Chapter Eleven #3
My fingers around the door handle tightened as I fought for composure. Nestore’s keen gaze locked on my face, waiting for a reaction that I had no intention of giving him. I wouldn’t become part of his game.
He scanned me from head to toe. “I knew you’d be gorgeous in white.”
I wore the long dress because the evenings were cold, and it turned out to be a good choice when Nestore led me out into the gardens.
The sweet, floral scent of millions of blooming roses carried over to me as we strolled along the paved path, even before we reached the trellises or the maze.
Nestore held my hand in a tight grip as he pulled me along.
He refused to tell me what kind of spectacle awaited us.
My skin crawled when I considered the options.
We walked past the maze to the farthest part of the premises, where the sports center used to be.
Nestore had removed the tennis courts and built a wide circular building in their place.
It was only one story tall and windowless.
Inside, electric torches illuminated the rotunda.
Two staircases led to the stories below.
Noise came from this area, an erratic and excited roar of male voices. What was going on?
Nestore took my hand and led me down the staircase.
I kept staring at the crown made from bones on his head.
Part of me hoped it wasn’t real bone, or at least not human bone.
I wasn’t an expert, so maybe it was something else.
It reminded me of an array of entwined sprigs, and I decided to think of it as exactly that: sprigs. I needed to forget the truth.
When we emerged from the stairwell, my lips dropped open in surprise. The room resembled a miniature amphitheater. The ranks were crowded with men who fell silent when Nestore and I stepped out. Every eye followed us as Nestore pulled me toward a loge with a perfect view of the circular pit below.
The moment Nestore sat down, a man stepped into the pit.
He was thick around the middle with broad shoulders and a thinning hairline.
His heavy-lidded eyes carried the look of someone who had seen too much.
“Tonight, we have a special treat. A rat gets its chance to evade death by surviving five minutes in a cage with Drago. Put your bets in. The fight begins in one minute.”
The man disappeared through a door that led to another area below the ranks. I sent Nestore an incredulous look. “Drago, as in my father’s tiger?”
My father had been obsessed with wild animals.
His private zoo of apes, tigers, lions, and cheetahs had always made me feel icky.
The poor beasts didn’t have enough room, and my father kept them drugged half the time, so he could pet them and feel like an even bigger man for controlling them.
He had brought them to this place when we’d moved here after Romano Senior had been murdered.
Nestore inclined his head, a few strands of his hair falling into his eyes as he held my gaze.
“You kept them?”
Nestore gripped the banister and surveyed the pit below before he fixed me with a look. “Not all of them. I could have had them killed. No sanctuary or zoo had room for them. There are too many wild animals being traded, and too many of them need to be rehomed.”
“So now you use them for fights?”
His dark brows dipped. “It’s good entertainment, an effective deterrence, and drives up the bets. This is business, Amelia, one I need to keep running so I can buy you only the finest fabrics and gems.”
I shook my head, horrified by what Nestore had become.
A tall man with his long brown hair in a low ponytail entered the pit below. He wore only pants. His upper body bore a few bruises and cuts, but he seemed well otherwise. His gaze found Nestore, and his expression shifted into one of pleading. “Let me redeem myself. I could work for you.”
Nestore made a cutting motion with his hand and sank into the elevated red velvet chair behind him.
I lowered myself into the seat beside him, my eyes trained on the circular arena.
A door was pulled up behind the man in the pit.
The man whirled around and backed away. For several seconds, nothing happened, then the head of a tiger peeked out of the inside before the rest of the majestic predator emerged from the shadows.
The crowd aah’d, and money was handed to two men who took down bets on their phones.
I wondered what they were betting on. Did anyone actually bet against the tiger?
My eyes caught on a clock on the wall that was counting the seconds of how long the man had spent in the pit with the tiger. That must be what everyone bet on.
Nestore raised an eyebrow, a challenging smirk tugging at his lips. “Wish to bet on the outcome?”
I gave a jerky shake of the head. “That’s not my definition of fun.”
He shrugged as if it were of no consequence to him. “It is mine, and it’ll be yours too.”
“Why? Will you turn me into a version of yourself?”
“Maybe you are already more like me than you want to admit.”
My attention was drawn to the cage. “I’m not.”
