Chapter 4
SCOURGE
You’re the reason pain is all I now know.
“Hey, boss,” Ricco said from the doorway as I hung up my last call of the day—another paid incentive to the morally righteous for a possible strategic opportunity—“the sottocapo just dropped off a gift for you in the basement.”
“Finally,” I said with a hint of impatience. I cracked my knuckles. Some good news at last. Hopefully, this led somewhere. “Our guest in good shape?”
“Not to walk.” Ricco snorted at his poor joke, immediately catching himself and straightening his slacking posture as I strode across my office. “Sorry, boss, yeah, the prisoner’s intact. He’s been readied for you.”
I walked up beside him and removed my cufflinks.
Blood too easily sank into every crevice, and these had been a gift from my mother.
I dropped the cufflinks into his palms, then undid my tie.
The blue silk with little goldfinches perched on branches remained as soft as when my sister gifted it to me.
“How old are you, Ricco?”
“Seventeen, boss.”
I clicked my tongue and handed my tie over.
As a new cugine in the outfit, Ricco was young, well-groomed, and still a bit too lanky for his age.
He was one of those pretty boys with matching skin and hair that girls fawned over before they grew up, but there was enough time for him to come into his own.
Life hadn’t beaten him down the way you’d expect with a deadbeat, abusive father like his.
Somehow, he still wore his heart on his sleeve, too kind, too earnest—something he needed to work on, or else this world would swallow him whole.
But he had a drive that couldn’t be learned.
It was what made the difference between a foot soldier and a capo in the making, and junior here had it in spades.
“You’re young, still a kid. One of the good ones. I know you and your mother feel I’m owed. I’m not. Don’t let what happened with your father define you. If this is the life you want, do it for you. No one else.”
“I am, boss.”
“Then you’ll need to learn to guard your thoughts, kid.
Keep that heart of yours, but don’t let anyone know.
Our dignity and the impressions we make define our worth, not only to our organization but to the world.
That starts with respect and hard work. We earn one and do the other.
Put both together, and the world is your oyster.
Leave one out, and the maggots will call your name. You got me?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed. After a tense moment, he nodded. “This is what I want.”
“Good.” My lips twitched as I clapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s go, kid. You’re getting your first lesson in hard business today.”
The smile that lit up his puppy face should have been annoying. Instead, a chuckle escaped me. His excitement was contagious, even if he didn’t know yet what he was headed into.
As we walked into the basement, instead of only the remaining odor of bleach from the last interrogation and the fumes of old cigarette smoke, I caught the whiff of fresh blood, like a shark to its prey.
“You’re right on time, as always.” Salvatore D’Amico sparked his lighter just as Ricco shut the basement door behind me. The boy stayed outside. Cleaning duty was more than enough for the kid’s first go at our world.
The lighter in Tore’s hands was another one of his anime collectibles, made of pure copper by the color.
His cigarette butt flared red before he snapped the lighter lid shut.
My cousin tossed his lighter up and pulled his breast pocket open to catch it.
Show-off. He flicked aside loose strands of hair dangling in front of his eyes, the motion practiced and as vain as he was.
It was a good thing he was a talented underboss because, family or not, he often made me want to flick him between the eyes.
“He’s not said much of anything yet, cugi.”
“Your charms not up to the task?” I asked.
“Thought you might want the honors.”
I did. I needed this like my heart needed blood. I wanted answers. I hunted for solutions. I needed to know where Persetta was to finally bring her home. My sister was soft and wholesome, with a smile that could melt even the hardest men’s hearts. She didn’t deserve the fate my father gave her.
Eight and a half months ago, the man I once called father sold her to the highest bidder at a silent flesh market auction the week after he found out she wasn’t his.
He sold the daughter he raised for nineteen years to get back at my mother.
The fucking bastard. He’d put us through so much shit, I should have known he’d pull something like this.
I should have prepared for it. It destroyed what was left of us.
My mother hung herself the next day. My sister had not been seen or heard from since. And I turned to patricide.
No matter how much I went looking, I never caught a whisper of Persetta.
Every trail went ice cold. Supposedly, money bought happiness, but I found it simply paid for a mask to hide pain.
I hadn’t been there to protect her, too busy picking up after my father’s bullshit and handling a dispute with the Russians to come home.
I should have dropped everything when my mother called.
