Chapter 21 Kitty
TWENTY-ONE
KITTY
“…haven’t they been pumping you full of my own drugs to keep you going? I’m thinking of leaving you here. Letting you rot and die at the same time.”
When I’d hit connect on the number, I hadn’t expected to be greeted with Stan’s voice.
Stan’s voice using Stan’s words to torture someone—Dante was the likeliest suspect.
“Do you know what happens to a body when it’s dumped in a lye bath?”
I flinched.
He’d asked me if I wanted to be there when he tortured Dante. I’d said no. I’d thought he’d respected my decision—
“See, Kitty told me what you were about to do to her, Dante. I’m tempted to make you choke on your dick and let you bleed out from the stump, but I need answers.”
Confirmation—this was Dante.
But as dumb as it made me, I couldn’t end the call. It was all on me. My thumb hovered over that red button. A quarter inch away from tapping on it and being an outright coward as I hid from what Stan was capable of.
“We found that little house in Philly. The one where your mom and sisters live. How fortunate that we have some openings in our stables.”
My stomach churned. Stables? What the hell did horses have to do with anything?
“I’ve seen pictures of them. I think they’d make nice whores. But then, looks don’t matter so much, do they? If they’re ugly, they’ll service the fuckers who are too tight to pay for the premium product.”
Prostitutes.
They ran hookers.
Of course they did.
The Irish did too.
Fuck, the Russians. The Albanians. Everyone got a piece of the action on subjugating women.
Tears flooded my eyes as I thought about what had been happening in that hellhole. The beds. The rooms. The cries and the moans.
But I wasn’t naive.
I knew what my brothers were involved in, knew what my da had done to get the money for this building with the Ra—the IRA—we lived under a roof funded on the backs of other people’s sorrows.
“You weren’t just a snake in the grass. You were a traitor. You stole my woman from my bedroom and thought you could get away with it?”
His claiming offered no reassurance.
“I like the symmetry of this. It’s very eye for an eye, but you should have figured it out by now, Dante—we don’t take one eye. We take both. We take your tongue and your fingers and your dick too.”
My brain switched off. I didn’t end the call. Didn’t ask who was there, listening into this conversation, giving me this information. I knew Stan wasn’t. This wasn’t him offering me vengeance. If he knew I listened in, I bet he’d never have talked about women that way.
No, this wasn’t something for the female gaze—or ears, in this instance.
I was in too much pain to curl into a ball.
Instead, I stared at the ceiling, listening to the man I thought I loved whisper the vilest shit to break another’s spirit.
The most amazing part was that it didn’t include a single grunt of exertion or a scream of agony.
No, Stan slashed at Dante’s metaphorical jugular, drained him of hope, and then packed salt into verbal wounds that amplified his victim’s fear.
I sucked in a breath when an odd rattling sound caught my attention and I heard someone ask, “You wouldn’t, would you, Stan?”
My heart fluttered with hope. That Stan immediately quashed.
“Turn your stomach, Chad?”
No answer was forthcoming until the other guy queried, “What’s with the meds?”
I gritted my teeth because Stan and drugs. Fuck. What else had he created? What other torment had he brought to this godforsaken planet?
“Rory ever tell you about C-L-O?”
“What is it?”
“A recreational drug.” I heard the sounds of an ampoule being snapped. I’d heard it so often in my working life that it was as obvious to me as the sound of a coffee machine hissing in the kitchen. “It’ll make him hallucinate.”
Hallucinate?!
My brows lifted.
Stan was… fuck, smart. Smarter than I’d realized. Smarter than, maybe, he let on. But he wasted those smarts on—
“Why do you want him to do that?”
“Because seeing is believing, Chad. If he won’t give me answers, I’ll let him see for himself what I’m telling him.”
“You can suggest the things you were saying?” The other guy sounded as bewildered as I felt.
“Power of the mind and all that. Only reason I haven’t started manufacturing this is it’s too powerful.”
And I’d thought Red was bad enough.
“Jesus.”
“Perfect for torture. Secret weapon. You turning soft on me, Chad?”
“No, Capo.”
“Good to hear.”
I almost wished the caller would disconnect the line. But they didn’t. And I couldn’t.
I lay there in a stupor, hearing his screams as Dante didn’t give up the information fast enough and they fed him a small dose of yet another miserable drug Stan had created.
My throat felt tight, the urge to vomit was there, but…
God help me.
A part of me was impressed.
And I hated that part.
The pragmatic part.
The part that could look at a downed man and slice his femoral artery because my brain had catalogued it as the quickest way to drain him.
The part that had heard about her sister’s abuse by a man in power and thought, Nah, let’s not bother calling the cops. I’ll drag my other sister into a murder one charge.
I was a nurse. I cared. I wanted to heal.
But I couldn’t hide from the darker aspects of my nature.
My very own yin and yang.
I heard from Dante’s mouth about how an Italian family, the Favaros, operated the brothel where I’d been taken on behalf of a syndicate. A child brothel of all things.
I heard how an Albanian, the one I’d killed, was the front because if the Valentinis found out, they’d have come after the Favaros.
I heard about an illegal fighting ring housed underground, near my ‘cell.’
Dante wailed and sobbed throughout his torture.
A session that Stan brought about with his genius.
There was no denying that.
He was a genius.
Capable of… Fuck.
I lifted an aching arm to swipe at my swollen eyes and smooth over the curves of my tear-drenched cheeks.
Then I ended the call.
Because the second Dante had uttered the words child brothel, he deserved every ounce of agony Stan could deliver unto him.
And I had to come to terms with believing that.