Page 32 of Sins of Arrogance (Syndicate Sins #1)

I wipe my hand on the paper towel, crumple it up and toss it into the biohazard trash bin on the other side of the room. A necessity for a room like this. We dispose of them directly of course, incinerating them in the furnace of the Shaughnessy Mob controlled waste management plant.

Violence is an integral part of mob life, but that doesn't make us barbarians. The people who make it into these rooms are often high risk for carrying infection. I have no more desire than the next man to be infected by blood borne pathogens.

Which is why I don a pair of puncture resistant nitrile gloves before moving onto more persuasive forms of interrogation.

Gjon moans.

I smile. "Strip him."

Brice doesn't hesitate, cutting Gjon's shirt and tactical vest until he's down to his pants. We keep the temperature in here a cool sixty-degrees and goosebumps immediately form on his skin.

My lieutenant goes through Gjon's things while I grab the custom forged obsidian surgical blade out of my private drawer of implements.

Cuts are so clean with this thing, they don't bleed right away and the pain takes just as long to register. Designed for slicing without killing (at first), it's perfect for prolonged, controlled pain.

In other words, interrogation.

Slicing a long stroke from the bottom of one of his nipples to the top of his hip, I watch the perfect, thin line form.

Seconds later, blood wells and he gasps out as the unexpected pain hits.

I nod. "You've heard of death by a thousand cuts?"

"Hasn't everybody? It's a myth." Gjon tries to look tough, but he can't hide the terror lurking beneath the surface. "Nobody can last that many cuts."

"This scalpel makes it possible. It is also very good for cutting away skin." Which is too damn messy for my taste, but this maggot doesn't need to know that.

I make another cut identical to the first on the other side of his torso.

This time, he shouts when the pain hits. "Motherfucker!"

"No desire to fuck my ma, but I am going to fuck you up." I pause and then smile again.

He flinches.

"You ready?" I run the flat of the blade across his chest.

"What do you want? I told you Besnik would pay."

No, he told me his boss would pay for his release. But now he uses the man's name. I already know he works for.

"I'm sure Besnik will be glad to know he gave his name up so easily to save another shallow cut to your precious skin." I would kill my soldier myself if he was this weak.

"You have to know who he is to ask for ransom." He sounds like he thinks he's being clever.

I wonder.

"Who is Besnik to you?" Why is such a useless piece of shite on a job with a man like Wraith?

No way did Ranger Rick pick this pissant for the mission.

A crafty look comes of Gjon's face. He's trying to decide if it's better to tell me or keep it a secret.

I help him out by cutting another line down his unbandaged arm.

"He's my uncle!" Gjon writhes making the chains he's dangling from sway. "I'm his nephew. He'll pay you a lot to get me back."

If that is true, I don't doubt Besnik would pay a high ransom for this man.

"Too bad for you, I don't need money. I want information and if you can't give it to me, I'll cut your still beating heart from your chest and send it to your uncle."

Gjon retches and I jump back, avoiding the vomit that explodes from his mouth a second later.

Weak. So damn weak.

"He's got the right tactical gear," Brice says in Gaeilge . "But it's flashy, not useful."

I flick my gaze over to my friend. He's holding up a knife with a neon green blade with hazard logos on it.

The so-called zombie slayer knife is overbuilt with crap materials and breaks under stress. The serrated edge looks cool but it's as effective as a babe's teething ring at hurting the enemy.

No question, despite this man leading , the real weapon with him is Wraith.

"You expecting the undead, or are you just terminally stupid?" My voice resonates with the disgust I feel at this incompetence.

I'd be doing his uncle a favor to kill him.

"It's a good knife," he blusters.

I don't bother to reply to that stupidity, but ask, "Who sent you?"

"I told you. My uncle, Besnik."

"Besnik's crew takes outside jobs. Tell me who paid for this one."

"I don't know. You think my uncle tells his men who we're working for? He's too smart for that."

"But you're not just one of his men." I don't call Gjon a soldier, because he's not. "Are you? You're family."

"Do you tell your family that kind of stuff?" Gjon sneers.

I cut him right across the throat. Just for fun. The wound is too shallow to hit anything important but he still squeals like a pig and yanks against his broken arm.

Well, feckin' hell. "He passed out."

