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The man shifts in the dark and metal scrapes against metal. Not a ghost. And chained, too.
“Liar. The woman you sent to kill my bosses caused this.”
I can’t help but laugh; it’s that damn funny. Funny enough to overcome my pounding head, rough tongue, dried throat, frozen balls, and manacled hands.Thatdamned funny.
“Like I said, wrong guy.” Hell, wrong gender. Still, keeping him talking might get me answers, like where we are—unless this guy is a plant or some other kind of threat. Only one way to find out. “But we’ve got time, so tell me about it. How long have you been here?”
The Russian gives a humorless, dull, and pitiful laugh that quickly dissolves into tears, which then shatters into fits of coughing. Gunshot-loud, hacking coughs ricochet off the stone. This lunatic is close. Judging by the coughing, he’s directly across from me.
I don’t reach out, but if I did, I’m sure I could touch him. This space, I’m betting, isn’t very large.
The man stops coughing and, for a few minutes, I can hear only his wheezing, wet, careful breaths in the pitch blackness. His ribs are likely broken.
I wait for him to settle down before asking softly enough to evoke a response, “What’s your name? I’m Sandesh.”
“Dmitri.”
Dmitri. According to the preparation Justice and her team gave me for our now-defunct mission, he’s one of the guards for the sex-slavers Justice had called the Brothers Grim. Well, at least one of us deserves to be imprisoned and tortured here. “Where are we, Dmitri?”
“Mexico. The woman you sent…” He coughs for another minute before dropping back into his wheezing breaths and whispering, “She is the devil.”
My woman’s getting a reputation. I push thoughts of Justice away because worrying about her, about how she’s dealing with all of this, is excruciating enough to make my aches and pains seem minor.
Through the dark, Dmitri issues a deep and pained moan coated with the phlegm lining his lungs. “I’m dying. It hurts.”
“That’s been going around.”
“Sandesh?” He whispers my name, almost as if it’s an entire question and then takes long, labored breaths to recover. “Will you… kill… him?”
“Who?” I shift my aching legs and the shackles on my ankles clink.
Dmitri stays silent for long moments before expelling, “The man who begs but never means it. Walid.”
Great, I’m stuck in the dark with a poetic Russian. What are the chances? “Not sure I’m in a position to make that promise.”
Dmitri coughs again. His coughs sound disturbingly like sobs. “They will bring you out. Strap you… to a chair. The first time… you still have strength. Act then. Don’t do as I did.” He falls into long moment of gasps. The wetness of those breaths puts pressure against my own ribs. “I thought to satisfy him and live by answering his questions as he asked. He begged me to answer so that he could stop.” He laughs as if at another person, a dumber person who had done something naively amusing. His laughter erupts into coughs, then back into wheezing.
It’s so dark that wheezing is the best way to tell the guy is still alive. “Walid tortured you? Himself?”
“Yes. Him. He likes it.”
He must. It’s been weeks since Jordan. Not good. “Describe the room. The instruments. Tell me as much as you can.”
50
JUSTICE
Two hours after our plane touches down at a seedy, rundown, and secluded airstrip in Mexico, I stand inside the nearby hangar that houses the family jet, a Cadillac, and my team: Tony, Gracie, and Victor.
There’s lots of shifting of feet and eyes. Gracie’s landing on this dilapidated runway had been dicey, but our prospects of getting into the ranch are far worse. The mood inside this rickety metal structure that’s so dented and rusted it looks like a toddler having a bad day could kick it down is tense. And awkward.
Dada’s informant/boyfriend/baby-daddy Sean has come through on Tony’s plan to get Victor and Tony onto Walid’s estate. Problem is, the plan calls for them having to pose as mental-air-quotes-around-the-wordentertainers.
Turns out, Walid gets off on pain—specifically inflicting pain, then watching pain inflicted by men having sex. He’s some kind of torturer-voyeur. Guess I shouldn’t have expected the morals’ bar to be too high with this guy.
According to Juan, he has a routine. Torture captives. Down to business. Live sex show, anyone? That information was part of our research, but I’d never thought to use it against him. Honestly, I was so focused on getting both brothers at the same time, I didn’t give it a passing thought.
Tony, however, did.
