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“I’ll be back. I need to go and take care of some things,” I tell her. I don’t need to provide her any type of reason, but I can’t stop myself from trying to ease her mind.
"Wait!” she says quickly, just as I reach the doorway.
I stop and turn, looking at her, her eyes flicking between me and the door.
“How long will I be here? I’ve been here for hours, and it’s almost eight. I’m not sleeping here, am I?” I can see her exhaustion, the long day taking more out of her than I thought it would.
“I’ll take you home when I get back.” I answer her the only way I know how, and she nods in understanding.
“Okay,” she says, relief in her tone, and her shoulders relax. I don’t wait a second longer before I am out of the room and walking with pace to catch up to the boys.
* * *
“Why didyou bring her here so soon, Nico? Are you sure she can be trusted?” Sebastian asks me the minute I step into the meeting room. Dante and Carter are sitting with him around the table, everyone’s attention on me.
“She needs to go through the boxes. It is going to take weeks, and we need to get started,” I state nonchalantly as I take a seat at the table, not looking him in the eye.
“Bullshit,” Carter says, covering it like a cough, and I throw my pen at him.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Sebastian says, looking at me pointedly. “Right now, we have a bigger issue at play.”
“What’s going on?” I ask, feeling like I’ve missed something if he’s this concerned.
“We picked up a guy loitering around the compound. He has been here walking the perimeter since early this afternoon. When our boys questioned him, he just grinned at them like some psychopath and didn’t answer any of their questions. They tried to push him on, but he continued his circuit around the block, so they brought him in,” Dante answers, leaning back in his seat.
Having people walk around our compound is nothing new. People do it all the time.
“What’s different about him?”
“We’re not sure, but something’s off,” Carter says, and we all know what we need to do.
Five minutes later, the four of us stand in the basement of our compound in one of our holding cells. A white male covered in tattoos, in his mid-thirties, at a guess, is sitting on a chair, tied by his hands and feet in the center of the room. He is not yelling, screaming, pulling or tugging on the ropes. He is not panicked, doesn’t even look the slightest bit scared. In fact, just the opposite. He looks like the cat who got the canary, and it doesn’t sit well with me.
Dante and Carter start firing questions at him while Sebastian and I stand back and watch. He answers none of them. The boys grow increasingly threatening, asking him again why he is here, what he is doing, and he simply smiles at them. He is certainly not a lost tourist, and from what we can see, he’s fully coherent. Carter was right; something is off.
As Dante and Carter continue with the man, Sebastian turns to me.
“So why is the girl here again?” Sebastian questions. I am about to answer when the man in the chair whips his head to the side and looks right at me.
“What?” I jolt up straight, observing him for a moment. I look over his features, and as I do, something just doesn’t sit right with me. What is he hiding?
When he says nothing, I move toward him slowly, not taking my eyes off him. “What was that look for?” I ask him, and he gives me a sadistic smile.
“Nico?” Sebastian asks, stepping up beside me.
“Are you here for the girl?” I ask the man, but his eyes are now focused forward, staring at the blank wall in front of him, giving me no indication of his reasons for being here. I am suddenly feeling like we are dancing around a bee’s nest, about to get swarmed.
I look sharply at Dante and Carter while I roll up my sleeves. They nod and take a step back.
“What is your name?” I bark at him, and when he doesn’t reply, I hit him right across his jaw. He head jerks back, and I see him swallow, but his eyes remain on the wall, not looking at any of us.
“Who do you work for?” I bark at him again, and he remains silent. I send a punch into his nose this time, which breaks on impact, and blood flies from his face onto me. He growls then, the pain searing, so his mental toughness is admirable.
I hit him a few more times, my anger rising, because I know I didn’t imagine it. I have a feeling it has to do with Emilia or her father, and I don’t like it one bit.
After another hour of unanswered questions and a tremendous amount of pain, the man slumps in the chair. He has remained quiet as a mouse for the entire afternoon, and now he is barely conscious, but even so, he looks right at me. As his swollen eyes connect with mine, a bloody red grin spreads across his bloody mouth. He parts his lips, looking like he’s about to speak, but then his eyes glaze over, and I watch the life leave his body.
“This is a problem. He was here for a reason. Nobody sits through a beating like that and stays silent unless they’re loyal to someone else’s cause,” I say, looking at the boys, all who have the same concerned look on their faces.