Brice hands me the smelling salts without having to be asked. I wave them under Gjon's nose. His head jerks and his eyes open, only to fill instantly with tears. "Please, I don't know who hired the mission."

Mission. Like he's got a passing understanding of what that word means.

"You know something." Puffed up with his own importance, he's the kind of guy that earwigs at doors.

"All I know is that my uncle was speaking in Russian to someone before we got our orders."

More military speak that this maggot has no right to be using.

Russian?

"Did you hear a name when you were spying on your uncle?" I ask.

"Ivan."

I don't bother to say anything to him giving me one of the most common Slavic names for a man. I simply slice one of his nipples off.

"Ilya," he screams. "It was Ilya Darakov."

So, the little piece of shite knew all along who his uncle was talking to.

Ilya Darakov. Shite. A weapons dealer, Darakov does business with my father. But he does business with a lot of people in our world.

"I'm done playing. Tell me everything you know about the mission, or the next thing I'm cutting off is your dick."

Gjon is crying so hard, he struggles to the get the words out, but he manages.

"Something about a prototype gun. High-value. Ilya wants it and anything stored with it."

Darakov knows about the whisper gun? Considering the engineer who showed it to us the first time was Russian, that's better news than it could be. It's entirely possible Darakov was at the demonstration too and tracked the original tech down to us.

But it would have been better news if they'd been after something else entirely.

"Where did you get intel on our tunnels?" I ask.

"Ilya knows about them. Said they've been around for over a century. He told us about a building in Queens to watch."

Brogan isn't going to like hearing that, but believing the Bunker is so secret no other syndicates know about it is foolish. I always figured someone knew, even if I didn't before Brogan inducted me into the Shaughnessy Mob. Which is one of the reasons I upgraded security.

"We didn't think they'd have security like the Pentagon. We thought it was a tunnel that led to a basement the mob used to use as a hideout, not a whole underground facility."

Those words just might be Gjon's death sentence. Right now, the intel is limited to old memories and hearsay. I aim to keep it that way.

Whether I do that by killing him, or not, is undecided.

Too bad the little pissant is Besnik's nephew.

"That doesn’t explain how you found the entrance."

"Wraith made us stake out the building until he found a soldier to plant a tracking device on." He snivels some more. "It was boring as hell and he wouldn't even let us go out at night."

Everything Gjon is saying is reinforcing my view of Wraith.

"Who did you put the tracker on?" It has to be someone who comes to the Bunker regularly.

"I don't know his name."

"What did he look like?"

"He's slick. Wears suits. He has brown hair. Oh, and he carries a briefcase."

A pencil pusher? But which one?

Not many come to the Bunker, much less often enough to be tagged.

Wraith will know the name of our man, of that I have no doubt. What I don't know is if he will share that name.

"You think he's talking about that prick, Patrick Mahoney?" Brice asks.

Gjon's eye twitches when Patrick's name is mentioned. The little fecker has been lying to me.

"You know who it is."

"No." Now his eyes are so wide with alarm, the whites look anime sized. "I just remembered! I swear. He said his name into his phone when he answered it."

"Your tracker had sound?" I ask. What else do they know?

"No, but he I was on corner duty when he came a few days ago and I could hear him. The tracker stops working once he's inside the building anyway," Gjon offers desperately. "It took Wraith five days to find the entrance."

"Did it?" Sounds like Wraith would have found it without tracking one of our guys.

Which makes me wonder why he bothered.

"Don't know what the point of the stakeout and tracker was anyway," Gjon says petulantly, mirroring my thoughts.

Once I've learned everything Gjon knows about Ilya Darakov, I ask him about Wraith.

"Who is he?"

"Wraith?" Gjon sneers. "He's just a merc my uncle hires sometimes."

"Let me guess, the times you go out on a mission ."

"My uncle doesn't think I need a babysitter!" But Gjon's eyes tell a different story.

I switch the scalpel for a six inch long needle-tip Damascus stiletto. "Who does Wraith work for?"

Gjon eyes the knife warily. "He doesn't. He's a merc."

"Mercenaries have handlers."

"If he has one, I don’t know who it is. He and my uncle know each other."

"They're friends?" I ask. You can't trust a man you get to turn on his friends.

Ever.

"No. Uncle calls him a fatherless mutt. But he's useful."

I bet he doesn't call him that in front of Ranger Rick.

