Chapter Seven
Marcello
When I hear about the attempted hit on Elio, I see red.
I have Dante take Elio to my private doctor so he can check him over. Dante felt Elio was fine immediately after the attack. Just a bump on the head and a few bruises, but I want him to get checked over to be sure.
Now I have work to do.
I need to figure out who the asshole is who came after my new husband. Because even if our marriage is a contract, when you come for him, you come for me.
I have a special place where I take people I need to have hard conversations with. The room is in the basement of a warehouse I own on the waterfront. I had it soundproofed three years ago and fitted with a drain in the concrete floor. The walls are cinder block, painted black to hide the blood.
In the movies, there’d only be one single light bulb hanging from the ceiling for dramatic effect.
But I prefer good lighting when I work on my guests, so I have bright fluorescent lights overhead.
The air smells like damp concrete, B.O., piss, and the sour tang of fear.
A metal table holds a selection of tools that I keep clean and organized.
Pliers. A hammer. A knife with a short, curved blade.
There’s also a blowtorch and a car battery with cables for my most stubborn visitors.
Gino Ferrara, the guy who sold the Hummer to the fool who tried to murder Elio, is sitting in a chair with his damaged hand cradled in his lap.
One raw nail bed is weeping right along with him.
His face is swollen and streaked with blood and tears.
He’s staring at the floor, too afraid to make eye contact with me.
Gino’s been crying for the better part of an hour.
The defiance he walked in with lasted about six minutes, which was longer than I expected.
He’s not a hardened thug like the men he sells cars to.
He makes money off of those harder men, but he’s not like them.
That’s why he broke fast. I only needed to take off one thumbnail and he gave me what I wanted. A name. Renzo Vitale.
Carlo and a few of my guys went to get Renzo for me.
Renzo is the one who’ll be able to tell me who put the hit out on Elio.
While I wait, I’m eating a bag of potato chips.
I missed lunch so I’m starving. Maybe some people couldn’t eat in a room as rank as this, but nothing really dampens my appetite.
As I eat, I have the urge to check in again with Dante to see how Elio’s doing.
But it’s best if I focus on the job at hand.
Elio is alive and that’s what matters. Whoever tried to take him out failed so now it’s my turn to even the score.
I’ve just polished off my chips when the door at the top of the stairs opens.
I hear heavy footsteps on the landing above and the harsh growl of Carlo telling someone to stop resisting.
Two of my men appear on the stairs, dragging a third man between them.
Carlo follows more leisurely, wiping blood off his fingers with a white handkerchief.
Renzo is bleeding from his nose and mouth.
He’s a big guy. Broad-shouldered, thick-necked, with the heavy, scarred hands of someone who has done physical violence for pay.
He has a shaved head and small, dark eyes that are darting around the room, taking in the chair, the tools, the drain, Gino’s mangled hand.
I can see the calculations happening behind his eyes.
He’s figuring out how bad this is going to be.
My men force him into a second chair and zip-tie his wrists to the arms. He jerks against the restraints once, testing them, then goes still. He looks at me. He looks at Gino. He looks at the table of tools. His jaw clenches as our eyes meet again.
Carlo goes to lean against a wall nearby with a smirk. “You won’t believe this, boss, but he says he had nothing to do with the hit on Elio.”
“No?” I glance at Gino who’s looking anywhere else but at me or Renzo. “Gino, did you lie to me? Did I bring Renzo here under false pretenses?”
Gino starts sniveling and his words are impossible to make out. He really should get into a different line of work. He’s not cut out for this stuff. He should go work at Home Depot or something.
I meet Renzo’s gaze. “Do you know who I am?” I ask.
Renzo’s jaw works. “I know who you are.”
“Good. That saves time.” I walk to the table and pick up the pliers, examine them absently, and set them down.
I pick up the knife. I turn it in the light.
I set it down too. I’m not choosing a tool.
I’m letting Renzo’s imagination choose for me.
Every second he watches me touch those instruments is a second his mind is filling with what they might feel like on his body.
Renzo glances at Gino with contempt. He hisses threats to the weaker man in Italian, and Gino turns his face away in shame.
“Now, now, you’re responsible for your own choices in life, Renzo.” Carlo shakes his head. “It’s not Gino’s fault you’re a dumbass who took a job you never should have taken.”
