuttered. "For – forever – his angel – Wingless – but his angel –"
The pistol Jordan had pressed to my head was lifted, and then came crashing down.

Blackness. No sound.

And then back in the alleyway some few minutes later, so far as I could discern, though I had been moved against the wall, sitting partially up, blood still wet while it slipped in rivers down my face, staining my vision with red. Jordan was there, glowering, and now I could see the weapon.
"Name," he snapped. I became almost stupidly, belatedly aware that I was naked, hands bound behind me at my tailbone. Breathing was pain; moving was pain; and when I came to be able to discern what I was seeing behind the blood that was stinging my eyes that, too, was pain, knowing that in foolish martyrdom to save the man I loved from Jordan's wrath I was never to see him again.
"A time to die," Jordan said, and I gasped in air.
"I saw," I said, wheezing, and wincing between words and sobs. "Under the sun the place of judgement, that wickedness… was there."
Ecclesiastes three.
It was enough to make his killing me quick, the bullet that was fired finding my skull, and landing in the brick wall behind me, below a window that once was rimmed with fingers of frost and hands of almost supernatural warmth.