Chapter 22
ROSA
Iam not a fan of torture, but I can make exceptions.
I spent some time catching up with Donatella, filling her in on everything that’s been happening—including the sex part because she’d already figured that one out—before letting her head off to wash up.
Then I follow Luca down to the basement.
He’s not difficult to find. The screams and cries float through the house like background music in an elevator.
I asked Matteo why the house wasn’t soundproofed when everything else seemed pretty high tech.
I mean, they built an internal portcullis, but they skimped on the insulation?
“Nah, the walls are soundproofed,” he told me.
“So, like, the house next door and nobody passing by can hear. But inside, not so much. If there’s more than one staying with us, we keep ’em separate—one upstairs in the waiting room while the other gets his treatment.
Scares the shit out of them listening to their buddies wail. ”
The look of delight on his face reminded me again that I was dealing with inhuman creatures here. I’ve always known that, but it can be easy to forget at times.
The door to the basement looks ordinary. White wood, brass handle. Like I could open it and find a laundry room or a bunch of teenagers watching movies and sneaking booze. The sounds coming from inside suggest otherwise.
I take a deep breath and enter.
Kurt is attached to a pulley device, his wrists enclosed in thick iron shackles.
Adjustable chains run from the wall up to a meat hook in the middle of the ceiling, and our new friend is hanging from it.
At the moment, he is scrabbling on the barest of tippy-toes, trying to relieve the pressure on his arms. One tug of the lever, and he’d be dangling.
Was this what Luca had in mind when he said he wanted to string me up? I study the device and realize that I’m interested—that I’d be willing to experiment.
But not here.
This place reeks of pain and suffering and death, the coppery tang of blood and the stink of shit hanging in the air. I’d need a damn tetanus shot if I got naked here.
Luca glances over at me as I walk down the stairs.
I expect him to be riled up, angry, taking out his many frustrations on his houseguest. Instead, he is the picture of calm and control, which is all the more terrifying.
Blood spatters his bare chest, marring the tattooed skin and drenching his sweatpants.
He’s holding a paring knife—the kind you might peel an apple with.
Except it’s not an apple he’s been peeling.
His expression shows a flicker of doubt—of regret. He doesn’t want me to see him like this. He doesn’t want me to witness how good he is at inflicting pain. That he’s a professional. It moves me, seeing him so vulnerable, much as he tries to hide it.
I walk straight over to him, place my palms on either side of his face. My fingers slip and slide in the blood, but I stand on tiptoe and kiss him firmly on the lips. “I know who you are,” I say quietly. “And I love you.”
Not the most romantic of places to bust out the L-word for the first time, but our lives are not like other people’s.
We could be waiting forever for the right moment.
There’s unlikely to be a long walk on the beach at sunset, an intimate dinner for two, or a vacay to Paris. We could both be dead by tomorrow.
So we have to live for today.
He pulls me into his arms, crushing me tight to his body, and buries his face in my neck, where he plants a trail of kisses. Despite the circumstances—half-dead vamp in a non-sex torture dungeon—my body responds.
He doesn’t say it back, but I’m not surprised. Not disappointed. None of this comes easily to him, and he shows how much he cares about me with every action he takes. It’s a sweet moment, but I feel the outline of his hard cock shoving against me and smile. Some things never change, thank god.
I pull away and take in my surroundings.
It’s pretty much as you’d imagine: bare walls, stone floor with a drain in the middle to get rid of the blood, a small box that I’m guessing emits UV light.
The metal table near the door comes complete with a hand drill, blowtorch, spiked baton, stun belt, and all manner of blades in different shapes and sizes. All your basics.
There’s also a couch, presumably so tired vamps can rest after a long day of torturing the shit out of their victims. I sit on it and tuck my legs underneath me. “So, how’s it going?”
“He’s told me a lot, but not everything,” Luca answers.
Kurt rallies, dragging up his ruined face to glare at him with some defiance. Got to say, I kind of admire his spirit. “I’ve told you everything, you twisted motherfucker!”
“I don’t think you have.” Luca uses the tip of his knife to lift a flap of skin from Kurt’s chest. His whole torso is covered in these flaps, a few inches long, bright red and bleeding.
