Page 31 of Kill Shot

Interrogation

Nico

“What is your plan?” Pablo’s voice was completely level, and his eyes were unreadable. It wasn’t the first time that he’d tied a man to a chair and extracted answers from him.

“Fuck you,” Nico snarled, testing his teeth with his tongue. None had been knocked loose yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Hindsight really was twenty-twenty. There were a dozen different places where he could have acted differently, where he could have struck and killed Pablo.

But those had all been before he allowed himself to be bound in Pablo’s office and interrogated.

Once that had begun, there’d been no real chance at all to escape.

In spite of appearances, Pablo was a professional in every sense of the word.

“I know you’re behind all this,” Pablo said coldly. “Your lies won’t work on me.”

“Fuck you,” Nico repeated, just now beginning to feel the edge of a headache coming on. The adrenaline had dulled the worst of the first few blows, but when that faded, he was just left with aching pain.

Pablo watched him for a long moment, then shook his head in disgust.

“And here I thought I solved all this shit years ago,” he muttered to himself. “Even now, Mattias won’t let me have a moment of peace.”

And just like that, Pablo had Nico’s undivided attention.

“ ?Qué chingados acabas de decir? What the hell did you just say?” Nico gasped, straining forward in his chair so much that he nearly lost his balance and toppled forward. Fortunately, the pair of guards flanking him grabbed onto the wooden back of the chair just in time, stabilizing him.

But Pablo didn’t say anything further. He just locked eyes with Nico, thoughtful and as cold as ice.

Tonight was the first time that Nico had been given a chance to look his hated enemy in the eye, to look upon the man who had robbed him of everything with his own eyes.

At dinner, he’d been forced to keep the strongest of his own feelings behind a mask, but now he could let them all seep out, and he didn’t hold back one bit.

“I suppose you might be telling the truth,” Pablo said at last, nodding slowly.

“Not with your words, of course. You haven’t exactly been verbose enough for that.

But no, I think that your body language tells a story all of its own.

I’m thinking that if you came in here knowing the full truth, then you’d be looking at me much differently.

You wouldn’t be staring at me like a wounded, confused boy that lost the man who raised him to a senseless act of violence. ”

Nico heard Pablo’s words, but their meaning was lost on him. He wasn’t hearing what he needed to hear. Was the man just fucking with him?

“I suppose I can’t blame you,” Pablo said with a tired shrug, rubbing his forehead and aging ten years. “You were young enough at the time. Must have been about twelve, I reckon. It’s unsurprising that you’d just buy the story that I’m sure Bolero told you about what happened back then.”

“A murderer like you, who killed my uncle and destroyed my family, should not be talking like that,” Nico spat. It felt good to finally say those words to the man in question, but it wasn’t enough to lessen the heavy sense of dread in his gut.

“Did I now?” Pablo raised his eyebrow. “Let me guess, I did it in cold blood too? Did I double-cross him too?”

Oh yes, he was definitely mocking Nico. He writhed in his restraints, but the bindings did not give, and the guards on either side just watched him, waiting for any excuse to put a bullet in him.

“Carl, go check on Seb,” Pablo said suddenly to one of the guards, then turned his attention back to Nico as the guard in question hurried to obey, barking a command into the radio he had in his hand as he rallied a few other guards to follow him.

Pablo returned his attention to Nico. “I don’t blame you for being angry. It’s only natural. I suppose it might even mean that you’re a dutiful son, but I really doubt that your uncle was the kind of man to deserve such loyalty. And I know for a fact that Bolero isn’t.”

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Nico snarled.

“I think not.” Pablo crossed his arms and looked down at Nico with an expression that was almost pitying.

“Or at least, not until I’ve told you the truth.

You see, your uncle had his own little organization, the Red Fangs, a small but dangerous crew working in the shadows for the New York Italian mafia.

That’s how I got introduced to Mattias. I wonder if Bolero even told you that much or if he tried to completely cover up his criminal connections. ”

“You’re lying.”

“Ah, then he told you nothing at all. Then it will come as a shock for you to learn that your uncle and I were actually in business together. Things went well for a while, but I suppose they went better for me. My organization and the Diamond Brotherhood prospered, while the Red Fangs went through some tough times. One day, Mattias came to me asking for a loan. Two million dollars.”

