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This wouldn’t break me. It wouldn’t fracture everything I was.
I was a fighter through and through. Uncle Caden had made sure of that.
I’d fight this.
I’d fight the men around me.
I’d fight Mr. Pozzi…to the death. There was only going to be one of us still living and breathing on this earth when I got out of here, and there was no way it was going to be him.
The moment he’d snatched me off the street he’d signed his own death warrant, and I was determined to be the one to serve it to him.
* * *
ROMEO
I twisted the hilt of the knife on the palm of my hand, ready to inflict a fresh day of pain.
“Morning,” I greeted, kicking him in the shin to wake him up. He groaned, the sleep deprivation getting to him. It was yet another tactic that my father had taught me. We all needed sleep, no matter how ruthless and violent you were, your body had to rest, and if you didn’t allow that…it was torture in itself. So every thirty minutes, we’d wake him up, not allowing him to get enough sleep. It meant we had to work in shifts, but I didn’t care, not to get what I needed from him.
We’d stripped him down, leaving him in just a pair of shorts and the lashes marring his cheeks and back from my knife skills. I grinned as I admired my handywork, then drifted my gaze down to his left hand that was completely fucked thanks to Dad. He’d broken every bone possible in it, then finished him off by slowly dragging his nails out and laying them on his leg for him to see.
My dad was a pro at the mental and physical torture. He got to know the man he was breaking apart, got to know what was going to have the most impact. It was something I was slowly starting to understand—to watch for the reactions, to figure out whether they were masking their agony or putting it on. Torture was an artform that my father had mastered a long damn time ago.
“Ready for a new day?” I asked him, acting like we were going out for the day to shoot the shit.
His head lolled forward, his hair matted to his head from the blood on his forehead. That cut had been thanks to Rafael. He’d mouthed off and Raf had shut him up with the planter that was sitting on the edge of Dad’s desk.
I grinned, remembering how pissed Dad was because Mom had gotten it for him only last week. “We can never have nice things,” he’d said at the time. And he was right. Us Paganis destroyed anything that came into our path—and when I said everything, I meanteverything.
It was something I was trying to break, to not be like my father and his before him, but the more days I spent on this earth, the closer to that man I was becoming. I hated it with a passion I’d never felt before, but there was nothing I could do about it. Destiny was pushing me down this path, and I either accepted it or left everything behind. The latter wasn’t an option, it never was. So it meant I had to embrace who I truly was: a Pagani through and through.
My path had been forged since before I’d taken my first breath, so who was I to try and deny it?
“No, please,” he grunted. I snapped my head around, staring down at him. For a second I’d forgotten that I wasn’t the only person in the room. I’d been off in my own head again, something that I was doing more and more lately.
Fuck. I needed to stay alert. I needed to be on point, not off in la-la land.
“Did I say you can talk?” I spat, getting right into his face, pissed off at both him and myself. “The only words I want to hear come out of your scummy mouth are ones that will tell me all of that bastard’s secrets.” Spittle flew out of my mouth as I shouted at him. I was at the end of my tether, feeling like I wasn’t getting anywhere.
It was taking too long.
I was losing my shit. Something that my dad had drilled into me not to do when I was working on another human body. We had to be calculated, meticulous. But this…this was rage that I couldn’t control.
Too much time had passed. We were on the third day already.
I hadn’t seen Bailey for three days.
Three days where I had no idea how she was.
I’d left her there like a lamb heading for the slaughterhouse. But there was nothing I could do about it, not yet. I couldn’t go back until I had the intel to get her the hell out of there.
“Fuck!” I screamed. At my word, I heard several sets of footsteps but they were too late. I’d let the darkness take me over, let it make all of my decisions. There was no going back now. I grabbed the edge of his mouth, pulling at it as I slashed the sharp blade of my knife at the corner of his lips.
I stared in fascination as it sliced through his skin and muscle with so much ease it should have scared me. But it didn’t. I relished in the way the blood poured from the wound. In the way it flapped there when I was done. But most of all, I loved the horror in his eyes.
I needed him to fuckin’ understand that if he didn’t give mesomething…anything…then I wouldn’t stop. He’d lose his life in this room without a doubt.
“I’m done playing,” I told him, holding the knife at my side and hearing thedrip drip dripof the blood as it hit the plastic sheeting on the floor. “That is just the start.”
