“KILL THE GIRL.”
It’s how my father chooses to greet me over the stained wood of his office desk, his whiskey colored eyes filled with rage. I adjust the cufflinks of my suit and mask my irritation.
The Morozovs have festered bad blood with the Costas for almost a century, fighting for dominance over the city’s upstate territories. After what they’ve done now, my father wants me to dispose of Anastasia Morozov, their eldest daughter.
“Patience.” I grit my teeth. “Is a virtue.”
My father grumbles.
He may have the brute strength necessary to be boss, but he’s blinded by vengeance and ignorance. Too set in his old-fashioned thinking and heavily disapproving of working with non-Italians. If it were up to him, the Morozov vermin would have been culled years ago. I don’t quite agree with his logic.
The Morozovs are worth way more to us alive than dead. No one is better than laundering money through law firms than the Morozov boss. No one knows the law like him. He racks up millions in tax fraud yearly turning illegal reserves into legal ones, and we can’t afford to lose his allegiance.
Even if I want to choke him with my bare hands.
I clamp down on my jaw. “Where the fuck is Luca?”
My father rolls his eyes, waving a dismissive hand. “Downstairs.”
Rhaegar, my bull mastiff and frankly, the only living being I can stomach, accompanies me at the bottom of the staircase as I stride down the hallway of my business condo.
Female moans echo through the guest room door before I swing it open.
And there my cousin is, fucking one of our servants. They’re both half naked, covered in thin sheen of sweat, and engaged in some sort of fucked up bondage experiment. But instead of arousing me, the sight just annoys me.
This is exactly why I have a business condo and personal one. Mixing business and pleasure is . . . uncivilized.
Luca curses, pulling out of her. The girl averts her gaze from me. Her back’s arched and she’s tied up everywhere, but she might as well be part of the wallpaper for me.
Luca gives me a flat look. “You should knock.”
A sneer pulls at my mouth. “You should shut the fuck up.”
I gave my cousin a week’s break after he returned from Italy before assigning him a task, and he didn’t complete it. I should slit his throat for incompetence, but Luca’s a sick motherfucker who’d probably enjoy the whole thing.
I gesture vaguely to the girl. “International pussy didn’t satisfy you enough?”
Luca shoots me a grin, zipping up his pants. “Nothing like what you get back home.”
“Stop fucking strays,” I snap, “and start doing your job. Untie her, so she can do hers.”
Rolling his eyes, he loosens the main knot at the base of her spine do that the rest of her limbs loosen, and then he lands a genial slap on her ass before buttoning his shirt and following me outside. The fucker bends down to pet Rhaegar.
“Don’t fucking touch him,” I snarl.
But Luca just scoffs, scratching Rhaegar behind the ear. “But he loves me. Don’t you Ray Ray? Good boy, good boy. C’mon, tell Torren you love me. ”
Rhaegar grunts contentedly in response.
I clench down on my jaw and offer my cousin a blank glare. Luca must finally get the fucking message because he straightens and sobers, with a look that’s as serious as an idiotic fucker like him can get. “He won’t speak.”
I scoff. “We’ll see about that.”
Sighing, Luca leads me down to the basement, opening the wide metal door. It’s darker than I’d like down here, usually why I relegate this kind of dirty work to someone else, but clearly an intervention is needed.
“Fair warning,” Luca tells me. “He’s a tough nut to crack.”
The air is kept stale and acrid by the basements poor insulation. I deliberately never fixed it. Most men fold from the simplest of things — like hunger or the cold.
In the center of the empty space, there’s a body tied to a single chair, a flickering lightbulb hanging directly above it.
If fear has a smell, this man reeks of it. Luca worked into him well, but not well enough. My little cousin’s gotten too soft. It’s probably all the time he spends in pussy that’s making him one.
Me? I love pussy. Worship it even. There are few things better than being inside a woman — few things better than sex.
Revenge is one of them.
And I’m about to feed on a lifetime’s worth of it. Once the man in front of me gives me the information I need.
“Lucky.” I glance up at my captive, flashing him a smile. The leather straps of the chair dig into the dirt covered skin of his arms, where angry red welts have formed.
Grabbing a chair from the corner, I let the metal drag across the floor, pulling it right in front of him. I slip off my suit jacket, hooking it onto the back of my chair before sitting.
Lucky raises his head slowly, gazing at me with his left eye swollen and coloured purple. “Fuck off.” He glares at me before spitting blood on my shoes. “Costa trash.”
I clench my jaw and fight the urge to snap the fucker’s neck.
“Come now Lucky,” I drawl. Sitting back, I gesture vaguely to the straps. “Those’ll come off soon. You know I’ll let you go. Eventually.”
Lucky freezes, peering up at me with his one good eye. He shakes his head. “Bullshit.”
I lean forward. “Why would I fuck around? You mean nothing to me.”
He stays quiet. I take my time rolling my dress shirt up my forearms. “Heard some interesting stories about you.”
Lucky pales, but not from my words. His eyes keep flitting to the corner of the wall where a spider half the size of my fist crawls.