“Carlo’s right,” I say quietly. “You really fucked up, Renzo.”
“I mean, for fuck’s sake.” Carlo snorts a laugh. “You thought you could murder Marcello Foschini’s new husband and live? Are you mental?”
Renzo glares at us, his eyes glittering with anger. “I couldn’t say no.”
“Is that right? Even knowing who I am? You thought you’d come for my omega?
” Fury shivers through me at the thought of how close Elio came to death today.
The very thought of Elio’s bullet riddled body bloody and smashed in a wreck is enough to make me want to rip Renzo’s head from his body. “Nobody touches what’s mine,” I growl.
Renzo winces at the rage in my voice.
I take a deep breath. “I’ll be frank with you, Renzo,” I say coldly. “You’re not going to make it out of here alive. That’s just a fact.”
Renzo says nothing. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscles straining under his skin.
“I’m going to find out who hired you,” I say.
“That’s not something you can prevent. You probably think you’re strong.
That you won’t talk.” I shrug. “You’ll talk.
Everyone talks eventually. The only thing you get to decide right now is how long this takes and how much of yourself you leave in this room before you tell me. ”
“I don’t know anything.” His voice is flat. Practiced. I suspect he’s said those words in other rooms, to other men, and gotten out alive. He’s just dumb or arrogant enough to think it might work again.
Unfortunately for him, I’m not those other men.
When I don’t speak, he adds, “I have no idea who hired me.”
“I thought you couldn’t say no to the person who hired you.” I laugh humorlessly. “How’s that work if you don’t know who hired you?”
His eyes flicker. “I… I just got a feeling I couldn’t say no.”
Carlo rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, this guy’s not too bright, is he?”
“Fuck you,” Renzo snarls at Carlo.
“No, thanks,” Carlo says drolly. “I don’t fuck dead men.”
I sigh. “I need a name, Renzo. Who hired you?”
Renzo licks his lips. “I… I got a call. I never met anyone.”
“Last chance, Renzo. Who hired you?” I pick up the knife from the table. The blade is short and curved and very sharp. I keep all my tools sharp because dull instruments make everything so much more work.
“I told you.” Renzo’s voice is harder now. He thinks he can outlast me. Outlast the pain. “I don’t know names.”
I tilt my head, holding his obstinate gaze.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Renzo.
I’m going to ask you the same question, and if you give me the same answer, I’m going to take something from you.
A finger. An ear. Something you’ll miss.
And then I’ll ask again. And we’ll keep going, you and I, round after round, until one of two things happens.
Either you tell me the truth, or you run out of things I can take. ”
Renzo narrows his eyes. “I don’t know who hired me.”
“Okay,” I say quietly, pulling on latex gloves. “We’ll do it your way.”
I start with his right ear.
The knife is sharp enough that the first cut is almost surgical.
Renzo screams. It’s a raw, guttural sound.
It fills the basement and bounces off the cinder block, dying somewhere in the soundproofing.
Gino, in his chair a few feet away, begins hyperventilating.
Blood runs down the side of Renzo’s neck and soaks into the collar of his shirt.
The ear is still attached but barely, hanging by a strip of cartilage.
I wipe the blade on my pant leg and squat in front of him. His face is white. His breathing is ragged, sawing in and out through clenched teeth.
“Who hired you, Renzo?”
“Fuck you.” He spits at my feet.
I lift one brow. “Wrong answer.”
“Like I said,” Carlo mutters. “He’s not very bright.”
I finish the ear. It comes away cleanly and I set it on the metal table beside the pliers.
The sound Renzo makes when he sees it there, separated from his body and sitting on a steel surface, is not a scream.
It’s something worse. A moan that comes from the deepest, most animal part of a man’s brain, the part that understands on a cellular level that something has been lost that cannot be returned.
“I’m going to let you sit there and think about the situation you’re in, Renzo. No one is going to save you. This person you’re loyal to doesn’t give a shit about you. I can take you apart piece by piece until you’re dead, or you can give me what I want and this will be over.”
I give him ten minutes. I sit in a folding chair and I wait.
Patience is the weapon most people underestimate.
Pain opens the door, but it’s the silence afterward that breaks men.
The silence is where a man sits and contemplates what’s coming next.
The imagination is always worse than reality, and Renzo’s imagination has a freshly severed ear to fuel it.