It seemed to happen in a split second. Like he’d just appeared.
What an evil son of a bitch he was indeed.
He really was that.
He stood before me with a deck of cards.
Instantly I recalled the recruitment session. I was supposed to find the three red queens.
The four men who’d gone before me fell prey to his game of death and met their fate. Part of me knew then that I was dealing with a real bastard. A real nasty bastard,sick. As sick as some of the men I’d come across in my career.
You had to border on some level of true psychotic sickness to be like that, truly psychotic and evil. It was missing in the general human. Others, like this guy, had it naturally.
“Xander Cage. What am I truly going to do with you?” Giovanni asked. “What am I really going to do with you?”
He started shuffling the cards but like how I did it, with that flair for the dramatic. The wow factor that drew people in.
It was all about timing. If you shuffled them fast enough they’d create their own momentum and motion. Like a circle within a circle. He did it and the cards were moving around in a sharp circle.
Show off.
Fucking show off, showing me he was through and through the Vegas king with his cards.
He laughed when he saw me looking.
“Think you’re the only one with tricks,Ace?” He stopped shuffling the cards around and they filtered back into a stack in his hand. He kept back a few though in one hand. Stepping forward, he held up an ace of hearts and hovered it over my face. “That’s you. Ace of hearts. You stole my daughter’s heart.”
He next picked the ace of spades.
“You alerted me yesterday to the presence of the leader of the Spades. You could only know about people like that if you were somebody special. Very special. Not just an ex-marine. That would be too low level. Well below the paygrade.” He held out the king next and shoved it into my face. “That is me. I am the fucking king and I allowed you to come into my circle, infiltrate and screw with me.”
Screw with him?
Fuck, it wasn’t him who was screwed. It was me. I was the one who was screwed here. I was screwed from that first fucking night when I accepted this mission. Right from then I was a dead man signing himself away to shit.
I continued to look at him. He held up the last card.
The queen of hearts.
“Jia…” He breathed. “My little girl. You turned her against me. You… just the presence of you turned her against me. There were so many warnings I gave you and you failed to heed them. I told you she belonged to Armand and you still persisted. I told you to stay away from her and you still persisted. I told her I’d kill you if you continued your secret affair and that didn’t stop you either. Now she hates me. She doesn’t have to say it. I could see it in her eyes. She hates me. But she is my weakness and as you quite rightly alerted me, I have to protect her. So Xander Cage, talk. Who commissioned you to steal from me?”
I pulled in a sharp breath and blew it out.
Fucking bastard. He thought I was just going to talk because he’d been torturing me.
No.
Not at all. I wished Ethan could see me now. Granted the man would get me out, but I figured the sight of me would put him in his place for questioning my duties.
When he commissioned me for this mission he told me that Claire would do it.
Claire would do this too. She wouldn’t say anything and would rather die than cave.
I wasn’t about to make anybody ashamed of me.
“A clown,” I replied, at least my words were coherent.
He laughed. “A clown. That’s original. A better answer than the last guy who was in your shoes gave.A clown. When I was a boy in Italy, my father was the revered Vermont Marchesi. Still is. Even at eighty five years old. He passed the torch to my older brother. Know why?” He looked to me with expectancy.
