15. Dimitri
15
DIMITRI
Dorian is breathing heavily through his mouth. He can’t breathe through his nose because Virgil broke it.
All talk of restraint flew out the window when he saw Dorian smirking like the fucking douche he is, and he went straight for him, punching him twice in the face.
I let him, and then I pulled him back. “I need him alive, remember.”
He shook me off, angrily, but then he nodded and backed off, flexing and unflexing his hands.
Now it’s my turn. I have much gentler but much more creative ways to get someone where I want them. I’ve just about reached that point with Dorian. I can tell from his disorientation and the sweat dripping from his face as if he’s run a marathon.
Psychologically, he’s fucked up. I’ve barely hurt him. Technically, I have hurt him, just nothing like the brute force that Virgil used. Call it death by a thousand cuts instead.
“You get to choose,” I tell him softly. “You’re not going to live, but you get a quick death or an agonizing one. I want to know who the fuck is running these auctions, and how did they get in touch with you?”
He spits blood and glares at me. There’s still a tiny simmering note of defiance there. That won’t do.
When we bought this cabin, I had something very special made in the bowels of the cellar. What used to be an old-style storm shelter has become something so much more. It took a team of men and a special archeological architect to lead the team, but we managed to complete it.
I have only used it once, and then only for about two hours before the prisoner was screaming to be let out and begging to talk. The other times, I’ve only had to show it to people to make them talk.
“Fuck you,” Dorian says.
It’s comical because he almost asks it like a question, as if I should tell him whether going with that reply is his best option.
“Do you know what an oubliette is?” I ask.
“What? Have you gone mad? No.”
I nod. “Most people don’t. You know what a dungeon is, right?”
He manages to drag a defiant smirk from the depths of his dawning terror. “Ooh, you going to put me in your scary dungeon?”
“No. I don’t have one. I do have an oubliette. Want to see it?”
I untie his hands and feet, making quick work of the knots in the thick rope, and then I cuff his hands in front of him. He’s too weak to fight, but just in case. He hasn’t had any food for the last few days he’s been here, only drops of water. Enough to keep him alive but desperately thirsty. I drag him along, and Virgil follows.
Virgil hasn’t seen this. It won’t hurt for Virgil to see just how much of a bastard I am, and what I will do to protect me and mine.
We reach the door to the back room, and I kick it open, dragging Dorian with me.
The far end of the room has the door to the large basement, which has more options for interrogation if I need them. I rarely do. Not when I have my baby.
I stop by the grate and take hold of Dorian’s greasy head, swiveling it down.
“A grate?” He sounds confused, as well he might.
“No. That’s where you will be left to die if you don’t cooperate.”
He peers into the darkness below, and I help him see by clicking the light on my phone and shining it down.
Dorian swallows hard three times. “What the fuck? I can’t fit in there.”
“Yes, you can. You’ll be hunched, but you will fit. You can’t stand straight in it, and you can’t sit, or crouch. You can only hunch over. Let me tell you, it becomes hellish very fast. After mere hours? Your body is screaming in pain. Your heart will be skipping beats because the blood is pooling in your feet, and you can’t move around to help it flow. Hell, you might faint a few times. Perhaps vomit. You most certainly won’t be able to do a thing to stop the cramping agony seizing every part of your body. Oh, and there are rats, spiders, and God knows what else.”
He turns to stare at me, horror etched on his features. “You’re fucking insane,” he hisses. “Sick. What kind of mind invents something like this?”
“You give me far too much credit. I didn’t invent it. The French did.”
Virgil stares down into the hole, and his face pales. Yeah, take a good look, motherfucker. “There are a few medieval castles in Europe with oubliettes. Most had at least dungeons. There is nothing, and I mean nothing we could today do that the medieval mind hadn’t already invented. They were sick fuckers.”
Then, just because I want to mess with him even more, I quote Shakespeare’s line about Pontefract castle, which in those days was called Pomfret. “O Pomfret, Pomfret! O thou bloody prison! Fatal and ominous to noble peers.”
