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I dragged my feet over to the stand and stared down at the tools. My fingers curled toward my palms, resisting the idea of so much as picking any of those objects up.
Mom tsked her tongue behind me. “Let’s get on with it, Luciana. It’s better that this pendejo gets a beat down than your beloved boyfriends, isn’t it? Of course, if you’d rather see one ofthemtortured, I can certainly—”
“No,” I snapped, fighting to keep my voice steady through the wave of horror her suggestion had provoked. I inhaled deeply, cringing inwardly at the dank smell of the room. “I’m just deciding on my approach.”
I could do this. Prod him for answers, show that I meant business—maybe I wouldn’t have to go too far to get him to open up.
If he was working for one of the other Devil’s Dozen members and digging into Mom’s business, he had to know the risks. He’d signed up for this. He wasn’t some innocent.
Even more queasy at the thought of drawing blood, I settled on a steel baton. My palm started to sweat against the cool metal as I hefted it and turned to face the guy.
I tapped the weapon against my other hand. “We could cut straight to the chase. Tell us why your boss sent you to spy on the Deadly Rose.”
A flicker of panic crossed the guy’s face. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s the deadly rose?”
So he was going to insist on making this difficult. I gritted my teeth and thought back to the lessons I’d learned from watching Mom in scenarios like this over the years and from my combat training.
I slammed the baton against the guy’s side just below his rib cage, hard enough to send pain spiking through his organs but not to actually damage them. I’d rather I never had to get to that point.
The guy jerked and cried out. Tears started to leak from his eyes even as his body went rigid with resistance. “Please, I swear—I have no idea what any of this is about. Can’t you—”
Another sharp whack on the opposite side of his torso. A jab right to his belly. A forceful smack across his knuckles, nearly cracking them.
With each spasm of his limbs and gasp that jolted from his lips, my nausea gripped me tighter. The only thing spilling from his mouth were frantic pleas of ignorance. It was all I could do to stop my own hand from shaking.
Lowering the baton, I clamped my free hand around his throat—not to strangle, just to warn and to lift his trembling face so his eyes would meet mine.
A sickly smell rose off of him—if he hadn’t pissed himself before, he had just now. But the stink wasn’t what made my stomach flip over as I stared him down.
He wasn’t just a “young man.” I hadn’t seen it before with his head low, his hair hanging forward to partly obscure it, and the defiant act he’d initially been putting on, but this guy was akid.
The face before me couldn’t have belonged to a boy older than sixteen. That was grit smudging his jaw, not a five o’clock shadow. There was even a bit of baby fat still rounding his not-quite-mature features.
It took all my willpower not to blatantly recoil in horror. What the fuck was Mom playing at here? She really thought thischildheld some crucial secret?
What if he wasn’t lying about having no clue what was going on? That possibility seemed increasingly likely with every second longer I gazed at his tear-streaked, agonized features.
My mind darted back to my conversation with Rafael the other night—to the young teen version of himself who’d been roped into a much smaller gang to appease his brother’s hunger for vengeance—and my nerves rebelled even more than before.
“What kind of work does your boss have you doing?” I said, firm but quiet. “In general, I mean.”
“I—I don’t do all that much,” the kid stammered. “Just hang around the house following whatever orders he gives me. Bring him coffee, clean his car, that kind of thing.”
“Did he tell you to go someplace else and take notes about what you saw, or anything like that?”
The boy shook his head frantically. “No. I was just walking home and these guys grabbed me and brought me here. The boss doesn’t let me in on anything interesting yet. He always closes the door if he’s going to talk business, shuts me out so I won’t overhear the important stuff. I don’t even know hisname—we just call him ‘Boss.’”
Nothing about his demeanor or the tremors that were shivering through his body suggested he was lying. Ihadbroken him already, and he simply didn’t have anything else to say.
I’d tortured a teenager a few years younger even than me. A high school kid.
I had to clamp my lips tight against the urge to vomit. Stepping back, I dropped the baton with the other torture instruments and spun toward Mom.
“I’m done here. I’m not going to keep tormenting some kid, especially one who seems like he doesn’t know anything and hasn’t done anything to hurt us.”
Fury flared in Mom’s gaze. She caught my arm and yanked me toward the doorway.
Only once we were in the hall with the door shut behind us did she start speaking, her voice taut with a vicious edge. “You never undermine me in front of a prisoner. Aren’t you already clear enough on the consequences of disobedience?”
