Chapter 7
Lula
I whirland race to the safety of the front entrance.
I sense rather than hear an explosion of movement behind me, the shadows separating, convalescing, becoming a man. Becoming Victor.
The door looms ahead of me. I’m so close. Five more steps, and I’ll hit the alarm. Then I’ll unlock the front door and escape to safety.
Three more steps. Two. One?—
A strong arm wraps around my front, wrenching me back against my attacker’s giant frame. I struggle but am pinned. My bare feet kick ineffectively.
A deep voice purrs in my ear. “Vera. Or should I say, Lucrezia.”
The bottom falls out of my stomach.
He knows.He knows my real name.
He knows everything.
There’s a story among hunters that the instant prey knows it’s about to die, it surrenders. I mean to fight, but something in me relaxes against my captor. Recognizing the rightness of his embrace.
But no. I need to fight. Before I start thrashing in earnest, something pricks my neck. A needle. I’d slap at it like a stinging insect, but I’m clamped in Victor’s hold. In the next second, darkness rushes over and pulls me under.
* * *
I heara leaky faucet somewhere nearby. Water falling from a great height into an empty sink. In the dead quiet of the room, each drop lands with a sound as loud as a gong. Plink. Plink. Plink.
That’s why it’s called water torture. Grab a prisoner, restrain him, and wear him down.
I blink and blink, but my surroundings are nothing but fuzzy shapes. A bright light overhead. A cold, hard, flat surface underneath me. I go to move, but my ankles and wrists are tethered. I’m splayed like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, all my vulnerable bits exposed.
A shadow falls over me, and I flinch, but there’s nowhere to go. I might as well be a corpse, dead on a slab.
I probably will be one shortly. Right now, my cousin Royal is tearing through the safe house. Will he find Gino? Or Gino’s body? I do feel regret. I didn’t do enough to protect my brother.
Never mind that my brother is a grown man, and I’m in a worse predicament than him. My future promises to be full of blood, bright lights, and lots and lots of pain.
The shadow over me hasn’t moved. It’s a source of warmth, though, and part of me wants to strain closer. “Drink,” Victor rasps and sets something at my lips. A straw. I suck down liquid because my throat is screaming for it. Too late, I realize that he could be drugging me again. But no, if he wanted to drug me, he’d just stick another needle in my neck. There’s a certain cold logic to fatalism. I can guess well enough why I’m here.
I shot Victor, and now he’s kidnapped and taken me somewhere he can make the rest of my life painful and very short.
It makes sense. He who lives by the sword. . . I’ve planned my life around the arc of vengeance, and now here I am, helping someone else complete their own revenge arc.
The water helps clear my vision. Victor stands over me. His white-blond hair is longer now but does nothing to soften the harsh perfection of his sharp features. Only the lush curve of his lips keeps him from looking alien with all of his pointy angles. His lips are soft, too, if I remember correctly. The way they grazed my skin?—
Despite my chilled limbs, warmth curls through me. Then I meet his arctic gaze and freeze again.
He studies me like a scientist would study a beetle pinned to a card. There’s a certain tenderness in the way he wipes a spilled drop of water from the corner of my mouth. But maybe it’s practical instead of kindness. Wouldn’t want your victims to die of something as banal as dehydration when there are plenty of more interesting ways to torture them to death.
As soon as I can speak, I croak, “You’re alive.”
“Yes.” He moves so his face is in shadow, and there’s no emotion in his voice. Not that he lets much show on his face. “Despite your best efforts.”
“So am I.” I raise my head and look around. I’m naked, my body shockingly tanned in this cold, sterile place. The cuffs encircling my wrists and ankles are steel half circles that look sautered right to the table. The room is long and low-ceilinged, without windows, and only white walls, silver cabinets, and glaring fluorescent lights. Like a lab. “You haven’t killed me.” Yet.
Victor steps away, and the harsh overhead light blinds me. I turn my head and blink rapidly. My brain is scrambling to figure a way out of this.
He’s fully dressed, of course, in simple slacks and a T-shirt that’s nondescript in a stealth-wealth sort of way. All black. A good color to hide blood.
How many victims have died in this room? I inhale, but I only smell cleaning chemicals. Sanitation, the professional murderer’s best friend.
“Why would I kill you?” He touches me then, wrapping a long, graceful finger around my ankle. My heart leaps, every cell in my body straining towards his touch, his warmth. I’m laid out like a cadaver, but his touch reminds me I’m alive.
He strokes the inside of my leg like I’m an object he acquired at great expense. “There’s no fun in that.”
“So you’re not going to kill me, then?” I try to scoff, but my voice wavers.
“Do you want to die?”
“Everyone dies.” My answer comes too quickly. He removes his hand.
“No, beautiful. You will not die tonight.”
One night. I have one night. My heart beats a sad, fragile rhythm like a moth with broken wings fluttering toward a light.
I seduced him once. Could I do it again? My body suddenly thinks that’s why we’re here. All it took was Victor’s touch and his delicious scent. It’s not cologne; it’s just him. A fresh, sexy cocktail of pheromones perfectly calibrated to entice me.