“ Jesus Christ .”
I glance at Virgil, who stares in distaste at Dorian, and no wonder. He’s soiled himself. Piss darkens his pants, and he gulps repeatedly.
“I’ll tell you everything I know; just please, don’t throw me down there. Let me live. I can help you.” He’s shaking now.
“The living part is negotiable and dependent on just how much you help us, Dorian. You turn out to be a great help, of course we will keep you alive. We aren’t mad men; we don’t destroy our assets.”
He nods feverishly.
“You tell me who this group is, and why they want Adriana. Tell us why you took Mila. You might also be able to help me track down a man who wants to buy Adriana before the auction even happens. You do all that, and you definitely won’t go down there. The rest is up for negotiation.”
“So if I tell you whose idea it was to take Mila, how we did it, and what I know about the auction, then you’ll not put me in there? It’s just a bullet to the head if I can’t help more?”
“Yes, you have my word.”
He nods. “T-t-they say your word is everything.”
Do they? Interesting. “They’d be correct,” I reply.
“Okay. Okay, well Mila was Ari’s idea, not mine.”
“You’re the leader,” Virgil cuts in.
“Ari’s my enforcer, and he has a lot of leeway. He said he had someone on the inside with a security team, and if he could get their guards in your home, he could pay them to look away while we took Mila. We just had to make sure your men got sick, and we had a contact who could do it.”
I glance at Virgil and any rivalry, brewing enmity, and issues poof out of existence. We have a fucking enemy in the camp.
“Who?” Virgil demands.
“I don’t know. All Ari said was that this guy would make sure the regular guards were sick, and then the newer, hired guards would be paid a lot of money to watch porn.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, we were set up,” Virgil shouts.
He kicks Dorian so hard in the leg the man crumples to the ground, sliding through my fingers.
Dorian rolls around on the floor, screaming and holding his leg. We ignore him.
“Who the fuck?” Virgil demands as if I know the answer.
It’s his house that needs cleaning out, not mine. “You must do a clean sweep. All the regular staff cleared out. Everyone,” I clarify. “The guards, the ground staff, the maids, get rid of them all immediately and if it’s okay with you, I’ll ask the woman we use to investigate people to do a deep dive on everyone.” I’ll actually ask Damen, but I don’t want Virgil to know that because while I’m at it, I’ll get Damen to investigate him. “Don’t make a move on your soldiers yet as it will give them a heads-up, but we need access to their devices, phones, and the like. We keep this between me, you, and Jacob for now.”
“Yes, of course. I need to find out who did this. I should shoot them all. Make an example.”
I flinch, thinking of the elderly lady who cooks for them. “You can’t shoot all your staff, Virgil. Let them go, and we’ll find out who did it and make them pay. It’s better that way. If you shoot them all, then we will lose the cooperation of the police department. There are far too many nonaffiliated people working for you to get away with killing them all.”
He blows out a long breath and nods.
“Okay. Ari said he had an in and you decided to take Mila; what the fuck for? What was the plan?” I drag Dorian to standing again, and when he starts to cry, I slap him, hard. “Focus.”
He gasps and sniffs, and then clears his throat. “We wanted to teach you a lesson. For before. Show you that we were also a force to be reckoned with. I was worried about it, but because Ari had already seen Adriana, and I knew when he told me about her that we could fulfill an order for the auction, it gave us leverage with a powerful group. Ari said if we had them on side, we had more power against the Bratva, and we should strike now. Adriana and the power she gave us with the auctioneers meant we thought we could take Mila and send you a warning.”
I consider what he’s saying. They thought Adriana would get them an in with the auctioneers, and that emboldened them to take Mila. What a chain of events they unknowingly set in motion.
“Ari’s theory was they’d help us, to some degree, if we had something they wanted. They are a strong organization, and they were going to send weapons as well as money and some extra men to help us bring the girl to them. The weapons were on their way, but their ship got delayed.”