I should have respected the fear in her voice, the quake in it stronger than ever, her words more piercing, but my instincts told me that abandoning the situation was going to cause an all-out war, which was far more dangerous than the latest fight in a string of them between my parents when she refused to leave him.
A war was staved off, but I came home to find my uncle planning my mother’s funeral, my sister missing, and my father calling the girl he raised a “two-bit whore, just like her mother.”
By then, my father had wiped clean all traces of what he had done. No trail to follow except crumbs on the potential involvement of the local chapter of the Hell’s Outlaw MC. It was all I had to go on, and so far it resulted in niente di niente—absolutely nothing.
He hadn’t stopped there. I came home to a void.
It was like Persetta had never existed. There were no photos of her left in the mansion.
Her room was cleared out. The art she designed on her walls was painted over, and her Stradivari violin was gone.
Her musical compositions and clothing were burned.
Everything that made her her was sold off or destroyed.
I shook out my fists. Yes, I needed this.
I had been wiping this shit-scum motorcycle club off the map since I killed Elio Iannelli and took over, trying to get answers.
My only regret was shooting the MC’s president and sergeant-at-arms too because, so far, none of the others I’d found seemed to know much of anything.
The MC enforcer tracked my steps into the room. He tugged on the restraints that kept him in the metal high-back chair over the drain in the basement’s flooring. His mouth opened wide, a grinning display of blood-speckled teeth.
“Come to play, boy?”
I huffed at his audacity. “We can call it that.”
Dressed down to his boxers and a thin tank, wrists and ankles clamped in metal cuffs to the chair armrests and legs, and neck bracketed in a collar, he was pathetic.
One of his mucky brown eyes was already sealed shut from the beating Tore or Jac—Jacomo Ales, one of Persetta’s guards—gave him, the skin swollen and discolored.
Dried blood crusted down his nose and stained his once-white tank top.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
The man spat blood. “A pretty gash in a suit?”
“Tore, weren’t you supposed to teach him some manners?” I raised a brow at my cousin.
“Nah.” Salvatore disappeared behind the space’s brick half-wall divider. The thump of the mini-fridge was heard. Then he popped back up with a beer in hand. “Can’t teach a porcupine to pull out its own quills. Want one?”
I shook my head. “But porcupines have such soft underbellies. His looks damn cushy.”
“He’ll split open like melted butter with the faintest touch,” Jac joined in. “I volunteer, boss.”
I crouched before my guest. “That would be too quick. I want him to feel everything. I want you to burn and ache and throb and suffer until you’re begging for mercy, knowing I won’t give it.
How long it lasts will depend on you. Tell me to whom my sister was sold, and I’ll grant you a swift death after the first ten minutes. ”
The idiot chortled, wheezing. “You don’t have it in you. Nothing like your old man.”
His one good eye flicked over my shoulder and stayed fixed there. I didn’t even have to look to know what he was focused on. My father’s leather butcher’s apron hung against the only door. The same apron he used to wear whenever he worked on one of his “guests” down here.
It was my choice to keep it there as a reminder of who I came from and what was left in his wake. My father was six feet under. I was alive and kicking. Funny how this stronzo thought that apron meant anything to him.
“You seem to be under the impression that I’m not sincere. So how about this? Just for you, I won’t stop until your heart does.”
“That’s certainly nice of you, cugi,” Tore added, chucking his empty beer can. “Jac, how about you pick the boss’s first little surprise for our guest?”
Jacomo chuckled deep in his chest, the hoarse noise making our guest twitch.
He pushed off his stool and strode calmly to the table at the far end.
He picked up a bone saw and tested its teeth.
He set it down and picked up a pair of prongs, snapping them shut a couple of times, the sound foreboding.
Satisfaction creased the hard lines of his face and around his gray-blue eyes.
Since Persetta’s birth, he had served the Iannelli family as her bodyguard alongside her biological father.
He was probably more loyal to her than to me.
“Let’s start with the blowtorch,” I said.
Jac tossed me the torch, followed by the butane canister.
A little screwing on for added tension, and the accessory was menacingly a foot long and a half foot wide.
The MC enforcer squirmed in his chair. I pressed the button down.
It popped and whirred as the flame bolted out in a blue, tapered point, stenching up the air with burned gas.
It was about to get a lot worse. I let the button go, and the room went quiet.
I turned it back on. Fear gleamed in the enforcer’s eyes.
“Let’s see how long your bravado lasts.”