34. Saw Them Off
Chapter thirty-four
Saw Them Off
Eoghan
“ I don’t love keeping him in the basement.” The brass knuckles on my hand were heavy, as I opened and closed my fist. I had to leave my wife in our king-sized bed to do this bloody task. “I think we need to move him to the shed.”
I didn’t bother hiding my identity from Morelli. Why would I? There was no intent to allow him to walk out of here alive. My father wanted to kill him, of course, but Dairo and I had requested we keep him alive, using him as leverage against the Durantes.
As a beloved member of the Durante family, even if only as a consigliere, he held an emotional value to Eugenio, and that was a powerful tool. My father didn’t agree until I promised to make sure he was in pain the whole time, with regular beatings.
God forbid my father beat the man himself, of course. I had to do it because he said it would make me less “soft”.
The mad bastard.
I looked at the old man, his hands strung over his head. His hands were purple from lack of circulation, the cuffs far too tight to let blood get to his fingers.
“ Oi! ” I said to Blaine Flanagan, my father’s favorite guard, “We’re going to have to tie him to the floor. It wouldn’t do to have to amputate his hands.”
It pissed me off that the cruelty of my father’s most trusted guards had no fucking logic. If we cut off his hands, then how would we tie him? By his feet? By his elbows? It was also unhygienic, this torture thing. Keeping a man in a cell was inherently filthy, so the chances of him dying from infection if I had to saw off his hand was high.
The point was that he stayed alive, not die due to neglect.
“Yes, Mr. Green,” Flanagan said with a solemn nod.
I hated the man. What kind of father didn’t burn down the world to find his daughter when she disappeared? Or did he know and not tell us?
No… that couldn’t be it. If he had known, his loose tongue would have told us where she was.
Morelli groaned, as I nudged him with the brass knuckles.
The man was still in the same suit I had kidnapped him in, though it was unbuttoned and fraying from the beatings he’d received. I had to tell the guards not to break his bones - broken bones caused medical problems, and we didn’t need to increase the number of people that knew where we kept our little Italian friend.
“Well, Johnny,” I said with a smirk, using the Americanized version of his given name. “It seems you’ve been looking around my gallery a bit, have you?”
I walked around him, letting the echo of my loafers on the cement floor echo around the barren room.
Morelli blinked, as if trying to focus through his pain.
“Did you hurt Cosima?” he gasped out, his cracked and dry lips bleeding, sending a small trail down his chin.
“You seem quite close to your goddaughter, aren’t you?”
It was the worst kept secret in the Mafia that the young Durante girl had eyes for her Godfather. But none of our reports ever said that it was reciprocated.
“Just leave her alone, Eoghan.” If he had the strength to bristle after three days of hanging, he would have. “Her, and her little friend.”
I paused.
“What friend?” I asked, disingenuously, casually examining the knuckles in my hand.
“You know which one,” he gritted out. “The art dealer from the gallery…”
Ah, the Italians do love to make things personal, don’t they? The Durantes, and the Morellis, took the blood part of vendettas to heart, and ruled with their passion. That was why they were on their way out.
“Your little Goddaughter’s got a soft spot for my Kira, doesn’t she?”
Possessiveness gripped my heart. No one knew that we were married. At least no one outside this house did. And I wanted to declare it now, to let everyone know that she was mine, and no one else could make it their business to protect her.
The burden of protecting her rested on my shoulders and I’d be damned if I allowed them to take it away from me.
His blue eyes looked down at me with scorn and disgust.
“Just stay away from the girls, Eoghan—”
“You’re in no real position to bargain, tied up as you are,” I said, gesturing to his predicament. “Are you trying to tell me that you were looking into my gallery because of my Kira?”
“She’s not yours!” Morelli spat out. If he had any spit, he might have actually spat at me.
“She’s not yours either!” I wasn’t sure which woman we were talking about. Were we talking about Kira, or Cosima? I knew which woman belonged to me. “Neither of them are really your concern, are they, Godfather?”
I made a little chef’s kiss gesture, mocking the Italian Mafia movie with a poor impersonation of a Marlon Brando voice. “I will make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
I laughed, letting the bitterness of it travel through the air.
“Leave her alone,” he said, as snot ran down his upper lip, into his mouth. “Before she ends up just like your mother.”
