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He shook his head. “I can’t tell you that, not until you get what we need from the girl.”
Perfetta.I’d needed an excuse to hurt this motherfucker, and now I had one.
Aurelio was already holding out the tack hammer to me; he knew me well.
“You’ve got five seconds before this hand won’t ever be the same again,” I said, nodding to Sterling’s uninjured right hand as I took the hammer.
“Five.” I slammed it down in the middle of his little finger without pause.
“You fucking tosser,” he hollered. “You’re going to pay—”
“Four.” The knuckles of his right index finger gave with a stomach-turning crunch, barely audible above his roar of pain.
“Three.”
I kept going.
“Two.”
His screams echoed off the walls, swirling around and around until it felt like they might reverberate forever.
“One.”
I stepped back, waiting as tears rolled down his red face and blood dribbled from his open mouth. His hand was a mangled mess, and the other one, with two broken knuckles and missing fingernails, had certainly seen better days.
“Do you have a name for me, or should I start again?” I asked, nodding to his less-injured hand.
“Nathaniel… Sinclair.” He forced out the name between body-wracking sobs.
The man from the cemetery. The legitimate CEO of Windsor Crest Architecture.
“I told you what you wanted to know. Now, let me go, for mercy’s sake.”
Mercy? Was that what I should have been feeling? I wondered. Remorse for disfiguring the man and inflicting an enormous amount of pain?
As I stared at the man, I felt neither. No different than he would have felt had he been the one standing here with Heidi as his captive.
I shook my head. “You’re not going—”
The heavy metal door squeaked open, but by the time I’d swung around, I was too late.
Heidi’s eyes were as wide as saucers.
Shit.
She gasped as she threw her hands over her mouth, her gaze swinging back and forth between Sterling, Aurelio, and me.
“Bloody hell,” she whispered as her gaze settled on Sterling’s disfigured hand.
Her face behind her hands went impossibly paler, and she was shaking her head like she could will the scene before her out of existence.
“What are you doing down here,perla?” I asked in the calmest tone I could find. But it didn’t matter; she couldn’t hear my tone, and she wasn’t looking at my lips to know what I was saying.
She took a step back from the gory scene, her eyes still wide, her hands still over her mouth, and her breath coming so fast, she was going to hyperventilate
“Heidi!” I said loud enough for her to hear me, but no part of her seemed to register the sound.
When she took another step away, her back hit the hallway wall behind her, and then she did what any reasonable person who’d stumbled upon the scene she’d just walked in on would do.
