Chapter 3
RETH
Present
The man's name doesn't matter.
They never do. A name is just a sound someone used to answer to, and the thing strapped to the chair in front of me stopped being a person when he became a target. Now it’s just a collection of nerve endings I'm methodically cataloguing for maximum yield.
The basement is old money—stone walls, high ceiling, the kind of architecture that was built to age beautifully and now hosts things that rot. Valeria's east coast estate has seven rooms like this one. I know because I've worked in all of them.
Different layouts, same purpose. Same drain in the floor. Same bolt anchors in the stone that accept the same gauge of chain. Consistency matters to her. She likes her suffering curated.
The paint on my face is still wet, still finding its grip on my skin. White first, bridge of the nose, across the cheekbones, precise, symmetrical. Black around the eyes, around the mouth, dragged up the right side where my scar fills the texture like the paint was made for it.
The man in the chair hasn't seen me yet.
The hood over his face is in place—black canvas, cinched at the neck, cutting out the world so completely that his other senses are already beginning to compensate.
I can see it in the way his head turns at every small sound, the way his fingers twitch against the armrests, the way his breathing has gone shallow and rapid with the particular panic of a body that knows something is coming but can't identify from which direction.
Good. That's where I need him.
Valeria is already seated. Settled, arranged, the way she always is.
She's been doing this more. Over the years, her attendance was sporadic—one in ten, maybe one in twelve, usually the high-profile jobs or the ones she'd specifically orchestrated for maximum suffering.
She'd watch the feed remotely for the rest, a queen reviewing footage from the colosseum rather than sitting in the stands.
But since I came back, since I walked out of that house in the mountains and handed myself over like a dog returning to its kennel, she attends almost every time. Especially the local jobs, the ones that keep me on the estate, within the walls of her cruel empire.
She sits in that ridiculous gilded chair and watches me work with the patient, proprietary attention of a woman reclaiming something she thought she'd lost.
I don't know if it's suspicion or appetite. Maybe both. Maybe she can smell the change in me the way predators smell wounded prey, and the watching is her way of testing whether the wound is healing or festering.
The red dress she’s wearing is deliberate.
Everything about Valeria is deliberate, but the dress is a statement, a reminder that she can sit in a torture room and look like she's attending the opera. Violence and elegance have never been separate things in her mind—they occupy the same breath, the same space, without the slightest friction.
The silk clings to her body like it was poured over her curves. When she slowly crosses her legs, the high slit parts with a soft whisper of fabric, baring the long, pale line of her thigh all the way to her hip.
She holds a champagne flute in her left hand, perfectly still, and watches the hooded man the way a cat watches a bird with a broken wing.
“Do you know why you're here, Thomas?”
“Please. I didn’t have a choice.”
“You gave names to the FBI.” She says it the way someone would note a stain on a tablecloth. “Four names. Three of them employed by me. Did you think I wouldn't find out, or did you simply not think at all?”
“They had my daughter, they said they'd—”
“Everyone has a daughter, Thomas. Everyone has a reason. The question isn't why you did it.” Valeria takes a sip. Swallows. “The question is what we do about it now.”
She glances at me. A small nod. Not permission. Instruction.
I begin.
The hood stays on.
That’s the first phase—complete sensory deprivation. No light. No spatial reference. Nothing for his nervous system to latch on to except the hard chair beneath him, the bite of restraints at his wrists and ankles, and the ragged sound of his own panicked breathing trapped inside the canvas.
I don't touch him. Don't speak. Don't move.
For forty minutes, I give him nothing. The human brain hates a void.
It starts filling it with ghosts—phantom touches, phantom whispers, the creeping certainty that something is inches from your face.
Add fear and knowing there are two monsters in the room, it becomes a clusterfuck to the brain.
“Please, Valeria,” he pleads. “I’m sorry.”
Neither of us respond.
His head starts moving, small jerks left and right, tracking sounds that aren't there.
His fingers clench and release, clench and release, his fingers desperate to feel something, anything, to prove he's still here.
