“Are you going to ask me any questions,” I grit out, “or is this a fucking tea party?”
Dashamir rolls his shoulders like an athlete warming up.
He hits me, calculated and brutal, right in my damaged ribs. The pain explodes white-hot through my chest. I can’t stop the grunt that tears from my throat.
“I don’t enjoy this,” Dashamir says quietly. “But I need answers. Are you working with the man who slaughtered your family?”
He hits me again. Same spot.
“Did you ask him to kill your father and make you don?”
Silence apart from my short, hard breaths.
“What plans do you have with Agnello Montoni?”
Nothing.
“Pain clarifies,” he says, breathing slightly harder now. “It strips away lies, pretense, false loyalty. By the time we’re done, you’ll tell me the truth. Who are you allying with?”
I smile through the blood. “Your mother.”
He grabs my jaw, forcing me to look at him. “Everyone breaks eventually. Everyone. The only question is how long it takes.”
“Then I guess we’re in for a long night.”
I don’t trust myself to say a single word about wanting to crush Don Agnello like an insect, in case Dashamir figures out the reason why I haven’t. Adora isn’t going to become this monster’s plaything because of something I’ve said.
He studies me for a moment longer, then releases me. Walks to the table. Selects a pair of pliers. Despite my bravado, my stomach clenches.
My hands are zip-tied to the arms of the chair. Dashamir grasps my wrist and drives the pointed pliers beneath my thumbnail.
The pain is blinding, my whole body arching from pure agony, and my eyes squeeze shut.
He rips the nail out.
The scream that tears from my throat could curdle milk. My hand feels like it’s on fire. Sweat and blood drip down my chest and back.
Adora. I’m enduring this for Adora.
I watch as Dashamir flicks my bloody fingernail aside and moves on to my pointer finger. I’m sickened by the way he’s maiming me, and my hands are shaking, but I’m unable to look away. Again, he shoves the thin, pointed metal under my nail,working it deep, before wrenching with all his might and ripping the nail out at the root.
“Fuck.Fuck.” I sweat and bleed and curse, but other than expletives, I don’t say a word. If he connects Adora with the woman at the fight and the woman who helped me in the laundromat when I killed the Dervishi soldiers, she’s dead.
Worse than dead.
I feel sick to my stomach at the thought of what this animal will do to her.
Dashamir drops the pliers onto the table and wipes his hands clean on a cloth.
“You’re strong,” he says, folding up the bloody cloth and laying it down. “Stronger than I expected. But strength isn’t enough. It never is.”
He returns to his chair. Sits. That unnerving calm settling over him again.
“Who was the woman in the laundromat?”
I spit blood onto the floor between us. “Go fuck yourself.”
He regards me coldly for several minutes.
