Copyright © 2024 by GroveltoHEA
*** TW for references to torture, death, trafficking ***
When we returned to the shack later that evening after dinner, Stefania Cifarelli was not the defiant woman she'd been when we'd first entered the shack earlier in the day. She could barely lift her head up when we came into the room. When she looked at us, her face was streaked with blood and tears, her eyes filled with pain and fear.
"If I tell you what you want to know, will you let me go?" she asked, her voice still gravelly from the hours of screaming she'd done earlier. "If I swear to go far away? I'll let you keep tabs on me so you know I'm not getting involved in anything bad again."
"You'll tell us what we want to know anyway," Lucio said coldly. "The way we get there is up to you. I won't negotiate with you except to say if you spill your guts now, I won't spill your guts later. Tell us what we want to know and it ends with a bullet in your brain when we're done. After the fun we had this morning, that should sound like a pretty sweet deal to you. Otherwise, we can play this game for days. It's up to you."
More tears streamed out of her swollen eyes and she began sobbing. "Please let me go. I don't want to die."
"We're already showing you more mercy than you deserve by promising to end you with a bullet between the eyes," Lucio said.
"Tell us what we want to know," I demanded. "Who's running the supply chain? Who's moving the people being trafficked?"
"Graves and his motorcycle club, the Unholy Sinners, they moved the people for us. Took them from the shelter and took them to a distribution warehouse."
"That's nothing new," Lucio said. "We've had our eye on Graves for a while. I want more names, where they went from the distribution warehouse, who was in charge from there, purchasers, who kept the records. Everything or I start removing parts of you an inch at a time."
I had tasked Lucio with determining who was involved with finding purchasers and how the victims were being moved from point A to point B. We needed to know how the supply chain worked so that could be dismantled as well. I didn't ask him for updates, and he only told me that they were making progress and they had their eye on a man who was the newly-minted head of an MC who had the lovely name of Graves.
And now, Stefania was filling in the gaps, stumbling over her words to give us more names, routes, the recordkeeper...everything. It was a grueling three hours, but Santo had been taking names and they had someone I didn't know running the names through a computer program.
"So far, they all exist," the man said.
"We'll start rounding them up tonight," Santo said to Lucio and the other Heads who'd been watching the proceedings the entire time.
Lucio turned to Stefania. "Once we have everyone gathered tomorrow, we'll make sure they talk by giving them a demonstration on you of what we're capable of before we turn our skills on them."
"You promised you'd kill me quickly," she cried.
"No, I promised not to spill your guts if you spilled yours. So, lucky for you I won't be gutting you like a fish. I also promised that it would end with a bullet in your brain when we were done. I didn't say when we'd be done. But I promise it will eventually end with a bullet. I am a man of my word."
She was shaking so hard that I swore I could hear her bones rattling. "Something else...something else I want your promise on."
"I've made all the promises I'm going to make."
YOU ARE READING
The Body #2: Lucio and Janie
RomanceGinevra Di Paolo was betrayed by her husband, Lucio Feroce, on their wedding night, so she disappeared. For five years. Now, he's found her and he's back to claim her. He was expecting a sweet, submissive wife. Instead, he got...Janie.
