Page 15

15

RAFFAELE

F lesh impacts flesh with a slick, wet shluck sound. Skin splits under the impact, bones creak and complain, and a muffled grunt of pain rises from the victim beneath me.

Not that I will ever call him that.

This twisted excuse for a human being put Adelina in the worst position possible, and I’m going to make him suffer for it. Since I rescued Adelina from that foul apartment complex, this scumbag by the name of Jim has been subject to lengthy and prolonged pain at the hands of Vito. Something I would have spent every second doing myself, but I couldn’t pull myself away from Adelina until now. She asked me to stay with her, and that is a request I will never refuse.

Especially not now.

But given that she’s resting after spending the day grieving her lost friend, I have enough time to finally get some real answers from this piece of shit.

Jim gurgles around his blood-soaked gag, pulling frantically at his rope bindings but to no avail. Vito is an expert at tying knots, and this fucker isn’t going anywhere tied upright to several wooden boards. I roll my head around my shoulders and deliver another fierce blow to his badly bruised ribs. Then another, and another. At this moment, he’s nothing more than a meat punching bag earning every blow from my anger and frustration.

Blood trickles down his torso from the hundreds of incisions Vito made all over his body. His hair is gone, badly shaved with scissors that knocked and scraped his skin. One nipple was lost to some form of torture, and the mangled mess of his pathetic, disgusting cock between his legs brings me minimal joy. He’s lucky he’s even still alive, given how strongly I desire to kill him repeatedly for every second he held my girl hostage and assaulted her.

I beat him until my shoulders ache and sweat rolls down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my pants. Panting, I deliver a final blow to the bastard’s blackened stomach and step back. Vito appears out of the shadows with a towel and hands it to me with a grim look.

He shares my anger.

While Vito has no emotional connection to Adelina, her capture and assault reflect badly on how capable he is at ensuring the protection of me and my people. Revenge is also dear to his heart.

I step back and allow Vito to proceed with the next step in Jim’s torture as I dry the sweat from my skin. Vito pulls a lever to the side of the device Jim is strapped to, and it violently tips backward. Jim whimpers in fear, his chest heaving with desperate breaths he’s barely able to get through his broken nose. Vito drops a wooden bucket underneath the man’s head, then pumps the lever so that he’s angled down and his head hangs below his feet.

Then Vito grabs a bottle of liquid from the nearby table, places a dirtied rag over Jim’s face and nose, and pours.

The desperate, gurgled sounds of waterboarding fill the small basement cell that will be Jim’s crypt. Not that the bastard deserves anything so elegant.

As Vito works, I lean back against my table near the door. The laptop sitting there pulls my attention, and I tap the spacebar with a heavy heart. A video begins to play, filling the air with Adelina’s panicked begging and sobbing in between the noises of torture. It hadn’t taken long to track down the livestream she had been featured on, and outside of torturing Jim, Vito was working on getting the entire black market site shut down.

Italian hands don’t deal in human trafficking.

It’s a line we have never and will never cross.

Watching Adelina’s torture is something I will never share with her. Her pain is her own in this regard, but I needed to know exactly what happened to her, right down to the last minuscule detail. Jim’s fate was sealed the moment he slipped something into Adelina’s drink at the bar, but to make sure his last moments on this earth are appropriately painful, I had to know.

The twisted laughter of Jim and his now-dead companion, Geoff, rises from the screen, sending waves of hot rage through my blood.

Jim may have been the one who drugged her, but Geoff was the one who assaulted her. I killed him far too quickly.

Tossing my rag onto the table, I slam the laptop shut and motion to Vito to bring an end to his torture. Vito empties the last of his bottle all over Jim, then pumps the lever to bring Jim back to an upright position.

His face is a deep shade of purple and his abdomen concaves with each desperate, meager breath he’s able to take in through his gag. Vito drags the soaked cloth away from his face, and Jim splutters as the gag is torn from his split, bleeding lips.

“Fuck!” he croaks hoarsely, coughing up a lungful of water. “F–Fuck…”

“Pathetic,” I growl, crossing my arms across my chest and gripping tightly onto my biceps to prevent me from pulverizing the bastard for speaking. “I’m only going to give you one chance to give me the answers I need, do you understand? One chance. Speak out of turn and I’ll rip off that pathetic thing you call a dick and shove it down your throat. Got it?”

Jim’s head sags forward, and his arms tremble from trying to keep it up. He nods as blood drools from his lower lip.

“This.” I tilt my head back to the laptop. “Who runs the auction?”

Jim shrugs. “I–I got no idea.”

I step forward, and Jim surges back against his bindings in a panic.

“I s–swear, man! I got no idea, that’s not my gig! It’s not!”

“Then whose is it?”

Jim sags back down, trembling violently. “Geoff ran all that shit,” he mutters. “I was just there to make a quick buck.”

“By drugging and assaulting young women? You think there’s any kind of honor in something as disgusting as that?”

Jim peers at me from under his swollen brow. “Ain’t that what all you criminals do?”

“Italian hands don’t deal in human trafficking,” I spit angrily.

“Some do,” he slurs, his head sagging back down.

Anger gets the better of me and I slam my balled-up fist into his gut, causing him to cry out in agony, then I crush his throat in my other fist and force his hazy eyes to meet mine.

“You'd better think very carefully about your next answer because insulting me and my family isn’t going to earn you mercy, you piece of shit.”

“S’fucked up, man,” Jim groans, tears swimming in his eyes. “I ain’t do nothing!”

“You drugged and kidnapped my wife . That alone is a death sentence, and you won’t be walking out of here alive. But the information you give me, if it pleases me, will earn you a quicker death.”

“Fuck, man.” Jim weeps, crumpling under my grasp.

