"Are you sure Nina is okay with this?"
I'm beginning to regret my promise to include Nico in things. He asks too many damn questions, and he's had a nervous look on his face since he heard of my plans for tonight. In a twisted way, it pleases me that he's worrying about her. I can't think of her without feeling like I have a ticking time bomb nestled beneath my skin.
She's never had anyone to protect her. I don't know how her brightness hasn't been dulled by the people in her life who have hurt her. The men. Her uncle, father, and brother.
Me.
A growl sticks in the back of my throat, and Nico widens his eyes, choosing to stay quiet. Smart kid. Now I'm thinking about things I've been trying not to think about.
Just forty-five more minutes. Forty-five minutes that I have to remain put together and be someone who makes sense.
Nina took herself to bed an hour ago, completely unaware of my plans for the night. Her body curled beneath the sheets in a way that makes me want to trail my hands up the line of her hips, touch her not with the intent of making her feel good but maybe just because.
Maybe, somehow, to make her feel... safe.
That can't be how that fucking works. But then again, what do I know? All I know are the nonsensical desires that have been clamoring at the back of my mind.
Things I've never cared to do with a woman before. Things I would have laughed at before. I have never craved a woman's touch like I crave hers. Her lips on mine, my neck, wherever she wants to put them. Her small hands clutching my arm like I'm the one she wants when she's hurting. Her shoulder brushing my bicep as we're running and she's stumbling into my side a bit, off balance from sneaking peaks at me that she thinks I don't see.
Cazzo. This ridiculous woman has me dreaming about simple, mundane things like they're the most erotic acts that could be shared between two people. Now that I've tasted her, it's clear one kiss with her is more erotic to me than sex with another woman. And what the fuck is that? Once I get her out of my system, I'm sure I'll go back to normal. I'm sure I'll be able to enjoy the company of other women again.
Right now? That's not in the cards for me. It took a slightly embarrassing incident with a prostitute, in which things still weren't happening after several minutes for me to really consider what the fuck was going on in my head. That kind of thing will really make a man sit down and think. Fucking hard.
Because even buried in another woman, I only thought of her. Then I thought about how the woman beneath me wasn't her, and that was kind of a vibe killer.
Nico decides I'm not a good conversationalist at the moment and moves away, sending me a cautious glance that just makes me want to hit something.
Thirty-nine minutes.
I'm standing impatiently by the door by the time the loud rumble of the helicopter seeps through the walls of the house. Footsteps pound on the stairs, and Simo is by my side in seconds. Nico and Tommaso stand in front of us, serious expressions on their faces.
"If anything—"
"I know. If anything happens to her, you'll skin me alive. She'll be safe," Tommaso interrupts with an eye roll. "Sleeping Beauty up there won't even wake up until you're back."
"Are you going to tell her?"
We all look at Nico, the echo of his soft-spoken question hanging in the air. He bites his lip nervously but meets my gaze steadily. Unexpected warmth presses on my chest cavity, and I work to not let it show on my face.
"Do you think I should?"
My little brother's eyebrows shoot practically to his hairline, shocked I'm asking his advice in the eleventh hour. He doesn't know I've already made my decision. I want to hear what he has to say, his thought process regarding the girl upstairs and her safety.
"You know her, Nico. She likes you. You guys talk. Do you think she would want to know?"
He lifts his chin, responsibility making him stand a little taller. It makes him proud, I realize, to feel like he's accountable for someone. Someone who needs protection and care, who needs him.
"Yes. I think she would want to know."
I nod. "She'll know then."
"So, what you're saying is that she doesn't like me?" Tommaso butts in, and I roll my eyes, preparing to go.
"We will return in several hours," Simo says as way of goodbye, always a man of few words. Anticipation burns in my veins as we stride to the helicopter.
"You were already going to tell her."
He doesn't say it like a question, but I nod, and Simo stops me with a hand on my shoulder. "You're good with him. Nico. You've always been able to give him exactly what he needs."
