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I don’t like where this is going. I glance at my men, who all look ready to murder these motherfuckers at the slightest twitch of my hand. Soon enough, they’ll get that chance.
“They made me do it. I swear. I didn’t want to. But they told me if I didn’t, they’d kill my mother and sister, and she just had a baby…” He sniffs. His voice cracks.
I’m not supposed to feel sympathy for the enemy. But I’m also not supposed to find someone this young in a place like this.
“What did they make you do?” I ask quietly.
The boy bursts into sobs. “I didn’t… I said I was sorry. I kept telling her I was so, so sorry. But if I didn’t do it, they’d kill us both. So I had to. I had to do it.” His head suddenly whips to the side. “And they still fucking killed her. Told me I was now a man and laughed about it.”
The gnawing pit in my stomach is a combination of sorrow for the poor girl, whoever she was, and unbridled fury at these sick motherfuckers who are all glaring at the boy. One of them snarls something through his gag. A Fontinelli man smacks him upside the head and threatens to do worse with the butt of his gun.
Taking pity on Yakuza recruits was not part of the plan.
But I also don’t feel right forcing him to endure the same fate as the rest of the men here.
“Take him,” I order my men. “We need him for follow-up questioning. Leave the rest here.”
Mako does the honors and escorts the boy, still bound and now thoroughly cowering, out of the room.
“Here’s the thing,” I say to the rest of the group. “I came here pissed about the shooting. I have now seen the sick fucking shit you have all been complacent to. Not a single one of you can look me in the eye and honestly say you had no idea about what’s been going on here. Which makes you guilty by association or bad judgment or just plain stupidity, whatever the fuck you want to call it.”
Behind me, someone brings up a large can of gasoline and begins to splash it on the group.
Who, now that they can smell and feel how fucking serious their situation is, are now all too eager to tell me anything I want to hear.
Too bad. They should have thought about that while they had the chance.
“See, I have a kid. I’m always telling her to treat others the way she wants to be treated.” I pull out a lighter and flick the lid open. Shut. Open. Shut. Really, I’m just enjoying the way their eyes widen in absolute terror with each pass of the lid. “And her mother? Insanely beautiful, inside and out. So much so, that your leader made the dumb mistake of trying to sell her into slavery and ripping my family apart.”
I stalk over to them, still flicking the lighter open and shut. Open and shut.
“As you’re probably imagining, I’m beyond pissed.”
Open.
“And then I saw that room of yours. That sick, disgusting room that told me everything I need to know about you and your sick fucking minds.”
Close.
“So I’m going to practice what I preach. I’m going to do to you what you did to them.”
Open.
“And make this room your grave.”
Light.
I have no personal attachment to the lighter—I picked it up at a gas station on the way here. That’s why it’s so easy to toss it into the gasoline-soaked group.
I won’t be needing it back.
Fontinelli and LaGrezzio follow me out, but not before spitting and cursing at the screaming men as they burn. They signal for their own men to leave, and it only takes a minute or two for us to reach the open desert air.
The screams fade behind us. The darker side of me wishes I could listen to them a bit longer.
But we have shit to do. There are victims who need to be reunited with their loved ones and a Yakuza recruit who might actually be redeemable. I’ve got a family to hold and a woman to fuck the rest of my adrenaline into.
And there are more bodies that need burning.