I bristled, but barely contained the growing rage inside me. No one mentioned my mother. No one. They knew the fucking consequences.
“Would you like me to do to Cosima what they did to my Mum?” I was done playing nice with the little puppet. He knew he wasn’t getting out alive, and he had nothing to lose that he hadn’t already lost. “You see, sequestered as you are with my hospitality, I think I want you to be the first to know.”
I lifted up my left hand to show where a wedding band glinted on my ring finger.
“Right after I picked you up, I got myself married,” I chuckled. “Maybe I should have brought you to the church, since I didn’t know you and my wife were so close.”
My heart contracted again, thinking that she was close to anyone but me.
“Now, tell me, Morellli-” I reached up to grab his collar, dragging him down as far as his stretched arms would let him. I felt the shaking of his joints as they held on to keep his body intact. “Since it’s just us blokes here, gabbin’ about the hens. Why do you think it’s your job to protect my wife?”
Morelli blinked, his eyes still not coming away from my hand as it moved in front of his face, the knuckles sitting beside it.
Then he did something I did not expect. He started laughing.
At first, it was a laughter from shock. But then it turned into something else. Something sinister and cruel, until his eyes shut. When they opened again, I swear, they were black all the way around, though it was probably just the burst blood vessels from the beating we’d given him.
“You think that marrying her will keep her safe?” He shook against his manacles like a man possessed. “You’ve just doomed her! Not even Cosima’s protection will be of any help! You foolish, foolish child! ”
Rage split my ears like the sound of a high wail, mixed with nails on a chalkboard. I struck him with the knuckles, and watched as spittle flew from his mouth, mixed with the soft, pink mist of blood. His face began to swell, as the bare knuckles of my left hand came up into his gut, smashing into his sternum and knocking the wind from him.
He wheezed, his eyes going blank with pain, until his shoulder snapped from its socket under the weight of his swaying body.
I hit him in the face again, across the mouth and a tooth came flying out, skittering across the ground like the button of an over-stressed blouse.
“You think that you can tell me what to do with my wife?” I bellowed, as I hit him again in the ribs, feeling the satisfying crunch of bone. “She is mine. You bastards cannot take her from me.”
He screamed, as I grabbed his collar again, pulling down, until we were face to face, our noses almost touching.
“Her name will not leave your lips again, or I will cut your tongue out.”
I hit him again, and his other arm snapped.
I hit his gut again, feeling the tension of his defined abs give in to the hard brass on my fists. It began to swell fast, turning red, then blue.
“You have doomed her,” he gasped out. “I only cared because of Cosa, but now? She will have no allies to save her when they break her like the whore she is!”
My vision turned red, as I struck him with the brass knuckles again and again. I hit him until bones cracked, and organs burst. I hit him until he passed out, a bloody, leaking sack of oozing humanity.
I inflicted pain for the sake of it. I derived pleasure in his moans, and the small ways his body betrayed him. The way his skin went soft, and swollen, the way his eyes closed under the bruises…
I struck him again and again, until my arms were exhausted and limp.
Then, like he had a few minutes ago, I began to laugh. The cruel laughter of a man who enjoyed the pain of others.
“You’ve doomed yourself,” I said, chuckling, as I took the brass knuckles off my hand.
I felt like a different person. I wasn’t the same man I was when I entered this room. I wasn’t the man I was before I gained a wife. This sadism was… disturbing. Like a different spirit had taken my body and I was a madman, like my own father.
“You see,” I said, licking my lips and tasting the copper of blood - Morelli’s blood - which must have coated my face like a menacing sight. “I was going to beat you until my father was satisfied and would let you die. But now?”
I took a single finger and pushed him, until he swung like a hung pig in a butcher shop, back and forth, in a sad little pendulum.
“I think I’ll keep you alive until I am done.” I stripped off my now bloodied shirt, picking up a fresh pair of clothes that was protected beneath a plastic covering on the table of instruments made for my delight - a skinning knife, plyers, an ice pick, bone saw and other fun things.
As I donned the fresh shirt, I looked up at him and grinned.
“I think you and I will be having brunch together for a long while, until I feel like I can send you to the afterworld, when you’ve learned not to mess with Mrs. Eoghan Green.”