The tiger snarled and pounced. With one swipe of its massive paw, it sent the man flying. He landed on the floor with a terrified gasp and tried to scuttle backward to escape the prowling beast. It sank its teeth into the man’s shoulder, causing him to screech in pain.
“These caged predators never learned to go in for the kill. They play to satisfy their suppressed urge to hunt,” Nestore murmured, his expression pleased as he watched the spectacle.
I shuddered at the sounds of bones breaking and the screams of agony. They reminded me of the past, of Nestore’s very own screams.
“These are men who betrayed me and the Camorra. Men like your father. Men who tortured and killed until I caught them.”
I looked away, unable to bear another second of the barbaric display. Finally, the screams stopped, and only the sound of bones crunching and the wet noises of smacking could be heard.
“Why are you forcing me to watch this?” I asked in a whisper. Nestore leaned back in his chair. “To scare me? That’s unnecessary. One look in your eyes is enough for that.”
He let out a low chuckle. “You watched me getting tortured for years, you heard my screams and the sound of my bones breaking, and you never ran away from it, but this makes you want to take flight?” The hint of accusation carried in his voice, as if he thought I had enjoyed watching him suffer.
His mind had warped the truth, and my running away had definitely contributed to it.
“I stayed to remind you that you weren’t alone. I bore the sound of your screams because I knew you suffered so much worse. I didn’t do it out of curiosity or fun. I stayed because I cared about you. After all, it was the only way to support you.”
Some of the hardness disappeared from Nestore’s eyes, and hope flared in me, only to be snuffed out when his jaw set tight and he turned away. He watched the tiger eat parts of the corpse before the predator lost interest, and so did Nestore. The door opened, and the cat prowled out.
A cleaning crew dressed in white bodysuits entered the pit and cleaned up the blood and remains with a water hose and a broom. The sharp hiss of the water hose raised goose bumps on my skin, and I shuddered as memories from long ago emerged, making my belly roil.
Nestore leaned forward and touched my forearm. I met his gaze, surprised by the understanding in his eyes. Maybe not everything was lost.
“You are safe.”
“Am I?”
He removed his hand, a cold mask sliding over his face.
Once the cleaning crew left, two men stepped out to fight each other.
If any of the spectators were disturbed by the display in front of them, they hid it extraordinarily well.
Or maybe this was just daily business, and they had grown used to it.
Nestore motioned to a server I hadn’t noticed before. Most people had to go to the bar on the highest rank if they wanted something to drink but not Nestore of course.
“Red wine for me,” he said before he settled back in his armchair with a bored air. “What do you want, Amelia?”
I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep anything down, but I didn’t want to give Nestore the satisfaction of seeing me squirm. “A glass for me as well.”
Surprise crossed Nestore’s face. “You have developed a taste for red wine?”
I shrugged and leaned as far back in my seat as I could so I didn’t see the lower part of the pit.
“I’ll develop it now,” I said petulantly.
Maybe alcohol would make this display of violence more bearable.
“It might help me blank out how cruel you’ve become.
How arrogant and merciless and drunk on power. ”
His smile hardened. “Ahhh, I see.” The server returned with two glasses of dark red wine. I wished it wouldn’t remind me quite so much of blood.
I took the glass. Nestore raised his own with a smirk. “To the woman who broke my heart, my future wife.”
He waited expectantly for me to clink my glass against his. With a hard swallow, I complied. At the high clanking sound, the little hairs on my neck rose. Below us in the pit, the grunts and pained gasps of the fighters increased in volume.
I took a sip of the wine; it was tart and strong, with a faint berry note, and the heat traveled down my throat, then up into my head. “Will you ever forgive me for running?”
Nestore took a swallow, his expression pensive. “I would have forgiven you almost anything, Amelia. But this…” His eyes bored into mine. “You betrayed me.”
“I never did anything against you. I never even thought about another man.”
“You didn’t cheat. But you didn’t stay.”
I looked away from the deep hurt and accusation in his gaze. I sipped at the wine, feeling a soft buzz that felt almost comforting. “And now you want to make me pay. You want to get even.”
“I can’t, Amelia. Nothing I could do would cause you the same agony I felt when I realized you had abandoned me.”