His breathing accelerates, then catches, then accelerates again as the panic builds in cycles, each peak higher than the last, each trough shallower.
I’m crouched against the wall, watching while I switch my karambit from one hand to the other.
Valeria’s on her second glass of champagne. The woman’s just as patient as I am. Maybe even more.
By minute twenty, he's hyperventilating. By minute thirty, he's whimpering, soft animal sounds that press against the hood and go nowhere.
His nervous system is wide open now. Every receptor dialed to maximum sensitivity, every nerve ending screaming for input. The brain has spent thirty minutes starving while flooded with anxiety, and whatever I feed it next will hit with a violence that feels chemical.
We’re on forty-eight minutes when I remove the hood.
The light is industrial, harsh overhead fluorescents. He winces, moans, eyes slamming shut, head wrenching sideways, the light striking his retinas like a physical blow.
While his eyes are still clenched shut, I grip his wrist and jab the blade into his hand, cutting bone and cartilage before it hits wood.
His scream could peel paint, the sound ripping out of him raw and unformed, pure nervous system, no language left.
His body bucks against the restraints, and the chair legs scrape against the stone in frantic bursts.
Valeria uncrosses her legs, then crosses them again.
I was trained to read her the way snipers are trained to read wind—constantly, unconsciously, because misreading her means dying.
I've been doing it for as long as I can remember, mapping her moods through micro-expressions and breath patterns and the particular way she holds her glass when she's pleased versus when she's about to make someone bleed. It's not a skill I chose to develop.
It's a survival mechanism she installed in me, and I hate that it still runs in the background of my mind like software I can't uninstall.
So I know the screams have her attention.
Not the violence itself—the violence is the vehicle.
It's the sound she feeds on. The raw, involuntary music of a human being stripped past dignity, past everything civilized until all that's left is the animal underneath.
That's what makes her pupils dilate and her breathing deepen and her fingers tighten on whatever she's holding.
The screams are what Valeria Capello gets off on. They always have been. The blood is just the dressing.
I pull out the blade with a squelch, and his screams turn to sobs.
Thirty seconds. Forty. Just long enough for the nervous system to step down from the peak, for the brain to start reassembling. Then the hood goes back on.
The sound he makes when the darkness returns is a low, broken groan, the sound of a man who just learned that relief is a weapon too. That the mercy was part of the cruelty.
I learned that lesson young. The woman sitting twelve feet behind me is the one who taught it to me.
The cycle repeats. Hood on. Forty-eight minutes of nothing. Hood off. Light, sound, knife through the same bleeding hand—all at once, all amplified by the starving nervous system. Each round, his body is more sensitized. Each round, the pain increases.
Usually, they make it to the third or fourth cycle, but this one caves earlier, giving everything he has—account numbers, names, meeting points, the specific FBI handler who ran him.
Information spills out of him between sobs like water through a crack, because the human mind will trade anything, absolutely anything, to make the cycle stop.
I glance at Valeria, and her dark brown, almost black gaze falls on me. “Continue.”
I move to the second phase. Different kind of pain now—not sensory overload. Structural. This is the part that has nothing to do with information. This is the part that's for her.
I untie the hand that’s not bleeding with fingers half severed.
Thomas tries to jerk back, to fight, but I slam my fist into his face once—hard, precise, the crack of knuckle against cheekbone loud in the stone room.
His head snaps sideways, blood spraying from a split lip, and for one beautiful second, his body goes slack with shock.
Before he can recover, I grab his wrist and straighten his arm, locking it out to the side like I’m tuning a machine.
I find the shoulder joint by feel—the ball seated in its shallow socket, held in place by a net of muscle and ligament that were never designed to resist what I'm about to do.
I begin to rotate—turning it outward, slow and steady, like winding a dial past its limit. The shoulder resists. Every muscle fires at once, the rotator cuff clenching around the joint in a desperate, futile attempt to hold itself together. His body knows what's happening before his mind does.