19. Dominic
19
DOMINIC
With a sigh, I leave Ariana standing in the middle of the small guest room. Those words implied so many things, but I don’t have time to digest them now. I still have shit to deal with today, and the time has come.
I close the door and activate the electronic lock with my phone. It whirrs, and with a clink, secures the room. I’m not a fan of keeping her contained, but after this morning, I’m not taking any chances. I mean…why did she want to run in the first place? Weren’t we being nice? And where did she hope to go?
I make my way to the foyer where Luca is rolling on his heels.
“For a minute I thought you weren’t here,” he says in greeting.
“Just contained our rogue guest,” I huff as I walk over to the stack of DNA tests on a console.
“Making you run around, is she? Is she talking yet?”
Fuck this shit. As if Matteo hasn’t made his own decrepit suggestions as to how to drag information out of Ariana already, Luca has one hell of a dirty mouth for starters, and a mind born in the gutter.
“Since she might be our little sister,” I spell out to stop him from going anywhere with this. “Can you sort this out later? Benedict still needs to do his swab. As for you and Steph, one will do. If you can drop it off at the lab, it will take a load off me today.”
Luca takes the box, studies the outside, then peers inside. “Sure thing. I’ll drop it off once Benedict has done his part. Steph is out of commission today.” He puts the box back with the others. “Where did you put her?”
“She’s in the small guest room. It’s the only room the guys had time to sweep before we got home.”
It’s also the room where it’s least likely she’ll hear anything we’re doing in the basement. The last thing I want is for her to be traumatized by noises. I still don’t know what she went through, but I can put two and two together. ‘ Are you going to tie me up? And lock me up? In a dark room? For weeks?’ Torture takes many forms. Isolation drives people mad. I’d take physical pain any day.
“Let’s hope she isn’t going to be innovative like Tasha.”
I smirk. Tasha did keep Matty on his toes all the way to Sicily and back. Ariana’s already shown she’s gutsy, which I like more than I should. “There’s nothing in there she could repurpose as a weapon. The windows are secure, and they’ve left her with some old-school puzzles and magazines to entertain herself. Plus, it has cameras in place. I’ll keep an eye on her.”
With Ariana’s brave and rather futile attempt at escaping, I had to make plans quickly. I got the security team to lock all the other doors in the house. Can’t be too careful nowadays.
“Won’t she be better off at Matty’s place, with Tasha there? I mean, she’s not our usual profile.”
“Matteo has had his fill of house guests.” And our older brother needs space after everything that’s happened. I’ve been thinking on my feet ever since he revealed it hit him like a ton of bricks that Franco wasn’t bluffing. “I’ll take one for the team. In any case, I’ve messaged Portia to come back and help work through the paperwork. She can keep Ariana company.”
At this, Luca chuckles. “Fun and games.”
So much fun and games.
We’re quiet now as we’ve reached the basement and things have turned to serious business.
“How’re we doing this?”
“Ever played good cop, bad cop?”
“Jesus Christ, Nicky. This isn’t my thing.”
Don’t I know it. That’s because it’s always been my thing and mine only. Assigned the task by our Lord and Master, also known as the Don, our fucker of a father and a complete psychopath.
I coil all the hate I have towards the Don back into my core. He had a plan for each of his sons, and here we are. The question is really: what was the plan he had for his only daughter? “There’re two of them, so no need for it to get messy. We play them off against each other.”
Luca huffs out a breath. “Fuck. Should have passed on that burrito for lunch.”
“Just remember they came to kill Steph, so…”
“We’re not letting them loose in the wild again.”
“Exactly, but we’re going to skin them for every last piece of information.” And that’s not a figure of speech. The tally cuts on Ariana’s lower belly flash in my mind’s eye, and I pull back. Fuck it. That woman is going to toy with my mind when I need it least. The fact that she’s in the house is already disarming me from my usual ingrained sang froid .
“This is what we know. Steph’s team at the gym filled us in,” I say. “You read the email?”
“Yep. Our boys are Boris and Boryslav.”
I smirk. Fuck my life. “We’ll make it easy and just go with Boris.”
“Yep. These two boys walked into Steph’s gym with baseball bats at around ten in the morning looking for him, the time he usually trains. Russian?—”
“Ukrainian.”
“Whatever.” Luca waves it off. “Asking after their guys who went MIA since the night at the gallery where Vincenzo came for Gigi. Bottom line, we have six wannabe Bratva in our hold, and none of them has spilled one useful bean of information.”
“Yep. But these two are still fresh.” And they haven’t experienced even the tip of my repertoire. I stretch my fingers out and curl them again, allowing my left pinkie to be obstinate.
Pain is nothing. It goes away once you’re dead. Something everybody begs for once pushed too far. My time will come. Some days, I can’t wait.
“They obviously didn’t only have baseball bats,” I say as we take the maze to where the men are locked up. Stephano’s team confiscated guns and knives once they had these boys cornered.
“Sigh. They should have known better.”
We walk past the two guards keeping an eye on our prisoners, and I dismiss them. This isn’t a spectator sport.
Then we’re standing in front of the two cages. Both men are shackled but have been allowed some space to move. Just enough, though—we don’t want them to think this is the circus and they’re part of the act. There’s a faint whiff in the air, of fresh shit contained in the closed buckets in the corners. Our guys look worse for wear what with their beat-up faces and scruff. They both have buzz-cuts, but these boys will never shave or have a haircut again.
They glance at us, shackles clanging and scraping as they get up, that nerve-wrecking sound of metal against metal, in itself a form of torment if you time it right.
“Okay, Boris and Boris. We’re here to talk,” I say, pulling up a chair. I gauge their ages at mid-thirties at least. The one guy has a bit of a pouch and is probably pushing forty-five. And he wanted to take on Stephano? Fuckwit.
For now, I’ll give them a chance to open up and fill us in. Luca does the same, and we sit, facing the men chained to a system the Don designed.
Each one has a metal choker around the neck connected to a pulley system for partial or complete asphyxiation. With their arms and legs chained to the point where they’ll strain in all directions like a star, it’s the neck that’s the weight-carrying joint. It’s right out of some medieval Torture for Dummies handbook, but with a modern twist. These ones are remote-controlled.
It’s a system we’ve perfected, the Don and me. Let’s just say, I know exactly how far to push someone with it. And it’s clean. Mostly.
“So, Boris and Boris. You work for Franco Fiore. Want to tell us how that happened?”