He swallowed hard; his neck pricked by the point of the blade. The blood trickled, but not nearly enough to hurt him. The way he wanted to hurt my woman.
“Who are you?” he asked, his voice shaking.
“Your worst fucking nightmare,” I spat out. “Now tell me, where is your employer?”
“My employer?”
“The woman that hired you. To hurt my wife and my daughter. To hurt the wives of these men,” I slightly tilted my head backwards to Declan and Antonio, never removing my eyes from him.
“I-I don’t know.” His eyes darted behind me. He tried to calculate which one of us was the biggest threat. In simple terms, he was fucked.
I pressed my knife against his throat harder, inflicting pain and enjoying it more than I should. I pushed him away, causing him to twirl on the rope, the movement making him scream. His shoulder dislocated and his arm popped, the sound echoing around the concrete tomb.
“I can do this for days, weeks, years,” I seethed, barely containing my rage. “Nobody will ever find you here. I’ll make sure the three of us rotate paying you a visit every single day, inflicting more pain. Your life will become a living hell.” I got into his face. His gaze locked on my eyes and whatever he saw in them, made him piss himself. “We know exactly how much a body can take so you won’t die quickly. Just imagine,” I purred, “years spent like this. Nobody will hear your prissy screams. Nobody will come and save you. Day in and day out full of non-stop torture.”
The rope stopped swinging, and he tried to prevent any movement, scared of the pain caused from his swinging. It didn’t matter what he did to prevent it… more pain would come.
I grabbed his throat. “Now, tell me what you know.”
“Nothing.” I pushed his body slightly and watched as the wave of pain washed over him, his eyes rolling back in his head as a guttural cry left his throat. The full weight of his body pulling on the dislocated arm. I could only imagine how it must have felt as if the limb would be ripped from his body at any moment.
I calmly put the knife away, and for a fraction of a second, hope entered his eyes as his body stilled once more. Could he really believe that I bought the lie he was trying to give me, or that he would survive this and make it out alive?
My fist connected with his face and his blood spurted everywhere. Blood and spit streamed over his chin, dripping onto the floor. His nose crooked from the fresh break. “Please, please,” he begged. “I don’t know anything.” His weepy words did nothing.
I swung again. Static rushed in my ears as the images of my wife and daughter hurt or dead flashed through my mind and made the rage inside of me grow, warping into something worse than ever before. I rained punches onto his face, his chest, stomach.
“Mateo,” Antonio’s voice reminded me we needed information.
I barely pulled myself back together. I pulled my knife back out and drug the blade down his torso, cutting him open. But not too deep. It wasn’t his time to die. But soon. First, I needed information.
“I won’t ask again,” I growled. “What do you know?” Silence stretched, and I pressed the blade against his chest again.
“She gave me a phone number to call,” he cried out. “When the job was done.”
Ah, finally a clue. “Give me that number.” He recited the number. I didn’t have to turn around to know that Antonio and Declan had already got it added into their phones. “Anything else?”
“She said if I get the job done this week, I’d get an extra million. One million for each dead body, the woman and her daughter.”
Red rage was all I could see and feel at this moment. I pulled out my gun and shot him between the eyes.
The silence lingered as I watched the light in his eyes extinguish. He got better than he deserved. I should have tortured him for hours.
“Fuck, Mateo,” Declan broke the silence. “You didn’t even give me a turn.”
He tried to joke but I wasn’t in the fucking mood, at all. I had to find a way to have that woman eliminated. She was a threat. I scanned down my body and my clothes were blood-covered. Fuck, this had never happened to me. Every death I delivered was always clean.
“Antonio take the women home,” I told him, taking off my jacket and vest. I had to clean up some till I made it into my office. “Text me when you are out of the building. I don’t want Brianna to see me like this.”
I walked over to the sink and started washing off my hands. Thankfully, my pants were dark so blood splatters weren’t as visible on them.
“Give access to this floor to Giovanni,” I continued as I washed my hands off, “and have him supervise the clean-up.”
He nodded and left. I leaned back against the wall, trying to clear my head and figure out where to go from here. We have a phone number. We needed to trace it to a location, but it didn’t take a genius to know that wouldn’t happen. It was probably a go phone just for the purpose of getting this transaction completed.
“This ever happened to you before?” Declan asked.
“What? Killing a person?” I retorted dryly. “Or losing my cool?”