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I don’t believe in yelling or getting in someone’s face. This man will break eventually, and I’m not going to physically strain myself to make it happen sooner. When you break someone, you can’t break yourself in the process, so I stay in a calm headspace, mentally detaching myself from each of the blows I rain down on him.
The man falls to the floor, and I take the opportunity to kick him—breaking a few ribs while I’m at it. He curls in on himself but keeps his gaze fixed on me as if daring me to hit him again. Blood drips from his mouth as he looks up and smiles—
I kick him in the temple. Hard.
I may not believe in yelling, but a fucker isn’t going to get away with being a smartass in my interrogation cell.
“How much are you going to take, you son of a bitch?” I mutter, watching his eyes roll back.
He’s only going to be able to hold on for a little longer at this rate. I patched him up like Hale asked me to, but his stitches are torn, blood seeping quickly from the wound. The gunshot he sustained at the church is going to kill him if we don’t do it first.
“How do you know Grace Weston? What
did you want with Samuel Weston?”
“Not… talking.”
Stupid bastard.
I get down on one knee and take his chin in my hands, forcing him to face me. He still tries to look away, his eyes straining in their sockets as he struggles to look anywhere but at me. To pull himself into a place where he can forget the pain and who he is so that he can protect the secrets he knows.
It’s a tactic I’m intimately familiar with.
And unfortunately, he’s better at it than I hoped he would be. This guy is good. Well-trained.
“I’m going to break you,” I tell him calmly. There’s no threat in my voice, just simple truth. “But it’s up to you how much breaking I do. You can talk, and we’ll help you, or we can force you to talk and then kill you.”
“You’ll kill me either way,” the man heaves, spitting blood.
I nod. “You’re right. We will.”
His screams echo off the basement walls as I do everything I can to extract information from him. And just like I promised, I do break him.
But his body fails before his mind does.
With one final blow to the head, I knock him out, and can tell in a second that it’s over. His body is done fighting, pushed beyond its limits. He’s lost too much blood and sustained too much internal damage.
I stand up and brush my pants off, taking a deep breath. Pushing open the interrogation room door, I draw in a deep breath of air that doesn’t stink of sweat and blood and fear. I’ll have to take care of the body soon, but I need a minute first.
The safe house is mafia owned, one of many we own scattered across the States. As the Novak Syndicate has extended its reach, they’ve become necessary. They all look like normal houses, but they’re in rural, out-of-the-way areas, and they’ve all got deep basements and thick walls. Everything we need for our purposes.
In the kitchen, I turn on the sink and begin rinsing my hands, watching the blood that coats them drip into the sink and turn pink as it mixes with the water and swirls down the drain.
I breathe in through my nose, mentally storing away this interrogation in a place I’ll never have to revisit it again.
I’ve gotten good at suppressing memories, but the one I’ll never forget is the feeling of wanting to wash everything away, to be clean again. After months of torture, being pushed far beyond human limits—I didn’t want food, I didn’t want water.
I wanted to feel clean.
The funny thing is, I can’t even remember what it was like taking that first shower, having those first normal moments of being back. The early months all blend into each other, a gray swirl of darkness in my mind.
The kitchen door swings open, and I catch Hale’s reflection in the darkened window above the sink. My best friend knows more about what I went through in captivity than anyone else, but even he doesn’t know all of it. There are things no one will ever know.
He respects me enough not to coddle me though, and to allow me to do my job. I’m one of the best interrogators in the Novak Syndicate.
I’ve learned a lot about torture in my life.
“You want a drink?” Hale offers. He’s got a bottle of whiskey in his hand.
