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“Thank you.”
I hold her gaze for a moment longer before leaving.
There is a man hanging from a pipe in a basement not far from here, and I have some questions for him.
Chapter31
Evander
Ipace across the basement beneath a recording studio we own on the south side of the city, snarling like a tiger.
Hector Constantinou hangs by his wrists from a reinforced steel pipe, blood dripping from his beaten and mangled face, his shirtless torso turning purple from the bruises blotting his flesh.
My muscles ache. My fists burn from where the flesh was scraped off, smashing Hector’s ugly face over and over. I’ve been working him for the last hour, ignoring his pleas to stop, ignoring everything but his pain.
Hate flows from me like a flood, and I don’t know how to stop it.
I don’t know if I want to.
I tilt Hector’s chin up and make him look me in the eye. He’s a big guy, older, in his early forties. The kind of Kazan family lifer that would’ve been happy sitting around a diner eating gyros until he died of a heart attack at fifty. Except he ended up here instead.
“Who ordered it?” I ask him, enunciating each word nice and slow.
“Zale,” he whispers. “Zale set it up.” He coughs and spits blood onto the floor. I punch him in the gut for that, the fucker. “Zale ordered me to do it.”
I pace away and meet Lycus’s gaze. He’s standing near the steps, looking grim. The whole basement is soundproofed, with a concrete floor and a drain for this exact purpose. A dozen men have been kept down in this hellhole, and all of them have given me the truth sooner or later.
Hector was more willing to sing than most, except I wasn’t ready to hear his truth.
I’m still not. All I want to do is hurt him for hurting Camille. I want him to suffer a hundred times for every moment of suffering he caused her, but I need him to speak before he dies.
And I don’t think he’s going to last much longer.
I walk to a tool bench nearby and pick up a pair of pliers. I walk to Hector slowly and he sobs, big, ugly, heaving breaths as I wrap the end of the pliers around his pinky finger.
“Why?” I ask.
“He thought—”
I yank hard, breaking the finger, and he screams.
I give him a moment and put the pliers on the next finger.
“Why?” I repeat.
“Italians paid—”
I yank, breaking the finger. He screams and begs and gibbers something meaningless. I wrap the pliers around the next finger.
“Evander,” Lycus says. “Let him speak.”
“I’m not ready to listen yet.” I tight my grip, snarling.
“Evander.” Lycus is firm, but unyielding.
“Fine.” I release the pathetic fuck and step back. “Speak.”
“The Italians paid him,” Hector says through spit and blood. “He was already angry. He heard from Lady Anissa and Lady Sophia about your Italian wife, and after how things went down with Lord Vassilis, your uncle—”
