Page 110 of The Devil's Pawn

“Please, don’t do this,” Ricky—or whatever the fuck his real name is—begs.

But I ignore him. They came for our women. They were going to kill them. For that alone, they will know death more painful than they’ve ever imagined.

Closing the canister, I drop it on the floor, along with the torch. Removing the matches from my pocket, I light one up, staring at the dancing flame and respecting its power before I toss it onto Ricky’s lap.

His screams are trapped within the roaring glory of orange flames, caught in his regret. He should’ve spoken. He knew. I know he did. But he was afraid of what the Bianchis would do to him or his family if he were to tell us.

I have no sympathy. We all make our own choices in this life, and his was to be a Palermo.Thisis his fate.

He stops screaming as death claims him, and I let the water hose wash away the rest of the blaze and find the charred flesh of the man who once sat there.

Moving to the other sack of shit next to Enzo, I get the torch and hand it to my brother.

“Do you see that?” I ask the man, turning his face sharply with my fist toward where his friend once sat. “That’s about to be you if you don’t give us the location.”

He wails as he glances at the destruction I enacted on good old Ricky.

“Okay. I’ll tell you.” He gulps. “I’ll tell you where the kids are kept. But once I do, promise you’ll just shoot me, man. I don’t want that to be me. Please!”

“You’d better not fucking lie to us,” Enzo warns, grabbing the front of his shirt and balling it roughly before coming face-to-face with him, his teeth gritted and bared. “I’ll personally come after every member of your fucking family if you do. Your mother. Your grandmother. Her fucking mother too, if she’s alive. We understand each other, pal?”

“I swear, man. I won’t bullshit you.” He shakes his head violently as Enzo backs away a couple of feet. “They’re sick. What they did—what they’re doing—is sick. I wanted no part of any of it. I never did. The kids. The club. None of it.”

“What club?” I pretend we have yet to hear about it.

His eyes widen, his lip bleeding from the kick Enzo gave him earlier.

“Speak!” I bellow, my punch flying out and hitting him square in his jaw. “You’d better not skip a fucking detail.”

It takes him a minute to catch his breath, and he mutters in pain before he opens his mouth again. “They’ve been taking kids and women for their sick sex club.”

My hand unintentionally balls into a fist as my muscles tighten. Every time I hear about that place, it makes me fucking insane.

“I swear I don’t know where it is. Only the members with a gold card and a spade on top of it know that info. It has a phone number on it. They call it, and someone comes to pick them up and blindfolds them. If anyone speaks about it, they’re automatically killed. I heard about one guy who was offed and tossed into the river when he told his buddy about the place.”

Enzo rushes toward the guy, removing a nine-mil from his holster and pointing it at the man’s temple. “What else?”

“Please don’t shoot me!” he cries. “I’m telling you everything, okay?”

Enzo backs away only a fraction.

“They’ve got this lawyer. Jo-Joey Russo,” he stammers. “He knows where it is. He’s a member. He knows everything. I’m telling you. You find him, you find all the answers.”

That’s what Joelle told Enzo too. But we can’t find that motherfucker anywhere.

“You said you knew where they’re keeping the kids. Spit it out.”

We need to find those children and women. To find Joelle’s boy. We need to save them all. Something we couldn’t do for our own brother or our parents.

“There’s a two-story building downtown where Joey has his office. The whole building is his. The kids and women are in the basement, kept in cages. It’s soundproof. Concrete walls and roof.” He sucks in a quick exhale. “There’s a door that leads to the basement from the building lobby, but there’s also a cellar door on the corner in the parking complex.”

“You knew all this and never reported it? Not even anonymously?” Disgust settles in my gut as my face turns with a snarl.

“You gotta understand, I didn’t want it to come back to me. They would kill my kids. Faro and his brothers will kill anyone who stands in their way. That club brings them a lot of money.”

“Who owns it?” I bark.

It sure as hell isn’t under the Bianchi name, because we would’ve found something registered to them besides the legit businesses we destroyed.

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