Luca tried pushing Santino’s arm away, his breathing coming faster and harder. “Don’t, no, I don’t—”
Santino ignored the sloppy pushing at his arm and pressed his thumb to the stitching, pushing hard enough to stretch and surely hurt like a bitch, but not yet popping them open. “You knowsomething, you slimy fuck, and you better tell me all of it.”
Luca tugged at Santino’s sleeve, a strained outcry rolling up his chest and pain flushing the skin fear had previously drained. “I don’t! I don’t know!”
“Bullshit.” Santino shoved his thumb past the fresh stitching. Warm blood rushed up, spilling over the fleshly ledge and running down Luca’s thigh to soil Santino’s bedding. It soaked his own skin, too, but the gratification he usually took from feeling his enemy’s blood on his hands was dulled in comparison to the untampered storm raging in his chest.
Luca, meanwhile, let out a surprisingly healthy scream. Seemed he had no pain threshold.
Armando leaned into the room. “Boss?”
“Unless you have news, I’m busy.”
Armando grunted and the door clicked shut.
Santino lifted his other hand from where he’d kept it pressed against Luca’s upper chest and clamped it over Luca’s mouth, silencing the bastard and simultaneously helping refocus him. He raised his bloodied thumb, which allowed more blood to seep from Luca’s leg. “See, look at this. Now not only do I have to pay a good, loyal doctor for a house call at fucking midnight, but I’ve already gone and ruined his work. All because of you. And you know what? I honestly don’t care about any of that, Luca.” He bunched up Luca’s shirt, doing a haphazard but deliberately offensive job of wiping off his thumb, and said, “I only care to know what you’ve done with my woman. It’s really not that complicated. You talk, you die much faster. Less pain. You don’t talk, you die much slower.” He let his voice harden. “That meansa whole fuck-ton more pain, Luca. And you don’t seem to like pain.”
Luca made a sound that came out only as muffled noise, so Santino readjusted to pressing his knuckles into Luca’s chest to hold him in place. Luca drew a gasping breath. “Ireallydon’t know,” he insisted, voice shaking. “I was never supposed to. I was just supposed to get her in the car. Where she took her after she peeled out, I don’t know. I fucking swear.”
Santino rocked back.She?He shot his hand up to Luca’s throat, squeezed in warning, and demanded, “Who was your contact? Who drove the fucking car? Who else knew about this plan?”
Luca reached on reflex for the hand at his throat, but he used his dominant hand—the one with the broken wrist—and let out a whimper when the new contact sparked fresh pain. “Aronne! Most of my instructions came from Aronne. And tonight, I didn’t know her. Don’t even know how she got past the gate. She never got out of the car. I swear, that’s all I know!”
Back to Aronne, and another piece of the puzzle clicked. Aronne hadn’t been late because he was getting laid. He’d been late because he’d seen an opportunity to blindside Santino while he knew Santino was distracted.
Santino shoved off the two-faced bastard. There was a woman working with them. With Aronne, or with Danilo? Or was she just someone in between? He dismissed that thought as quickly as it formed. Danilo and Aronne were equally pig-headed about women. They viewed women as objects, toys to be played with and shown off for a length of time, but never anything to be trusted with a crucial secret. So, if therewasone in the mix, she had to be someone they couldn’t escape involving. Someone who’d have too much to lose on her own and they would believe they could sway to their side.
His chest tightened. It could only be either Gisella or Adele. Aronne was also married, but only on paper.
Santino threw the door open and stalked into the hall. “I promised him aless painfuldeath if he answered my questions,” he said to Armando and Ciro, both standing guard. He locked eyes with Ciro. “Gift him that.”
Ciro’s eyes darkened with understanding and he nodded.
Santino waited until the door was shut again, then reached for his phone. “Anything from the guards at the front?”
Armando shook his head before falling into step at Santino’s heel. “Ivers said they’re both concussed, and I saw for myself the computers were shot to shit. It’s over my knowledge base, Boss.”
“How convenient.” Santino tapped the green button that would irritate the shit out of the guy on the other end and put the phone to his ear. It was what it was sometimes.
It was also closer to two in the morning in New Jersey, so the fact that it took Michele De Salvo three rings to get to the phone was—objectively—understandable. “Believe it or not, you’re not the only asshole on the planet,” Mikey snapped. “Your report should be ready in time for your morning coffee.”
Any other time, Santino would have grinned at that. “My fiancée might be dead by then, Michele. I need your brain tonight, I’m afraid.”
Mikey managed to curse and groan simultaneously. There was a shuffling sound, followed by a muffled, “I have to take this, kitten.” Seconds more passed before he spoke again, clearer and sharper. “Tell me what I need to know.”
Once upon a time, not so long ago, Reiko had thought she was curious about being tied up. She’d thought it could be sexy to be so at the mercy of her partner, trusting him enough to allow it and surrendering to his control in such a way.
She’d been curious about blindfolds, too. She sometimes slept with a night mask when her nightmares became so frequent that she fell into full-on insomnia, and the forced darkness somehow helped her in those times. It wasn’t something she’d ever fully understood. But as a result, she’d realized how much more aware her other senses became after hours behind the dark curtain. Her hearing sharper, her sense of smell more acute, her skin more sensitive. She’d thought it could, possibly, be quite a lot of fun to play that up in a trusted scene with a sexual partner.
All of those thoughts had been fantasies, developed slowly and in sporadic stages. Though she could see herself trusting Santino that much.
It hardly mattered anymore, because after however long she’d been effectively stuck on that tarp, Reiko never wanted to touch such items again. The idea of being restrained—of having her arms locked and immobilized for lengths of time—only emphasized how much they had come to hurt. Her shoulders were screaming worse than her head. Or perhaps she’d grown used to her head. The surface beneath her was so hard, her hipwas threatening to detach altogether and storm off just to escape the pressure-pain. And yet, none of that compared to the fear that wouldn’t release her throat.
Because she was still blind. And what good was hearing, when most of the time her not-so-charming captor spoke in a language she didn’t know?
All she had going for her was the awareness that she was freezing cold. The surface beneath the tarp was probably concrete, or at least tile, because it was not becoming warmer over time. And it was hard as hell.
She wanted to cry, but her eyes were the only part of her that had any moisture left between the bone-chilling temperature and the nauseating cotton-gag still in her mouth.
