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"I don't know anything else. I swear," he mumbled, his voice a rasp like he'd spent a year wandering the Sahara.
"Sandro!" Matteo yelled. "How's he supposed to talk if you don't water him?" Sandro hurried into the room with a water bottle in his hands, holding it to the man's lip so he could take greedy gulps of water.
He'd throw it up.
I'd seen enough vomit for a few days. "That's enough," I grunted, and Sandro pulled back to scurry to the very edge of the room.
"Kid’s loyal," Simon chimed in. "But damn do his balls need to drop a bit. What did he think this was? Playtime with glitter and sequins?"
"He's young," Matteo returned, and there was a light bite to his words. One I recognized as a man who thought about his future sons needing to harden up for the role they'd be expected to fill.
I immediately thought of Axel, because even though he wasn't my biological child, he was mine all the same. I’d raise him in the family.
Calla wouldn't like that, but I could already see the boy was born to do it. His head for numbers meant he'd probably end up working with Lino, but he'd be in the family, regardless.
"You were fifteen when you slit a man's throat," Simon pointed out. Matteo shrugged, but we both knew that he wouldn't raise his sons the same way his father raised him. It was only Ivory who had pulled him out of the darkness he'd been destined for, and even after he'd had to walk away from her, he'd worked to guide the business to endeavors that endangered innocent people as little as possible.
He had a list of rules, of tenets that weren't to be broken.
Not if you wanted to survive in his city, anyway.
"When will Miguel leave the city?" Matteo asked.
"Within the next week," the guy admitted and his eyes went down to his arm where it remained wrapped in a towel. I stepped forward, grabbing the edge and yanking it off. It took all the dried blood, all the potential for healing, with it, and fresh blood welled to the surface immediately as he moaned in pain. "Please! I swear that's all I know."
Stalking back to my table, I picked up my filet knife from yesterday. I normally took excellent care of my tools, cleaning them after every use, so the sight of the dried blood on the blade made me pause.
Then I touched it to his cheek. "Do you think I can carve out your eyeball before you die?" I asked him, tapping the pointed tip of the blade against the spot just beneath his eye.
"He's done it before," Simon said. "Pretty sure you've taken both eyes and an arm before someone died."
"Oh, that's right," I sighed. "Guess that means you'll have plenty of time to feel pain then."
He thrashed in the chair, and I used one hand to pry his eyelid open. As the blade approached his eye, any normal man with information would have confessed. But there was nothing but silence aside from his pathetic whimpering.
"Put him down. He knows nothing else. We got what we needed anyway," Matteo sighed dramatically, and I nodded to him. My blade shifted, swiping across his throat so quickly he didn't even have time to register the change in threat. I watched the life bleed from his eyes, the same way blood poured from the straight line across his throat.
When I turned back, I tossed the knife to Sandro. "Clean that," I grunted. "And put the fucking body and the chair in the incinerator. Call the cleaners to deal with the rest of the mess," I told him.
"Yes, Ryker."
"There's a good boy," Matteo said, sarcasm in his voice as he followed me out the door. "You in a hurry?"
"Fuck you, Bellandi!" I called, climbing into the Maserati while he and Simon roared their laughter behind me.
I didn't care, because I still had to go to the store before I could go home.
???
The stuffed wolf in my hands was adorable, with vivid blue eyes that echoed the fierceness of his face.
I could only hope it would do the trick for my Princess and keep the bad dreams away. I wouldn't tolerate Ines suffering in her sleep.
With the wolf in my hands, I wasn't sure what kind of mess I'd expected to walk into when I got home, but Dante showing off pictures of his own kids and sitting at the table with a coffee in his hands wasn't it.
I'd thought my hellcat would tear him to shreds for his complicity in what she still saw as her imprisonment. Instead, she'd apparently saved all that vitriol for me, because when I stepped in the door from the garage the smile died from her face and she leveled me with a fierce glare.
Dante sensed the change in energy, wisely standing from his place at the table and moving for the front door. "Bye Dante!" Axel called, and Ines peeped up from her little corner nook where she was pretending to bake cookies.
