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STAR

IN TOO DEEP - SUM 41

SUMMER

“It didn’t have to be this way,” I sang as I hauled the limp deadweight along the shiny parquet floor of Midlothian Palace’s entrance hall.

Ignoring the lump's groans when we reached the grand staircase, I dragged him up each step, aware that his head cracked against the edge every time.

Sometimes, you didn’t have to work harder, just smarter.

“You could have just told me who he is.”

A garbled reply was his only response.

In all fairness, Prince Edward of Midlothian couldn’t speak freely right now. His face was taped up like the rest of him with cling wrap. He had a few air holes, but I’d squished his features up nice and tight to compress him as much as possible.

The human sausage continued moaning with each step and, by the end, I’d admit, I was starting to moan too—from sheer exertion.

“Never heard of cardio?” I panted when we made it to the midway landing of the staircase where it flattened out before going up to another mezzanine level.

He grunted in reply.

Me? I just planted my hands on my knees and tried to recover my breath.

I’d recently gotten back into the game, and torture was a work of art that required not only skill but a strong constitution. My ass wasn’t as fit as it used to be, and I was feeling that at the moment.

When my breathing was under some semblance of control, I turned to face the palace ahead of me. Beautiful, ornate, but the best part? It was currently a dead zone thanks to this clever piece of tech I’d borrowed from Conor—none of the CCTV were working, none of the alarms. The guards were watching rehashed versions of last night’s footage, and I had a good ninety minutes before the next man came on patrol.

Ninety minutes to make Prince Eddie talk.

Ninety minutes to break him.

I used to be good at breaking people.

Some people in the CIA called me The Nutcracker, and it had nothing to do with cracking code. But I had to admit, Prince Ludwig and Ke Jintao had held out on me.

This fucker here was the last person who could help me.

He had to talk.

I was running out of options.

Leaving the lump on the landing once I dropped down to grab a length of rope from my kit, I headed up the stairs.

It was an open mezzanine, but it suited my purposes.

With two landings that looked out onto the massive hall of the palace, it enabled me to loop the rope around one of the ornate balustrade railings and dangle it to the next floor before I tied it in a timber hitch knot to secure it.

Now that it was swaying vertically, I retreated to the prince’s side. Once there, I tugged on the rope then tied both ends into a square knot. With the gap in the middle, I looped it around his feet then tightened it.

With more brute force than I’d like—I was pretty fucking sure I popped a vertebra hefting his weight over the railing—I let gravity do the work for me and watched him dead drop.

If my calculations were wrong, he’d snap his neck and break his face if he collided with the floor.

Luckily for him, my math was never wrong.

His muffled scream was music to my ears as he came to a halt a bare inch from the parquet flooring.

After gently twisting my back to ease the strain he’d caused, I loped downstairs and kicked him in the junk to make him swing.

I hadn’t found any evidence that indicated he deserved a sprained penis, but my rep was from damage down below and I was sure the fucker had done something in his life to earn it.

“I can keep this up for a while. Turn you in circles and make you drown in your own vomit,” I taunted him. “That’s before I bring out the knives. You see, Your Highness, I need your help and you will give it to me.” I kicked him a few more times, watching him sway. “You could end it easily tonight. A simple overdose. No pain. Just death. Or we can play.”

This time, I had to go the whole nine yards. If it didn’t look like an accident as the others did, then it was tough shit.

I needed answers, and I could admit to myself that I was growing desperate.

But I would not bend.

I would not break.

Allowing my threat to sink in, I retrieved the photograph from my pocket.

For a moment, I stared at it.

Ever since I’d seen it when I was cataloging what I’d found in the motel room of the once-Prez of the Satan’s Sinners’ MC, Bear, it had been haunting me.

Bear had annotated on the back: United Brotherhood?

That was what I’d been trying to figure out.

I’d recognized three of them. Three random officials from three different countries.

One, a high-ranking politician in the Chinese Communist Party. Two were princes, easily renowned for their playboy ways back in their heyday. But it was the fourth one…

I recognized him.

I just didn’t know how.

No names were on the back. Either Bear didn’t know who they were or he didn’t feel the need to make a note of them.

I wished he had.

It would have saved me a lot of torture.

The photo wasn’t recent, but the men in it weren’t much changed from the corpses I’d left behind. They were sitting in a room together, heads dipped as they conversed. What was interesting was the camera angle—it peered through a gap.

The subjects hadn’t known they were being photographed.

“Think about it, Eddie,” I mused out loud as I studied the stranger’s face. “You can die peacefully or you can keep quiet and I can make you regret the day your mother gave birth to you.”

Something mumbled spilled from his lips. I grabbed a hold of him and stopped the pendulum swing of his body, then I ducked and popped two fingers into the holes I’d made in the cling wrap that fed air into his nose. Kinda gross, but torture was messy. I needed more than a couple of Tide PODS to keep my whites white that was for fucking sure.

As he lost those streams of oxygen, I felt his panic increase before I retreated, tugging the plastic wrap with it.

That was when I knew I’d done my job right—the panic didn’t abate. It surged .

“You try to scream or alert a guard, you’ll do more than choke on your vomit,” I warned as I carefully tugged on the gag I’d stuffed in his mouth.

He gulped down air the moment he could, then he pricked my hope like it was a balloon. Much like the others had, he rasped, “In our Brothers we trust.”

My jaw clenched as I accepted what I had to do tonight.

It sure as hell wouldn’t be pretty…

“If you want to play it that way, Your Highness, then play we will, but there’ll be no winners in this game. That’s a promise.”

An hour later, a bare fifteen minutes before the guard was due to patrol this section of the palace, Prince Eddie finally gave me what I’d been seeking.

Anton Kuznetsov.

At last , I had a fucking name.

Now, I just had to figure out how the hell I knew him.