“Delayed?” I ask. That doesn’t sound like some top-level group.
“Yeah, some international snafu. You know, that shit that was on the news.”
The only thing I can think of is the embargo of shipping containers that was on the nightly news a short while back.
“So their base is in the Middle East somewhere?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Okay. So where are these men and the arms now?”
“Still en route. It’s why it all went to shit. They should have been here ages ago.”
Fucking amateurs. They should have waited until they had the extra men and weaponry before they enacted the raid on us and took Mila and then Adriana. I make a note to let Damen know this information. His father-in-law, Stamatis Kantos, runs the weapons game in Europe, and I doubt they’d want ships heading to the Med with arms and men. It suits them to have the information, and it suits me if these auctioneers, whoever the fuck they are, take a hit.
“Do you know a man called The Prince?” I focus back on Dorian.
His sweaty face pales. I’ve shown him the oubliette, and yet his face paled at the mention of this man. That’s not good.
“Shit. He’s fucking insane. They say he’s a madman and very powerfully connected. No one has seen him in person, but there are tons of stories about him.”
“Like?” I ask.
“Loads, but one example is that he was so angry one day when an order he placed didn’t get fulfilled that he took the men who failed him, kneecapped them, gut shot them, covered them in honey, and tied them to posts and let the rats and flies feast on them.”
“Creative,” I drawl.
“That’s even better than your oubliette,” Virgil deadpans.
“What was the order that was fucked up?”
“A mummy.” Dorian shrugs.
“ What ?”
“He wanted a mummy. Supposedly, they say her hair holds special power, and he wanted her, but the men delivering her fucked up, and she got destroyed.”
“I mean, they are fragile,” Virgil says as if he’s a forensic archeologist.
This sicko wanted a mummified body because he believes their hair holds special powers and now he wants my Littleblue too?
“He wants Adriana,” I say to Dorian. “Have you ever spoken with him?”
“I didn’t know that. I was just told she was going to auction. Whatever they do with her once they take delivery of her is up to them. As for The Prince, I’ve had a couple of very limited conversations with him.”
“Where?”
“He posted in a group I’m in on the dark web sometimes, you know, with orders, stuff he wanted. I can give you the group details and tell you how to find it and the names of the people he chats with. The things he likes. The sick stuff he’s into. I can write it all down.”
“You just earned yourself a reprieve. You’ll stay here but you might be useful, so you live to see another day. I’ll even feed you,” I tell him.
He stares at the grate. “I’m not going down there?”
“No, not today, and not so long as you continue being helpful. I want you to sit down and start writing. I want to know every member of your group who is left in my fucking city. Names, addresses, places they’ll go to hide out. And I want Ari most of all. I also need to know your name in that dark web group, how to access it, and how to fool this Prince fucker into thinking I am you. Get writing.”
He sniffs but nods.
“One thing I want confirmed. You didn’t touch Adriana, did you?”
“No, never got the fucking chance. You got there before I could have my fun. I wasn’t going to fuck her anyway as the auction pays more for virgins, so I was only going to make her suck my cock.”
The rage in me bubbles to the surface with the way he casually talks about assaulting my Littleblue, but I need him alive because he might be the key to flushing out this mysterious Prince figure.
I use my self-control to not kill him and call the men back in from outside. “Feed him, water him, put him in the basement so he can’t get out but can lie down and sleep.”
“You promised.” Dorian shrinks back.
This man who brought terror into so many women’s lives is a sniveling little mess. “Relax, you’re going through the door into the normal basement room. There’s a bed, a toilet, and a light.”
“No rats?”
“I mean, I can’t guarantee it, but dude, it’s just like a built-in garage or something. Chill the fuck out.”
He nods and sniffs.
“Eat and get some strength up. I will need you focused because we aren’t done yet.”
I turn on my heels and stalk outside with Virgil. I want to get back to Adriana.