Page 14 of Crave Me

But in certain circumstances it proved necessary.

Just like now.

Especially now.

Nothing was off the table. No lines were too fucked-up to cross.

I’d do whatever it took to bring my boys back to me, to reunite our family.

Including breaking my code.

Just like I was about to do here and now.

I walked into the designated room where we were keeping our captive.

Ben Harvey.

The fool who was Elijah’s second and was still remaining loyal to him in spite of his boss abandoning him and leaving him for dead.

It was more than loyalty in fact. It was akin to cult mentality, his twisted devotion toward that undeserving filth, a disturbing sickness.

Well, I didn’t have time—or the patience currently—to undo years of that depth of indoctrination.

I stood against the open metal door of the bare concrete room in one of my warehouses that had been emptied out to prepare for the storage of new devices and technology from King-Tech. We were always updating and improving upon things, so this sort of thing happened on a semi-annual basis.

And at the moment, it was providing a quiet space free of interruptions to conduct this business before us.

Ben was bound to a metal chair bolted into the floor, a pool of his blood surrounding it. His fingers resting on the arms of the chair were broken and shuddering, even three of his knuckles crushed to pieces on account of a sledgehammer Dante had requested. His left kneecap had suffered the same fate.

Dante stood before him now, clad all in leather, including a pair of leather gloves outfitted with brass knuckles that had delivered scathing damage to the sides of his face and his ribs, the deep bruising prominent as he sat there with his shirt ripped open.

Ben bucked as Dante drew strategic, shallow cuts down his torso.

“I don’t… I don’t know!” Ben cried out hoarsely.

“Sure you do,” Dante responded stoically, making another incision. “Your hard-on for your former boss is just getting in the way of the truth.”

“He kept a lot to himself! You know that! Please!”

“Wrong answer.”

He went to make another cut, but a whistle from me pulled him up short.

He’d been so immersed in what he was doing that he hadn’t noticed me standing here.

He spun his knife in his hand and slid it into a sheath at the hip of his leather pants as he made his way over to me.

His eyes went wide as he took in the blowtorch in my hand and what I was holding in my other.

A jerry can of gas.

“I told you I’d handle this side of things.”

“And your efforts, although impressive, haven’t yielded any concrete results. A potential location he did give up proved to be bullshit. Caleb and Bastian weren’t there and we discovered that hovel of a safehouse had been abandoned for months.”

“It takes time to break a fanatic, Caspian.”

“Oftentimes it’s actually impossible.”

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