“And you shot him,” Nico hissed.

“Interesting. I guess that’s as simple a place as any for Bolero to lie.

But no, I gave him the money, and we went our separate ways.

However, things didn’t look up for him down in El Paso, not even with the sizable loan.

I wonder what he did with all that money.

” Pablo paused, shaking his head at an old memory.

“When it came time to pay it back, he refused in no uncertain terms.”

“And so you shot him,” Nico hissed once more, but his sense of dread was only getting stronger, and he was nearly shaking.

“And so he came up under the pretense of talking terms,” Pablo corrected him.

“But it really was just a pretense. He never intended to pay me back, and instead it was he who shot my wife, Seb’s mother, ending her life in a senseless act of violence.

She had just given birth to Seb a few months earlier and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. ”

“You’re lying.”

“No, I’m not, but I also don’t expect you to believe that right now.

You’ve believed in the lies Bolero fed you your entire life.

You thought that you could kill me to avenge your uncle and family, and in a sense, I suppose that is true.

I did kill him, after all. Once he shot my wife and ran to Mexico to hide, I followed him, and I dealt with him. ”

“You’re full of shit. Why haven’t I heard of the Red Fangs before?”

Pablo smiled humorlessly. “Because I am a very thorough man. After they shot my Roberta, I vowed that I would bury them so deep that nobody would ever remember their name. I’m glad to see I did such a good job that their leader’s boy doesn’t even know they existed.”

“You’re lying,” Nico snarled. A surge of strength filled him, and he eagerly reached for it. Anything was better than the uncertainty and doubt that was tearing him apart.

He wrenched his arm so hard that he thought he would rip his shoulder right out of his socket, but the bindings at his wrist didn’t give way completely. Pain sparked through him, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him now.

If he hadn’t been so completely engrossed in his own pain and rage, then he surely would have noticed Pablo nodding a signal to his guard, who stepped back and allowed Nico to struggle without any interference.

“Do you really think I’m lying?” Pablo taunted him.

“Your uncle was human filth. Maybe he was different at home, and maybe he was even a loving father figure for the few years that you had with him, but just know that everything you heard about him after his death was a lie, fed to you by a man that wanted to turn you into an instrument of violence. Mattias Lopez was a piece of shit, but Bolero is even worse, and he made you waste your life on his petty schemes.”

That didn’t make Nico stop or listen. He was too deep in the pain, too engrossed in the chance to escape and throttle Pablo Altamirano with his own two hands.

If he killed the man, then he wouldn’t have to hear this any longer.

For his entire life, he’d been consumed by a singular need, and he could feel this chance slipping away.

Because if he found himself no longer wanting Pablo Altamirano dead, then he didn’t know what he’d do with himself. It was a fate worse than death, or at least it felt like that in the moment.

“I should have gotten rid of the Black Cobra while I was at it. After all, it was Bolero who encouraged your uncle not to pay his debt to me,” Pablo said.

“I thought it was a mercy to just limit the damage to the Red Fangs because Mattias was the one who pulled the trigger on my wife, but that was clearly a mistake.”

“You should have killed me too,” Nico hissed, trying to convince himself that the tears in his eyes were because of the physical pain, not the emotional.

“I thought I did. Guess you managed to sneak away, you little rat,” Pablo said softly but with no softness in his expression whatsoever.

Without warning, the ropes around one of Nico’s wrists frayed too much and ripped apart. With one hand free, it only took Nico a few bloody seconds to scratch and rip his other hand free.

And when the guards reached for him, Pablo stopped them with a glare. “It’s alright. I’ve been his age once. I know what it feels like to want your pound of flesh, so I’ll let him have it. Nothing I can’t handle.”

And then there was nothing separating the two men, nothing preventing them from beating each other to a bloody pulp.

“I’m gonna make you pay for all that,” Nico snarled, rage driving him forward.

“And I’m gonna make you regret ever coming near my son,” Pablo shot back.

Nico’s fist connected with Pablo’s jaw with a brutal snap.

Regret?

Yeah, he had plenty. But Sebastian wasn’t one of them.

The only thing he regretted was not realizing his feelings for the boy sooner, and not stopping before breaking his heart.