Surprise renders me speechless for once. Simo doesn't speak much of the years we spent raising our little brothers, and he speaks even less when it's an encouraging word. My brother doesn't do emotions that way. He'd sooner give you a gun and a target than sit you down and have a heart to heart.
Well, since we're having heart to hearts...
"You touch her again in any way, you look at her wrong, you even mentally fucking visualize what it would be like to send her away from here, and I will fucking set you on fire."
Simo raises a brow, looking surprised for a moment at my vitriol. Even after countless conversations and arguments between us, he's still surprised every time I double down on my defense of her.
"She distracts you, makes you question your duties. You don't see it now, caught up with her charm as you are, but you will."
My fists tighten, and I work to keep my voice level. With Simo, if I get too emotionally charged, he'll stop listening. "And when has that affected anything? I'll tell you right now—it hasn't. You like your numbers, your results," I snap, losing it for a second, "and I have given you that and more."
"Santo," my brother nearly sighs, "don't get caught up in something that will not last. You may be able to perform your duties to this family and the organization now, but what of when she asks you to stop? What of when you feel she isn't compatible with this life any longer?"
"I already feel that way. Have I faltered once?"
Simo's eyes flash, his restraint evident in the slow pulsing of his jaw. And I know, despite the way he goes about it, that everything he's done is because he cares about me. I almost lose it right then when I realize that selfishly, I wish he wouldn't care about me at all. Simo's version of caring is cold, inhuman, and it's only served to make me feel like I'm suffocating since I was twelve fucking years old.
What he doesn't get, what he'll never get, is that I've led a life frustratingly characterized either by numbness, or the invigorating fires of anger. Battling the numbness every day, letting the anger push me to great, horrifying lengths but letting it move me nonetheless. Since that day when I was twelve... Simo stopped fighting. He stopped fucking moving.
So it wasn't a matter of if I'd ever chase after something more. It was a matter of when. I can't fucking stand here and let him convince me to stop chasing just like he did.
"You are so focused on feeling," Simo murmurs. "When our mother met our father, was she not the happiest she'd ever been for those first years? Did she not love—"
He doesn't bat an eye as I get in his face, my limbs suddenly trembling. "She was a child! And—" I choke back the rest of my words, spluttering in disgust. "What the fuck is wrong with you? You will not speak of their situation like it provides anything relevant to this conversation, or any conversation regarding Nina."
Simo blinks, and it's like I'm not looking at my brother anymore. "What do you think made her vulnerable to our father's advances? I don't blame her for what he did to her, Santo. But the facts remain. And what do you think drove him to hurt her the way he did? Lust? A version of love? Whatever it was, it was something altogether too human to result in anything besides their own destruction."
Thoughts of our parents threaten to open a great chasm in my chest, but what's worse is that my brother—the one person who lived with me through the worst of what they put us through—would liken their situation to mine.
Have I not spent my whole life already fighting to not succumb to the thing my mother made me to be?
"You are wrong about one thing," my voice rings numbly between us. I sound like him now. "Their emotions didn't destroy them. We did. It was us."
It was the wrong thing to say, and at the look on his face I push everything down, needing to draw Simo back before he's gone from me forever. But my chest hurts and I can't look him in the eyes now. "Answer me this at least. Why help me with this if you disapprove? What we're about to do is for Nina."
It takes him several moments, the wind from the propellers jostling his perfectly styled hair, and I stand there as the pilot no doubt wonders what the fuck we're doing.
"You are my brother," he simply says, but there's a ragged quality to it. "And anyone who does what that man did to a child deserves this. There are some things I hold as objective truths, and that is one of them."
Looking at my brother, I'm struck with so much frustration, hurt, and pity that it threatens to plow me over. I push past that emotion as always, knowing that if it did, I'd never get up again. I understand him more than anyone else will be able to, and still, I understand so little. The anger dissipates. The hopelessness left in its wake is so much worse.