My core throbs with a second, shadowy beat. A wave of lust turns my nakedness and my bound wrists and ankles into a kinky game.
I take a deep breath and let it roll through me, elongating my torso and arching my breasts. I lick my lips, ready to speak, but he beats me to it.
“No, my little liar. I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to break you.”
Victor
Lucrezia Romano,daughter of Giovanni and Vera Romano, scion of the Regis family. A mafia princess by birth. A lawyer by training. Lula to her family.
My prisoner. She lies on my table with her silky dark hair pooled around her head. A Madonna in repose, but for her sharp gaze flitting around the room. Searching for escape. Naked and bolted to the table, she is still mentally throwing herself against the walls of her cage. Figuring out her next steps.
I will have to stay ten moves ahead to win this game. She is my equal in every way. The bullet she put in my belly is proof of that.
The healed wound in my gut twinges as I move around the table.
“Break me? What do you mean?” She looks up at me through her lashes.
I grip her face and let my thumb stroke the line of her jaw. “Oh no, beautiful. I know your tricks. You will not make me forget myself again.”
She quivers like a rabbit. A small part of me wants to unlock the steel cuffs and gather her close. Shush her until she relaxes in my arms.
I’ve never had such weakness around anyone before. It is a novel sensation.
Another part of me knows she’s playing a part, allowing me to see what emotions she wants me to see—the better to bend me to her will. But I have too many elaborate plans and ways I will wreak my revenge.
“How will you break me?”
“You want to know my plan? Do I owe you the truth? Vera?”
Her dark eyes turn flinty. “Did you expect me to give you my real name?”
“What was the name on the marriage certificate? Fake?”
After a moment, she nods.
“No wonder I turned up so little information on you. It should have been a clue to do more research.” I wind my hand in her hair, wrapping the silky skein around my palm until I tug her head to the side. “Oh, beautiful, what am I to do with you?”
“You could let me go.”
“So you can run out and right into danger? What were you thinking, cornering Stephanos like that? In his lair with his strength at its fullest? And with only a few guns and no backup?”
With me pinning her hair, she can’t look at me, but she smiles at the wall, all serenity. “That’s exactly what my cousin asked me. It seemed like a decent course of action at the time.”
I move my hand, shaking her gently. “You’re too smart to believe that. You will tell me the truth.”
She blows out a breath. “All right then. It seemed like the only way.”
“That’s why you seduced that man, David. You wanted to use him to get to Stephanos. It would have worked if he hadn’t been embezzling money.” I can imagine her strapping the gun under her wedding dress. So much scheming just to put a bullet in Stephanos’ head. “You picked an idiot for your plan.”
“I know.” Her raised voice bounces off the walls. “That’s why I rushed Stephanos the next morning. I didn’t work so hard, get so far, for it to just end.”
“Is that what you thought when I took you? That you had another way in?”
She’s silent. It’s true.
I knew I was a means to an end, but it still annoys me. The most memorable night of my life and she offered me nothing of herself. Only her body. And in the morning, she walked away.
She won’t walk away again so easily.
“Well, now you’re over your head, little liar. And the only thing that will save you is how well you obey.”
She closes her eyes.
She thinks I am going to torture her. And I am. But not in the way she thinks.
I turn to survey my tools, my weapons of delicate destruction. My knives are honed to perfection, and I have a bevy of new items bought specifically for her. I was trained by a butcher. I know exactly how to draw and quarter and dissect someone.
Grooves around the table edges will allow any blood to drain away, and when I’m working, I keep a large sheet of plastic underfoot. Easier for clean up.
I didn’t lay the plastic down this time. I don’t need it. There are subtler ways of mutilating someone.
When I turn back, she’s opened her eyes again.
“One question. The man at the house when you took me. . .” She hesitates, perhaps trying to figure out how long I have kept her. Down here, there is no day or night. This deprivation is part of the plan to break her. “He was my brother. Is my brother. Is he. . .?”
“Alive. At least, that’s how I left him. If he’s since rolled his garish sports car off a cliff, it is out of my hands.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get this over with.” She sets her face in a stoic mask, ready for the worst.
She has no idea what I intend to do with her. The depths I will drag her down to. I’ve spent every waking moment since we met obsessing over her. I won’t be content until she has repaid those moments with her own time.
I rap the metal table and hold up a hand in a signal I’ll use to cue her to give me her attention. “This is my workshop. This room is soundproof.” Well insulated against my victim’s screams. It also has its own heating and cooling system. A sink. A shower. And a few feet away from me, in a corner she can’t see, a pallet in a cage.
She cranes her head to take half the room in. “Looks like Frankenstein’s lab.”
“And you will be my new creation. For the time being, this is your home. Eventually, you will earn a better one, as well as a place in my bed.”
“How will I earn it?”
I select my first torture implement and hold it up to the light to inspect it. I let the metal catch the light and flash it around the room for her to see. “First, you scream for me.”