Page 83 of Hateful Vows
When I kiss her, it’s soft, like Dante showed me how to be, for her.
“Do razrusheniya,” she says—until ruin.
“Do razrusheniya,” I vow.
THIRTY-FIVE
DANTE
My breaths are short when I come back to my senses. I’ve lost track of time. The table I’m laying on has been washed, but I’m still strapped to it, shivering between cold sweats and hot flashes. I try to swallow around the dryness of my throat, but it’s like I haven’t had water for hours.
The light steps I now would recognise anywhere alert me that my captor has entered the room he keeps me in. Despite years of training, nothing prepared me for this.
Fear has my body shaking. That, and missing the fucking drug the bastard keeps injecting me with. I wiggle like an animal the first few times, but fuck if I don’t crave it by now. It’s a promise of sweet oblivion, an escape from the hell he put me in.
“If I let you out of your bindings, do you promise to be good?” His tone is condescending and annoyingly sweet, but I’ve been on this table for what feels like a lifetime.
I’m strong.
I can take him. He’s alone, I’m pretty sure of it. No one else ever comes down here with him, he doesn’t talk to anyone. I can tackle him to the ground with brute force, disorient him and flee. Find my wife and my man.
“Yes, I promise,” I reply, injecting enough shame into my words to have him trust me.
He unbinds my wrists and ankles, his face still hidden by the overhead light.
My heart pumps faster in my chest.
I surge up.
And fall on my knees, my muscles completely atrophied with the lack of exercises and proper food.
My captor hums low in his throat. “You disappoint me, Dante. But I should be used to it. It’s not the first time, after all.”
“You know nothing about me,” I rasp, anger surging through me but doing nothing to lift me up the floor I’ve crumpled to.
“No?”
He drops to a crouch in front of me.
The light hits his face differently from this angle. Eye-level with me, he gives me a grin. One I know all too well.
Because it’s the same I see when I look in the mirror.
“Hello, brother,” Gio says.
Panic seizes my chest.
“No. No. You’re dead. You died years ago.” I close my eyes and shake my head. “You’re not real. You drugged me to make me hallucinate.”
My mistake cost me, but even if I looked, I’m too weak and wouldn’t have been able to escape the knife that cuts my forearm in a deep and long gash. I hiss, the cut burning and air coming into the wound where my blood pools and wets my arm down to my wrist.
“Trust what you can feel,fratello,” Gio says conversationally, like he isn’t cutting me up but sipping fucking breakfast tea.
“Gio! Why are you doing this?”
The blade leaves my skin and I inhale sharply. My lungs are seizing. I’m panting with the force of the panic attack I’m having.
My brother is alive.
