I couldn’t hurt myself. No. If I were to die, let it at least be with some honor.
The door swung wide open. The metal creaked, making me jump. I curled up in the corner, feeling tiny and my satin dress far too thin. Four hooded men entered that sort of cell, automatic weapons in hand, and a familiar face appeared behind them.
“Ready, Signorina Parker?” asked the skull-faced man. In that light, I realized he was blond and noticed he could be even uglier than in the darkness.
“What are you going to do to me?”
The man shrugged and ran a hand through his greasy hair, and I saw a diamond-encrusted watch glinting on his wrist. “What Don Vicari ordered, obviously.”
“So—so, am I going to die today?” Waves of cold and heat shook me. I wanted to be strong, to fight the terror, but it was hard when death was staring me in the face.
The skull-faced man laughed. “Not so soon, Signorina. You’ll be around here for a few more days. Today, we’re going to watch a little movie together.”
Days.He was going to torture me for days. “Where is Camillo?”
“Probably at his villa, comfortable, watching your last moments through the cameras.”
Before I could say anything else, the hooded men were pushing me out of the cell. Barefoot, I forced myself to walk down a corridor also filled with pipes. We walked for quite a while, and I noticed other adjacent corridors and realized that the one we were in seemed to have no end, which meant this wasn’t just a basement.
We must have been in some kind of underground facility. Far from eyes and ears that might witness my end.
Moments later, I tripped over my own feet and crashed to the floor of a large room.
The room was like the cell where I had been, like the corridors and everything else, yet in its center there was a chair and asmall screen on a table. One of the hooded men walked toward me and yanked my hair, forcing me to lift my face.
“Say hello to Don Vicari, Signorina,” growled the skull-faced man behind me, and I spotted a camera in a corner of the room, near the ceiling.
The pain formed a knot right in the middle of my throat. How could he do something like that to me? And Luca… How could Luca be okay with all of that? Had I been that stupid? Was their humanity just a trick of my mind?
Tears rolled silently down my cheeks.
“Take a seat, Signorina Parker.” The skull-faced man’s voice sounded like an invitation, but the hooded man’s hands on my shoulders made it clear it was an order. I was forced to sit down and watch the skull-faced man approach and move the mouse resting beside the monitor. When light replaced the blackness of the screen, I saw the image of a paused video. “What do you know about Don Vicari’s son, Signorina Parker?”
I trembled and swallowed the urge to scream, letting the tears continue to stream from my eyes. I replayed what I had heard in my head. “I think… I think he died.”
“You’re right. But do you know how?”
“I-I…”
“Don’t worry. Don Vicari has decided to be kind and clear up all your doubts. He wants you to know the whole truth before you die. Consider it a gift.” He declared, and I watched him spin on his heels and wave, smiling, at the camera in the corner of the room. “Ready?”
A hooded figure placed his hands on my shoulders again, gripping me tightly, as if to ensure I didn’t get up, and another held my head, keeping it fixed on the screen. When the skull-faced man hit play, it didn’t take me long to understand why.
On the screen, I saw a hooded man, wearing an overcoat that camouflaged him in the darkness of a house, and holding a suppressed pistol. I watched him move as only a predator would be capable of. His long legs stalking across the floor, moving toward a certain destination. The image shifted as the home camera that had captured it panned, and I shuddered when, suddenly, the view of a baby’s room appeared.
This camera was positioned at a perfect angle to the door, allowing a full view of the room and a very tiny baby in the crib. Probably a newborn. Perhaps a little older. I couldn’t tell. When the door to the room opened and the figure emerged like a menacing shadow, I could clearly see the eyes through the opening in the hood. The images were from a night vision camera, in grayscale, but those eyes needed no color for me to know who their owner was.
Camillo.
He looked at the child for a few moments, his head tilting slightly to one side, and without hesitation raised the gun and fired. I jumped in my seat, unable to take my eyes off it. The way the bullet pierced the baby’s skull and the body twitched slightly, the way a dark pool spreading beneath the tiny, lifeless body, soaking the mattress.
The images that followed confirmed everything. Camillo entered a room where a woman was sleeping and pistol-whippedher. The light came on and the filters switched to daytime mode, bringing color to the scene. He ripped off the hood and I saw the woman’s pleading gaze, before he dragged her into the room where the child lay dead.
The woman screamed upon finding her lifeless son, but Camillo wasted no time in throwing her to the floor. He showed her something—a video—that made her writhe in agony, before planting a foot on her chest and stomping her to death. Once, twice, three times, and again. Camillo crushed the woman with his feet, reducing her to a bloody pulp.
The skull-faced man replayed the images, and I felt them searing into my brain.
“Now that you know how terrible Don Vicari can be, do you still doubt your fate, Signorina Parker?”