I don't speak, gripping his shoulder, and something passes between us. Something tender and hurtful and ugly. How can the affections of the only family I have—the only people on this earth who will tolerate me—be something so awful? I tap my chest with a fist, just over my heart, and then tap his own. Understanding spreads in his eyes, and my brother gives me a nod. For now, we'll push past any issues.
I can only wonder how long that will last.
I watch the city disappear beneath us as the helicopter quickly gains altitude. Both of us are silent for the whole ride. I need silence, I always do before missions like this, and Simo knows that. It's not that I need to get into the right headspace—I already am. When I'm about to take someone's life, my one-track mind refuses to acknowledge anything else. I feel the need for it twitching at the tips of my fingers, my lungs aching like they've been dipped in lava with each breath.
I don't want to focus on anything else. I want to revel in this. I yearn for the moment I hold that life in my hands. I could exist in that moment for a long time, in that blissful stretch of time between the decision and the action. The diminishing of a life to nearly nothing and then the very last trembling breath.
No matter how many times I do it, it feels like this. Sometimes it hurts with how much I want it. Sometimes I feel like it shouldn't be this way.
I glance down at the eyes tattooed on my hand. Like every time I look at them, a chill shakes the parts deep inside me. Everything in me trembles like I'm going to collapse from the inside out—a building decimated by a wrecking ball, reduced to nothing but dust. After a second, it's gone. But the reminder is there, like it should be. Like it always is.
Something I learned when I was very young is that sometimes, the people who treat you the worst are the ones who know you the most. And that's why they do all the damage they do.
Hours, maybe minutes later, we stride silently down the dimly lit street, our boots thudding dully on the asphalt. There isn't a car in sight so we walk in the middle of the road, the small community around us a ghost town.
Simo stops, staring at a small brick house in front of us with a horribly overgrown yard and a roof that sags, almost like it's about to cave in. Disgust curls my lip. This is the place. What a shithole.
"You'll want to put your gloves on now," I murmur, so low that the night air almost steals my words.
But Simo hears me, methodically pulling on his gloves and slipping his arms through the cover he wears so as to not dirty his clothes. He looks at me, ready.
Soft affection for my brother surges in my chest, warring so confusingly with the jagged edges of hopelessness. Despite it all, I wouldn't want anyone else by my side right now. His eyes reflect a similar sentiment, in his own way that I've become accustomed to seeing since we were kids.
I start towards the house. It's time to get this fucking party started.
+
He takes longer to die than we expect.
By the time sunlight is seeping between the slots of the dusty blinds, Andrea Lorenzo has dirtied the sheets of his grimy bed with his own blood and vomit, but he is far from death. He is exhausted from hours of pleading for his life and thank fuck for that. The sound of his voice was making it hard not to end his life prematurely.
When I mentioned Nina's name to him, the only emotion I saw in those beady eyes was lust. Dirty, unrepentant lust. Simo had to hold me back as I lunged at him with my knife drawn. I would've gutted him right then.
When he said her name, I made sure his next breath was preceded by a mouthful of acid. As a result, he has endured severe corrosive injury to his mouth, esophagus, and stomach, with internal bleeding and perforation of his vital organs.
He hasn't said her name again, though.
I don't know if it's all the beer in his diet—his entire kitchen is littered with bottles—or just the way that the worst men seem to find ways to survive against all odds, but I'm beginning to get impatient with the longevity of this man's tolerance to torture.
In a few hours, if I'm lucky, the girl sleeping in the room across from mine will wake up. And I want to be there when she does. The acid should've done the fucking job by now.
I sigh, wiping my knife on the edge of a curtain. I'm not even slightly fatigued and figure it's time to start exerting myself to get some real results.
Simo looks at me knowingly. Even after the last several hours, not one hair of his is out of place. Even his gloves are clean, and it's almost absurd. This certainly isn't what he likes to do, but he's here because of me, and what happens next—that's solely on me.
He removes his gloves in one swift movement as he leaves the room, shutting the door behind him and giving me the privacy to end this man's life the way I deem fit.