“Lucky, Lucky, Lucky,” I drawl, unholstering my .52. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Untie me,” he sputters, bloodshot eyes zoning in on me. “Then we’ll see.”
Rhaegar barks from the entrance of the basement. My lips pull upward, because Lucky here wants to even the playing field. And it’s fucking hilarious.
“Oh, I have no interest in a pissing contest, Lucky.” I drag my gun from the crown of his head to his forehead. “And I don’t play fair. I assure you that if we got you untied, it would take seconds for me to get done with you. But then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy dragging this out. That’s no fun, now, is it?”
Confusion douses his features. “W-Why?”
“He took something from me.” The anger in my jaw simmers. “Something I can’t get back.”
“Just . . .” He splutters more blood. “Just fuckin’ kill me already.”
I tsk. “Come now, Lucky. We can’t let you off that easy. My cousin introduced you to more . . . how do I put it? Traditional methods. He just roughed you up a little, didn’t he?”
At the door, Luca gives me a blank stare, like he knows I’m an asshole. Like he thinks he’s somehow better than me. But being the lesser of two evils is bullshit. Evil is evil. And that’s what we are. What we both are. What you have to be in this world to survive. Cruelty runs in our blood.
I focus on my prisoner. “I’ve learned a few things myself. There’s this one the CIA likes. Rectal feeding. They grind up your food and force it up your ass. Not for actual nourishment. To break you.”
My lips tip upward. “And this other one . . . this other one’s my favorite. They lie you down on their back and dump a rat on your chest. Trap it with a metal pot and start to heat it from the top. The poor little shit has no option but to eat through your torso to escape the heat.”
Lucky’s still pale, but my words aren’t drawing even half of the reaction from him as they should. I’m already bored.
“Or we could just take a pair of pliers to your cock, since you don’t know how to use it responsibly.” I glance at Luca. “We can organise that one, no?”
Luca shrugs, faint amusement in his eyes. “Whatever you say, boss.”
Still, Lucky isn’t entertained. Sighing, I walk over to the wall and collect the spider. It crawls onto my hand gently, like a lazy mistress. When I walk back to Lucky, he’s completely pale. Frozen up. The spider dances across my tattooed knuckles as I bring my hand up close to him. A shiver racks his body, and he turns away from me, tugging against the restrains at his wrists.
“Wait,” Lucky sobs. “Please. Wait.”
Bingo.
“I bet she begged the same way,” I say, “but you didn’t listen, did you, Lucky?”
His eyes widen. And he’s reminded that he’s not the innocent little victim he’s playing anymore. Not by far. In fact, he’s filth. I want him to know this before he dies.
Turns out Lucky tried to get lucky with one of the Costa cooks. Against her will.
I could shoot him right now for the disrespect, but I’ll pull information out of his disfigured lips before he dies. He has information that I want. A penny that fell straight into my lap.
I figured out Lucky’s fear by chance. Who would’ve thought he was more afraid of a little spider than getting his cock crushed?
I speak calmly. “What. Is. His. Weakness?”
The spider crawls down my finger, inches away from falling down his neck.
Lucky shakes, pulling away until he can’t anymore. “H-his daughter! His daughter. Fuck!”
I grit my teeth, pressing the barrel of my gun into my temple as I run low on patience. “Tell me something I don’t fucking know.”
The spider is halfway off my fingers now.
“He has another one!” Lucky rasps, desperate, almost sobbing as he strains to get away from my hand.
“God. Please.” Another choked sob. “He has another one. She’s it. She’s his weakness.”
The room goes quiet. Now we’re getting somewhere. A smile touches my lips. “How old?”
“Sixteen.”
And it slips right off my face. Eleven years younger than me. I pull my hand away from him, depositing my little spider on the floor. The grip on my gun tightens. Sixteen. She’s young. Too damn young.
Lucky’s shoulders sag with relief. “Y-you’ll let me go now? ”
“Of course I’ll let you go, Lucky,” I say. “I’ll let you go. Straight to fucking hell.”
He doesn’t get time to react before I pull out my gun and pull the trigger. Clean through the forehead. I don’t even bother using a silencer, so the sound of the gunshot echoes in the hollow space and rings in my ears.
His blood splatters onto my face, the white of my shirt. Fucking great.
Luca curses. “Fuck, man, did you really have to do that?”
I pull a cigarette from my pocket. “He was annoying me.”
Luca walks over, glancing vaguely at the mess. “This is going to be a bitch to clean.”
Luca lights up for me as I glance at the slumped mess for a good few minutes. The cherry at the end of my stick glows red hot.
In the corner of the room, the spider returns to its web. I take a long pull from the cigarette as I make my decision.
I take a glance at the dead man with an ironic name. “Maybe I’ll see you there.”
❖ ❖ ❖
THERE IS A 5 YEAR TIME SKIP! THE FEMALE MAIN CHARACTER IS 21, NOT 16!
authorʼs note: welcome to TORMENT. iʼm so excited to see how this story goes! please donʼt forget to vote if you like this story and iʼll have more chapters up soon <3