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Very faintly, the bass from the speakers on the club floor above us filter in through the copper piping, but other than that, it’s completely silent down here. Almost another world entirely.
Marco Alessi is the softest of the Montalto outfit, stepping back and letting Elia’s second-in-command, Giacomo Marelli, take over the bindings. I watch Marco study the junkie’s mangled fingers, the way his crumpled bones jut against the thin, translucent skin; his face pales the longer he stares, and I clamp a hand down on his shoulder, jarring him from the sight.
“Not quite a Renaissance painting, is it?”
He scrubs a hand over his dark head of hair, the tattoos lining his arms dancing with the movement. We’re all dressed in PPE, plastic scrubs and hairnets, except for him in his muscle tee and cargo shorts, as if he came here knowing he wouldn’t take part in the more gruesome acts of the evening.
“Fuck off, mick,” he snaps, jerking away from me. The ethnic slur rolls off his tongue so easily, I can’t help wondering how long he’s been waiting to hurl it at me, but I don’t bite at the bait.
He can call me whatever the fuck he wants; at least I don’t have a weak ass stomach.
The metal door to the basement swings open, Elia and his bald goon stepping inside just as it slams shut. Coming to stand on one side of me, opposite of Boyd on my left, Elia adjusts his cufflinks, gesturing toward the victim. “We wrapping up here any time soon? I’ve got people waiting on me at home.”
Gia slides the metal strap in place against the junkie’s ankle, placing a strap of leather between the man’s incomplete set of teeth, giving hiscapoan indecipherable look as he straightens and walks over. He holds out a dermatome with one gloved hand, and I take it, approaching the man slowly as he hangs upside down, watching me with barely focused eyes.
As a finisher, I don’t get to do a ton of torture; I’m mostly disposing, doing what the regular fixers can’t—and most fixers like to get their hands dirty. I got lucky with Kal’s weird moral compass, sometimes luring him into the darkness and other times convincing him it’s a bad place to be.
I don’t need to be convinced, though. I’m right where I’m meant to be.
Setting the dermatome on the wooden table near the body, I reach for a larger instrument. One that’s been rigged to act like a dermal punch, with a metal head the size of my palm. The junkie whimpers as I loom closer, running the tip of my index finger along the sharp, circular edge of the tool, his body stiffening as it prepares for what’s to come.
Despite the abuse he’s already taken at my hands, the purpled skin and broken bones, he still tries to fight me off. I watch him squeeze his eyes shut and press his lips together, watch his hamstrings clench when I’m only a whisper away.
None of it deters me, just like the fear of the girls he helped kidnap didn’t stop him from violating them. Selling them.
Killing them.
Rage makes my hands shake as I glare down at his naked form, his flaccid dick a deformed lump barely attached to his body. His dick was the first thing to go—when Boyd tracked him down to a homeless commune on the outskirts of Portland, living under a different name and trying to pass himself off as a veteran, we hauled him back here for questioning.
Unfortunately, Murphy’s organization must have been pretty tight-lipped, because at the point where we started breaking his fingers and toes, he still didn’t have anything to offer. All he could tell us was that he’d been paid a hefty lump sum to grab girls off the streets during their regular routines. They typically hit neighborhoods on the Maine-Canada border, aiming for younger teens, and then would drop them off at a hidden location in Augusta and pass them off as refugees, hoping no one ever came looking for them.
But they caught Mel instead, a fuck up that’d cost my brother everything. They’d been dating at the time, and after learning what the men did to her at the warehouse, how they stole from her in front of the other girls and the men beneath his command, Murphy went off the deep end.
He lost what little splintered pieces of his mind existed, launched himself off the cliff of depravity, sinking into the caricature of a psychopath that King’s Trace had already painted him as. I found him fucking corpses at his cottage, having taken his girlfriend so aggressively she laid passed out, bleeding below the waist on his bed.
And so I, then only a monster by association, did what needed to be done. I carved the evil from his body, dissolved his body in my bathtub, and dumped his sloshy remains into Lake Koselomal, praying no one ever entered it and came into contact with him.
Later, I cleaned his bones, loving the way it made me feel renewed—as if taking justice into my own hands was the only way to cleanse the darkness from my soul. A darkness I wasn’t entirely aware of the origin.
When Mel asked me to help her forget the horrors she’d seen, when she turned to drugs as an escape and spurred my dominant fantasies by letting me abuse her—a way to take back control of her body—I didn’t think anything of it. I just took over as my brother, taking his place so seamlessly, it was as if we’d been the same all along.
His boss came for me, demanding payments I didn’t have any knowledge of and accusing me of getting the feds involved. They burned down the operation and seemed to cut ties, but paranoia, once branded into your skin, doesn’t heal very easily.
I pulled out of Ivers International and holed up in the mansion with my deteriorating mother, who most of the time pretended I was the only son she’d ever had. She prayed hard for my soul, but I sold it the first time I agreed to do exactly what Ivers men have been doing for decades.
But it was never the killing that bothered me, never the destruction of men who deserved it that kept me awake at night. It was the knowledge that, unless I killed everyone on the face of the planet, I’d never be safe.
That’swhat keeps me working for the Montaltos and Stonemore, what keeps me searching for the people who ruined my family. There’s a sort of preparation you get from working for the mafia, an automatic air of danger that keeps people from messing with you unless they’re on your level.
Unfortunately for the junkie hanging in front of me, he’s no match for the Devil. Whoever he worked for didn’t teach him how to play a fiddle well enough.
Gripping the sharp instrument in my palm, I poise it over the skin above his knee and cock an eyebrow, pulling the leather strip from his mouth. Sweat drips off his face, his tears staining his hollowed cheeks, and the sight warms my insides. “You’re sure you don’t knowanythingelse? No locations, no names, no timelines?”
He shakes his head, thrashing, trying to dislodge himself. “Man, I fucking told you everything I could. You said you’d let me go—”
“Oh, you poor soul.” I pat his cheek, my voice saturated in condescension. He jerks back, nipping at my fingers. Chuckling, I shove the leather back between his lips, irritation flaring in my gut at yet another dead end.
Emphasis on dead.