Cold satisfaction curls in my gut, but it’s not enough. Adelina is going to live with this trauma for the rest of her life, and I can’t take it from her. All I can do is make sure those who caused it never hurt another soul.

“Tell me about your disgusting scheme.” Releasing Jim, I step back, and Vito hands me the rag once more to wipe the disgusting blood from my hands.

Jim slumps in his bindings, hanging like a piece of old meat. “I don’t know,” he sobs. “I just…”

It takes all my control not to lash out at him again. If he dies under my hands, I’ll end up with no answers. Especially since the car we traced turned out to belong to the dead man so there are no answers to be found there.

“It’s an easy gig,” Jim cries as he breaks down. “We get paid a shit ton of money to go to clubs and find hot, young men and women. It’s easy. We chat them up, slip a little something in their drink, and then take them to the apartments. We film a little something for the auction, and usually, they sell pretty damn fast. All we gotta do is stream it until we get a call.”

“Who calls you?”

“I don’t know, man,” Jim whines. “Some guy from the website. Different numbers each time. Once someone’s sold, we keep ’em drugged up and take them down to the bus depot. Sometimes they’re collected and other times we gotta put them on a bus. Either way, they get shipped off to their new owners.”

“ Owners .” My stomach recoils in disgust at the word. “People aren’t products.”

“Whatever,” Jim slurs. “I heard some of them talk Italian, like the folk at the bus station.”

“Just because someone speaks Italian doesn’t mean they’re part of the Mafia, you racist fuck!” Punching him doesn’t alleviate the disgusting tension inside me, but it does bring a small note of satisfaction.

He gurgles and chokes on a mouthful of blood.

“Did you ever fuck any of your captives?”

“You’ll just hit me again,” Jim slurs.

“Answer me, you cunt.”

“Sometimes,” he whimpers. “It was too hard to pass up.”

“The other girl.” Swallowing tightly, tension forces my teeth together. “The second girl you kidnapped. Did you fuck her?”

Jim’s gaze falls away from me.

“Did you fuck her while she was dying from an allergic reaction to the poison you pumped into her? Did you even spare a thought for her suffering? Even a second to think that she was a person and maybe you should get her help?”

“You know what, fuck you, man,” Jim snarls weakly. “Y’all organized criminals think you own the world of crime, but whatever, man. She was just a pussy with attitude so yeah, I fucked her, and I would have fucked that other bitch too until she was screaming and begging for me to stop, and I would have ripped her open?—”

I don’t lash out this time. A cold rage settles over me, cooling the heat of my anger. My pounding heart begins to slow and I lift my chin, gritting my teeth.

“Boss.” Vito touches my arm and then holds up a tablet displaying our captive’s banking information. “You gotta see this.”

“What the fuck?” Displayed in a long list is every large payment Jim ever received. Some of the amounts were over five hundred thousand dollars, chump change in my line of work, but that’s not what catches my eye.

The money comes from an offshore account displayed in a second, smaller window just under Vito’s thumb. The name jumps out at me like a dagger.

Pascal Castiglioni.

“He wouldn’t…” My eyes lock with Vito’s. “There’s no fucking way this is accurate.”

“It’s a locked account,” Vito murmurs. “Took everything I know to get this far, but I’ll keep digging.”

“Please. And Vito?”

“Mmhmm?”

“Not a word to anyone until we know for sure, understand?”

Vito nods and rolls his eyes slightly. His loyalty and secrecy are a given, but given the sensitive nature of this, I have to make sure. “Sure, but Boss… how does someone supposedly so deep in debt afford payments like this?”

Pascal wouldn’t deal in human trafficking, surely? Most of us follow unspoken rules, and carting people about like cargo is against one of the core principles that keeps us on top. I can’t stomach the thought that he’s involved in such a disgusting line of work.

And how does this factor into his debts? I provided a large sum of money when I married Adelina and allowed him into several drug supply routes. Still, Pascal insisted those drugs were for hospital schemes where he undercuts insurance companies to make a quick buck.

Something I found strange, but given how Adelina’s mother died from sickness, perhaps it’s a personal thing. So what’s the connection?

There are too many unanswered questions, and the last thing I need is to make a bullheaded decision that fucks things up even more.

The only thing I know for sure is that I’m done here.

“Your nose is broken, so you can’t smell it,” I say to Jim as he weakly glares at me. His false rush of confidence is fading fast. “But Vito didn’t waterboard you with water.”

Jim’s eyes widen and confusion shines like a beacon from them.

Digging my hand in my pocket, my fingers curl around a lighter. Pulling it out, I flip the edge and a single flame blooms to life.

Jim’s eyes widen.

“It was gas.”

With a flick of my wrist, the lighter flies through the air and lands against Jim’s chest, where it sits for a second before gravity drags it south.

A second is all that’s needed for the flame to ignite the gas soaking Jim’s skin. Flames burst over his chest, burning hair and skin alight as they sweep upward toward his gas-soaked face.

Jim opens his mouth to scream and drags the flames into his lungs the moment he takes a breath. He goes up like a candle wick, and his dying screams of terror are music to my ears. Jim thrashes with unexpected strength, but he’s fully ablaze within ten seconds.

“Nice touch with the gas,” I say to Vito, who smirks proudly.

“They never expect it.”

“Fucking cunt.” Watching that fucker burn alive in front of me for what he did to Adelina is satisfying, but it doesn’t erase what he did or how traumatized Adelina is. All I can do is remove her captors from existence.

“I want that tape scrubbed,” I say, tilting my head toward the laptop. “Every copy gone, you hear me?”

“Understood.”

“And set up a meeting with Pascal.” I watch Jim burn to a crisp, his ragged cries slowly becoming nothing more than waspish croaks as he succumbs to his injuries. “I’ve got some questions for him.”