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I sliced the skin of his cheek, the knife moving through flesh like butter.
Pete screamed as blood poured from the wound, a flap of skin hanging down as I lifted the knife.
I waited for the screaming to subside. My mind wandered to Sienna as I checked my watch. She would’ve finished her workout by now, and she’d be upstairs drinking coffee, eating a bagel. If she felt like it, she’d be sitting in the sunshine.
Pete was quiet enough for me to speak now. “The practice was originally performed in a public place, with the condemned man being tied to a wooden frame,” I said, considering where my next cut should go. I didn’t want him to bleed out. “It was to humiliate the prisoner.” I pulled at his hand so it was flat on the arm of the chair. Pete tried to fight me. To no avail.
“This punishment was reserved for those who committed the most heinous of crimes,” I said, holding his hand flat. “And you, Peter, have committed a heinous crime by thinking you could have her.” My grip tightened around the knife. “By thinking you were worthy to fucking touch her.” I pressed down on his hand. “But your worst crime was thinking she was yours to fucking sell. For thinking you could continue to draw breath after that.” My knife went through skin and bone as I chopped off his thumb.
His screams bounced off the walls and his body started to shake.
“There was no specific detail of cuts to make in Chinese law,” I said overtop of his whimpers. “Therefore, executioners could get creative. They could slice off limbs. Cut away flesh.” I carved at the skin of his forearm, careful to avoid arteries.
“Contrary to the name, a thousand cuts were not made,” I said moving to his chest. “Not even the bravest of men could survive that.” I regarded the weeping man soaked in his own blood and excrement. “And you are far from that. It’s likely you won’t even survive ten.”
My knife moved through flesh.
“But I’ll try to make it last,” I said, my own blood singing with satisfaction.
Pete did not last an hour.
But leaving the basement covered in his blood gave me the renewed focus I needed.
I had a meeting in Desolation, a city that even the police avoided. Sienna had worked there. In The fucking Emporium. When she’d told me that first night, it had taken everything I had not to react.
Even then, only knowing her for a few hours, I’d been furious. Not that she worked in the club, I didn’t give a fuck about that, but that I’d been so fucking close to her and didn’t know it. I wasn’t a member of the club, but a number of The Ruin were.
The Ruin. I didn’t choose the name. I had no fucking clue who chose it. The organization had existed for longer than I had been alive. Vincentius introduced me to them when it became clear he was grooming me for leadership.
Though we were all members of various and sometimes conflicting families, we followed a strict code. Every meeting we had in Desolation was on neutral ground. No weapons. No blood was spilled.
Which was one of the many reasons I’d covered myself with Pete’s blood this morning. Because the mere thought of any of these men having come across Sienna while she worked at the Emporium made me want to rip them limb from fucking limb.
I couldn’t bring down a decades old peace treaty because of a fucking woman.
But fuck was it tempting.
“Sir?”
I glanced over to where Felix was standing in the doorway. His eyes flickered to Pete without emotion.
“We’ve got to leave for Desolation now,” he said, eyes still on the corpse.
I sighed. “Yes. Let’s go.”
The sooner we left, the sooner I could come back.
To her.
I left the body where it was.
It would be useful later.
Sienna
As with the first morning here, Cristian was gone when I woke up. I wasn’t sure whether he knew I wasn’t ready to see him and face my feelings for him in the cold light of day, or if he needed to get up at five in order to do ... whatever it was that mafia bosses did.
It hit me that I didn’t know anything about what being in the mafia really entailed. Laws didn’t mean anything. Loyalty meant everything. If you crossed them then you’d be in a shallow grave. That’s what the media had told me. If I was going to get evidence to get me out of here and put Cristian in prison then I needed to actually go looking for it instead of stomping around the house in silk dresses, getting fucked on the dining room table. I needed to find something that would end all of this.
The thought turned my stomach, and my mind was on Cristian the entire time I went through the motions of my morning routine. I gathered what I knew about him thus far. Not as a mafia kingpin but as a man.