Talking about his niece hasn't done anything, so I decide to have a bit of fun. His body is going to fail on him soon, but his mind is still there, frustratingly unscathed.
"Have you heard of Vlad the Impaler?" I begin, running my finger absentmindedly along the sharpness of my blade.
Andrea remains silent, his hairy chest heaving. Blood runs into his eyes so he has to keep blinking to keep me in his line of sight, and his face is beet red from his fever.
"No? Okay, let's have a little history lesson," I continue conversationally. "Vlad was a Romanian ruler in the 1400's. Great guy. Personally responsible for the deaths of more than eighty-thousand people."
Andrea starts breathing heavier as I cross the room. No doubt his pea-sized brain is struggling to process my words, but half the fun of talking is the anxiety and terror it induces. He will never know which word will be my last, which one will announce his fate and precede the plunge of my knife. The story I spin doesn't matter, but the fear it builds makes the whole thing more fun.
For me, of course.
"But what's important about Vlad is how he got his name. The Impaler. You see, Vlad liked to torture his victims in a very particular way." I stop in front of my victim, bending down slowly until I'm at his eye level. "He'd take a thick, splintered pole made of wood and insert it into their body, through their rectum. Then," I drag the knife down Andrea's cheek, almost tenderly, "he'd push it all the way through their insides until it came out their mouths."
"P-please..." he rasps, blood spilling from the open wound that is his mouth.
"It's genius!" I exclaim, moving away from his rank face, and he jumps. "I mean, just thinking about that makes you cringe, doesn't it? I'm almost jealous I didn't come up with it. Oh, relax," I roll my eyes at his sudden panic. "That's not what I have planned for you."
Andrea's eyes flit around as he tries to follow the path of my knife that I gesture with chaotically. "The point is, Vlad did this to thousands of people. So many, that he unintentionally got quite good at it. To the point that he'd impale his victims just right, and they'd stay alive for days, impaled on the stake, their organs scraping against it with each breath. In excruciating pain." I tighten the ropes binding his wrists, disgust filling me at the way he cries out. "Pain like you couldn't imagine. I do wonder how fervently his victims must have wished for their own death. I'm sure it was the strongest desire they'd ever felt in their lives, this animal thing that consumed them completely."
His eyes tell me he understands my point now. As of the last several hours, pain is familiar to him. But he doesn't understand the pain that he inflicted on Nina. The pain done to a child by the adult tasked with their wellbeing, choosing to hurt instead of love. To abuse instead of protect. It's a kind of pain that goes well beyond the skin.
Oh, I'm going to enjoy watching this man bleed.
"I'm good at what I do, Andrea," I murmur. "So good, that I can promise you'll wish you were fucking dead the moment I get started. And maybe you'll be so lucky." His eyes well up and his lip curls in agony as he processes the fact that I haven't even gotten started with him.
"There's one more thing," I almost whisper, feeling my pulse hammer in every inch of my body. It's almost finished. "Many people thought that the only way someone could commit such horrifying acts was because they had the devil in them. I've had people think that about me, too. And moments like these, when I'm breathing down the neck of a man who threatened to hurt someone who means very much to me, I do wonder how right they might've been."
The man's body shudders as he lowers his head in resignation. He wants death now more than he's wanted anything else. He's not sorry for what he's done, but it's okay. My job is to make him.
I grip his chin, yanking his face up so he has to look at me. And the face of a man who truly thinks he's looking at the devil himself is the last thing I see before my knife nicks a vein in his throat that will have him slowly bleeding out, with every breath feeling like fire.
In the meantime... I grab his hands, those hands that touched Nina when she was too young to even know what it meant. Hands that touched other girls, that touched himself while looking at them. I take off one finger with an expert flick of my knife, Andrea's howl of pain fading to white noise. Nine more to go.
Red paints my vision and the room around me.
---
Anyway...
So many vague hints about Santo's past! MUCH of it will be revealed very soon! I can't wait. Please VOTE and tell me your thoughts!!
- G