Page 48 of Lourdes & the Mafia
I step close to her and she steps away, making me stop. I bite back the urge to growl and snap. I am not like the human who struck her. I would never hurt her, and yet I am somehow much worse. And infinitely more dangerous.
“You have two options,” I tell her. “You can stay in this room as punishment for leaving in the first place, or you can come with us to The Pit and see what the consequences are to those who would dare harm you.”
She freezes up at the suggestion, and it takes a moment for her to answer. “What will you do to him?”
I try not to smirk. “I’m simply going to ask him questions. But Kane? Kane is going to torture him, and this time, we make no promises to spare him.” I say that last part in case she’s getting any ideas about asking us to spare his worthless life. Because the bastard is already dead. “He does not deserve your kindness.”
“I—I wasn’t going to ask you to spare him.” Her voice quivers.
“Good. So what is it you choose?” She looks between all of us, as if we somehow hold the answer of what she should decide. I shake my head. “The choice is yours, vidente. The choice is always yours.”
She breathes a sigh of relief. “I’d like to go with you.”
I smile at her excellent choice and then take us all to The Pit.
The ardent flames of hell greet us, but they do not touch us. We are safe from the pain of The Pit, though the souls that reside here are not. They feel the licks of agony travel over their bodies. It makes them forever thirsty. Forever hot. And while we can see it, we do not suffer it.
The Pit is a graveyard of bones. Bones and crosses with bodies strung from them. The bodies aren’t corporeal. They appear solid enough, but their earth forms burned away when they died. Now all that’s left of them is their soul filled with memories of a life they once had. Every little thing hurts as if they were alive.
That’s the point of punishment.
The soul lives on and it suffers everything they gave in life.
The moment we whisked the human away and brought him to the Underworld, his earth form disintegrated—I made sure of it—leaving nothing but his soul behind. A soul we mean to torture at this very moment. A soul that still holds human memories fresh in its mind.
We’re cut off into a more private area of The Pit. We can still hear the screams from the others, still see the darkness, still feel the heat of the flame. Flame that scorches across the ground and licks towards the human’s body.
Demons crawl at his feet, slithering up the coals to nip at his heels from where he’s strung up. They’re not harming him, but they are frightening him. He’s already weeping like a little bitch, demanding to be let go.
They are futile pleas, and this is where he will stay for the rest of his days.
The man’s screaming stops when he sees Lourdes. She doesn’t hide behind us, though her gaze does sweep curiously over The Pit. I see her gulp, the only outward sign of fear she shows before she steps towards the human man. She stares at his strung-up body. Gone are all the rich accouterments that had decorated him previously. He is in nothing but boxer shorts. Bare everywhere to make him more vulnerable.
Just how we want him to be.
Her curls snag against the ashy wind that blows through the depths of The Pit. “What will you do to him?” she asks once more.
“That depends,” I say. “This isn’t my domain.” This is Kane’s. Though I rule over everything, I let my brothers have their special places. In this, I will defer to him, though I want to hear Lourdes’ answer as I ask my next question. “What is he to you?”
Her head whips to look at me and bounces back and forth between my brothers and I. I know they are just as curious as I am to hear what she says. If this man was just someone in passing who was trying to harm her, or if he’s someone else entirely to her.
Either way he will suffer.
Her answer depends on how much.
“Don’t tell them anything, Lourdes! Don’t tell them any—” His voice is cut off by shriek as one of the slithering demons jobs sharp teeth into his heel. He squirms against it, and behind me Lorenzo grunts.
“What a baby,” he mocks.
She pauses for a long length of time, and I wonder if she’ll lie to us. “Dimas was my boyfriend,” she confesses. “Once upon a time before I dumped his ass.”
“I told you not to tell them anything, you stupid—”
Again, his tirade is cut off as another demon sinks his teeth into his calf. I know this is Kane’s doing. Sometimes you can control the lesser demons with nothing but a thought. He’s not tolerating the disrespect the human is showing her.
It is very telling, considering he proclaims to hate her.
The human breathes in and out rapidly. I want to begin the interrogation and let her watch. Not because I am a cruel master, but because I want to show her what lengths we will go to in order to protect her, so that she trusts us and doesn’t dare run off ever again.
