Page 29 of Broken Vows

He’s not sorry at all. And I’ve seen his hands. I know how this goes. If I’m pulp, I can’t help Carla.If I ever see her again.

I go limp like a rag doll, quivering uncontrollably. This could have been my baby sister. Somehow, the thought calms me. It’s me, not Carla. She left with Vincenzo and Papa. Her bodyguard waited for her. He will protect her. I’m doing this so she doesn’t have to. My body stills, even if it’s only superficial.

Franco senses my capitulation, because he lifts his weight off me, and his goons loosen their grip.

“Tie her up in any case. I don’t need her jerking around.”

I don’t know what’s coming, but it’s going to hurt. Instead of looking, I close my eyes and feel how they manipulate my body. Arms tied above my head, attached to something keeping me immobile. I force myself to breathe through my nose, deep breaths that are supposed to be calming, but my heart is a battering ram in my chest, my blood stormwater through my veins. Somewhere, something flips open, the lid of the medical case, the clang of metal against metal. The callused hand on my knees, opening me up, tells me only one thing. Franco is going to gothere.

He glides his hand up my inner thigh, and when a thumb strokes over my sex, I want to curl away from his touch, but I can’t, held in place by restraints circling my ankles.

“We’ll keep this for later,” he says softly as he rides his thumb up and down my slit. “You have no piercings now, butwe’ll go slowly, one at a time. What we’re doing tonight is more important, and it needs more time to heal.”

His hand slips higher then, tugging the band of my panties lower, exposing my sex.

“Very pretty,” he mutters, but he doesn’t pull them farther down to bare me completely.

I shudder when the medicinal alcohol’s scent floats past my nose, the cold wipe swiping close to my loin, just above my mound. There’s pressure then, a pen drawing.

“I’m really good at this,” Franco says, pride in his voice. “But it hurts, so hold still.”

As if I have a choice. Now someone is holding me down on my stomach, too. I have no idea what he’s doing, but the first slice into my flesh makes me want to jolt up. The goons who’re pinning me down knew this was coming, because they intensify the pressure on every part of my body.

Tears flow freely now, and Franco, without missing a beat, says, “Should’ve had that drink, hmm?”

I don’t know how long it takes, only that the warm trickle of blood sliding down my groin and to my sex puddles in my panties where Franco’s pulled them down.

What feels like hours later, there’s a dab of something cold, a wipe over my mutilated skin.

“We’ll look at this tomorrow to see how it heals,” Franco says as he stands.

I blink up at him. At his hands, in blue surgical gloves, stained with my blood. He drops the scalpel into a metal bowl with a clang, and as if on cue, a goon hands him another whiskey.

There will be no tomorrow for me and this man. I will never see him again. This is a vow I make to myself, and I’d rather die than break it. Somehow, I came ready for this—a part of me knew and has been waiting for years.Monsters are rising…

He takes a sip of his drink then looks down at his handiwork. “I get better all the time. It’s a pity I didn’t keep count of the number of cunts from the beginning.”

Chuckles run through the room. The other men have been remarkably quiet, probably in deference. Franco Fiore is a sadistic maniac, and I’m supposed to get married to him.

We’ll leave tonight and disappear forever.

He pulls off his surgical gloves, one by one, and drops them in the bowl with the scalpel. He picks up his whiskey glass again, but it has my blood on the sides where he held it before. He brings the glass to his lips and licks the blood off with his tongue. When he slides and rolls it along the edge, bile rises to my throat.

With a wink, he looks down at me. “I like the taste of you already,amorina.”

I turn my face away from his madman’s gaze as my stomach churns.

“Put the tracker in her arm, and bandage my work so it heals properly,” he says, and someone grunts.

That wasn’t it? In panic, I glance around. With my arms tied as they are, I can’t see much more than the ceiling and another man, the one who looked like an executioner, stepping in, his face upside down from where I’m lying.

He runs a finger down one inner arm, and then down the other. “What hand do you use to write?”

I flex my fingers of my right hand, and he nods.

I watch on in horror as he pulls on surgical gloves and wipes my left arm down with alcohol.

“This is quick.” He disappears out of view, but when he comes back, he has an ear-piercing gun in one hand and a scalpel in the other.

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