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At the top of the stairs, she turned back, looking right at me with troubled eyes. Like a fucking coward, I looked away. It was too soon. Maybe it would always be too soon.
I headed for the parlor where Greta had already poured out three fingers of whiskey for me. Brute stood next to her, eyeing me just as warily as Greta was.
“Are you all right, Deo?” she asked while I tipped the drink back.
When it was empty, I stared at the glass, contemplating a refill.
“No,” I said, both to Greta and to the refill. I wanted my head clear for what was coming.
“She’s fine,” Greta said, seeing right through to what was eating at me.
“We both know it could have just as easily gone the other way,” I said, and she knew it was the damn truth.
If Sinclair had found the pin I kept hidden against the seam of my pocket.
If Heidi hadn’t been able to bullshit him.
If he’d given that asshole Jasper free rein with her.
I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to banish the images that had been rolling in ever since I woke up in that basement.
“You got her out of there before shit went bad, my friend,” Brute said, smiling sympathetically.
I had to admit, he knew firsthand what it was like to know bad shit could happen to the woman he cared about, but he’d never had to stand there, tied to a fucking post, forced to watch it happen.
I slammed the glass down on the coffee table. There wasn’t fuck all I could do about that now. But what I could do was make sure Dorian Sinclair and the asshole with the knife paid for their sins.
And when it came to meting out punishment, the devil had nothing on me.
***
The basement was cold.
We kept it that way deliberately. It was a natural way to slow blood loss, to draw out a man’s torture a little longer.
Goosebumps raised across my arms as I entered the room where Aurelio and I had done some of our best work.
He was standing in the room now with Cielo nearby. In front of them, Dorian Sinclair and the man named Jasper had been secured to chairs, their wrists and ankles cuffed, their hands and feet duct taped to the chairs.
“Dynamite thought you’d appreciate the wrapping,” Cielo said, nodding to Jasper who had an actual bow wrapped around his shaved head, covering most of the inked scriptures. I’d have to remember to thank him.
“Leave,per favore,”I said to Aurelio and Cielo without looking at them. This was between me and the assholes in the chairs. Their blood, their pain, belonged to me and no one else.
I could feel my brother and one of the men I trusted most both eyeing me, but I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself and Greta had already tried to talk me down. It wasn’t happening.
“Leave,” I said when neither of them had moved.
I saw Aurelio nod out the corner of my eye, and Cielo clapped me on the shoulder.
“Just holler if you need us,fratellone.”
I nodded, then stood there as they left the room and closed the door behind them. I walked over to the door and locked it, not taking any chance of Heidi walking in this time.
And then it was just me and the men who’d put their hands on her, the men who’d shackled her to a post in a fucking basement. Who’d touched her, cut her. And there hadn’t been a goddamned thing I could do to stop them.
I had no doubt about what that fucker, Jasper, would have done to her. I’d felt the combination of bloodlust and pure, blatant lust in the air, just like I’d felt not so long ago inEl víbora’scompound when I’d been there to help take that asshole down.
And while I hadn’t been able to stop Sinclair and Jasper in that basement, there was plenty I could do to them now.