Some are half healed, others fresh. His face is battered and broken, and one eyeball is hanging out, connected to his socket by a repulsive string of flesh.
“I’ve told you!” Kurt shrieks as the flap of skin is pulled back to reveal fat and muscle. “We weren’t supposed to hurt her. The others, yes, but not her.”
I frown. “Me? You weren’t supposed to hurt me?”
“No! You were off-limits. He said he’d done it before—said he organized the death of the Lombardi bitch decades ago. Now he was ready to get rid of the rest of the Seers, apart from you.”
“But I was getting the same Calls as the others. I was under the same pressure.”
Kurt sneers at me—as well as a man with one eye, a broken nose, and a busted lips can sneer.
“We had to make it look good. He wasn’t ready for the others to know his plans, so we had to make it look like you were being targeted too.
He was gonna blame it on the vamps. On the Coscas, who he’d say were out of control and needed taming. ”
“And then take all the glory when he stepped in to clean up the mess?” I ask.
“I suppose. I don’t fucking know! The man is demented. But he pays well, and the work was steady.”
The work was steady. Jeez. He talks about it like he had a pleasant office job, like it was a vocation.
That steady work almost killed Paola Bianchi, and it definitely killed her precious baby.
I look at this piece of shit hanging from Luca’s basement ceiling and feel nothing but contempt. Contempt, and a fuckload of rage.
“Luca, will his eye heal?”
“Not if I sever the nerves and remove it completely. The skin will just heal over.”
“Right, interesting. Why don’t we do that and then take his other eye? What do you use, a spoon?”
“Ice cream scoop,” he replies calmly. “On the table.”
Ingenious, I think as I pick up the blood-stained scoop. Amazing what uses one can find for everyday kitchen implements. I take note of the pizza wheel and imagine what I might do with it as I move to stand in front of Kurt.
He tries to spin away from me. “There’s more I can tell you!” he screams, slobber and blood spraying from his mouth. “I have details. Dates and names.”
I tap the scoop against my palm. “I thought you said you’d told him everything?”
“Yeah, well, I lied! There’s more, I promise.”
I turn to Luca. “He doesn’t need eyes to talk does he?”
“No, my love, but in my experience, once you take both eyes, they lose the will to fight. To live. It might be best to save that for later—unless he talks.”
“I’ll talk, okay? For fuck’s sake, I’ll talk!” Kurt cries.
Whatever loyalty he once felt to the Grand Ball Sack has clearly faded under the assault, and it seems that having two of us in the room with him has pushed him over the edge into honesty.
“I was getting the Calls,” I say slowly. “I was tired, wiped out. I could have slipped, could have been killed. How was it different for me?”
“The others, it was like … gangs of vamps. Or skilled vamps. Ambushes, like the Bianchi girl. The Agostini Seer was next—we’d infiltrated the place where she lives. If she’d gone home to her apartment instead of flying off to fucking Cairo, she’d be dead by now as well.”
“Paola’s not dead.”
“Good as. She was … Well, she put up a lot more of a fight than we expected. I wasn’t there—I swear I wasn’t there—but she took down four vamps on her own, and when they threw her off that balcony, they assumed she was finished.”
“Too bad she’s strong and she’ll recover. And when she does …” I shake my head and let out a low whistle. “I pity anyone who was involved in what happened to her.”
Pausing, I frown. “So all the Calls I’ve been getting … They’ve been—what? Fake?” They didn’t feel fake. They felt hard and bloody and exhausting.
“Not fake, no. They were just … controlled. I found the vamps and encouraged them. Made sure they did enough bad shit to get your attention. But you must have noticed that none of them were A-listers. They were easy kills, all of them.”
He’s right, I think, looking back over the last month.
None of them were a real challenge. It was the sheer volume that posed the danger.
I suspect the onslaught also had another side benefit for the Grand Ball Sack—it kept me distracted.
Like a magician, he kept me looking at the right hand while he fooled me with the left.
“Why you, Kurt?” I ask, pushing his bloody chest so he sways in front of me. “What did you do to earn the Grand Ball Sack’s trust?”
He looks confused, so I clarify. “Tomasso. My fucking grandfather.”