The infinitesimal change in Wraith's breathing tells me that he knows now what the Albanian gang leader thinks of him.

"From the look of things, Wraith is the only useful man your uncle has working for him."

"I'm useful! I told you everything," the maggot claims.

"That doesn’t make you useful. It makes you weak and a coward." I hit him hard enough to knock him out.

Regardless of the complications that would come with killing Besnik's nephew, I'm still deciding if I want to let him live. We have drugs that will make it possible not only to make him forget the past twenty-four hours, but to plant false memories.

He could be useful in recruiting Ranger Rick too.

When I glance over at my future mob soldier, his eyes flutter open, unfocused at first. Woozy. Then they lock on mine. Panic flares and banks just as quickly.

Under the influence of the drug.

Impressive.

But his blown pupils can't lie. The drug is still very much in effect.

"How long were you casing our building?" I ask.

How patient is he? And when did the Russian contact Besnik?

Wraith shakes his head like he's trying to clear it. "Little shit told you everything, didn't he?"

"Everything he knew."

"You think I'm going to tell you more?"

Doubtful. "Will you?"

He starts reciting Jabberwocky , one slow word slurred at a time.

Yeah, he's had black ops training alright. Even with the right drugs in his system, overcoming the conditioning he just triggered would take too long.

I don't have the patience when there's another easier man to crack in the holding cell waiting on me. "No. But the other member of your team? It's a safe bet he will."

I have Conor bring him in, dropping his unconscious comrade on the floor before stringing him up from the same chains.

Despite his time in the cell, the second man takes longer to crack than Gjon and I end up giving him a dose of the specialty drug to speed things along.

They deserve whatever I dish out because they broke into our facility, but that doesn't mean I have the patience to dole out the punishment now.

I learn very little more. His name is Luan. He's a high-ranking soldier which comes as a surprise and confirms that Wraith and he are basically bodyguards for Gjon so he can prove himself on missions for his uncle.

Luan also confirms the name of the client: Ilya Darakov.

The whole time I'm interrogating him, Jabberwocky is slowly repeated over and over in low tones from behind us.

"Is Wraith a member of your gang?" I ask when I'm sure I've exhausted his current store of knowledge.

Brice will interrogate both him and Gjon again at least twice more to make sure nothing has been missed.

Information is power and we collect as much as we can from every unwilling guest who visits my domain.

"No. Besnik hires him to watch over Gjon, but he'll never be a member of The Albanian Boys."

"Has he refused to be inducted?" If he has, he showed smarts.

Besnik is a piece of shite.

Luan laughs with overblown amusement. Another consequence of the drug. "He's a mutt. His slut mother fucked around while her husband was in prison."

The recitation of Jabberwocky stops, jerking my gaze from the now voluble Albanian soldier to Ranger Rick.

The look he's giving the man hanging from my ceiling says if Wraith's hands weren't strapped to the chair, they would be wrapped around his former colleague's throat.

Well now, the first step in turning Wraith into a mobster may have just presented itself.

"Is part of your mission to protect this maggot?" I ask him.

Ranger Rick's expression shifts from stoic to disgust. "No."

I nod. "Good. He's going to die. Do you want to be the one to kill him?"

"What about Gjon?" Wraith asks, no more telltale emotion reflected in his features.

"We're going to drug him and rewire his brain to remember the last twenty-four hours differently. Then I'm going to offer him to Besnik in trade for releasing all claim he has on you."

"Besnik has no claim on me," Ranger Rick snarls. "I'm freelance."

He's got enough conditioning to start reciting Jabberwocky rather than answer questions under the influence of our specialty compound, but it's still powerful enough to lower his inhibitions about displaying his emotions.

Otherwise, none of his anger would have shown and I doubt a single word would have passed the man's lips.

"You still work for him. My men don't take outside contracts or have loyalty to any syndicate but ours."

"Your men?" Wraith shakes his head again.

"Aye. Ranger Rick, you've got the right makings for a good Irish mobster."

"Not Irish."

"You know more about who your father is than this piece of shite?"

Wraith's face closes like a vault's door and I have my answer.

"If there's no strong Irishman in your ancestry, I'll be surprised. But Irish blood or not, you've got more in common with a strong Irishman than you do the maggots you've been keeping company with."

Luan squawks out a protest.

But Wraith? Spits in his direction. "You've got that right."