I’ve become obsessed with watching her, sometimes staying up until all hours of the night just to watch her sleep.
Call it intuition or a gut feeling, but I just couldn’t shake the notion that something bad was going to happen to her.
And now that she hasn’t been home for a few days, I’d say whatever I was feeling was right.
Something happened to her.
My cell phone begins to vibrate in my pocket, and I’m quick to answer when I see Baz’s name pop up on the screen. “Hello?”
“I have something here you’ll want to see, my friend.”
And then he hangs up the phone without another word or explanation. Furrowing my brows in confusion, I put the phone away, grab my laptop and leave the coffee place in a hurry.
Finding the nearest subway, I take the old access tunnels until I finally arrive at Baz’s underground lair. Usually I have to wait for access, but I notice the door is open and Baz is waiting for me.
Shit, this can’t be good.
“Follow me, my friend,” Baz tells me, leading the way through the twists and turns of his underground mecca. When we enter his office, he closes the door and indicates for me to have a seat at his desk. “I intercepted this being sent to Ciccone yesterday.”
He clicks the mouse, and a video begins to play.
At first, it’s just Nolan Farrell standing around with his gang of goons. But then, a petite brunette is led into the room. I instantly recognize her. “No,” I say with a shake of my head.
The moment they sit her down on a chair and she raises her head, my fingers involuntary move to the screen, tracing Victoria’s beautiful cheek. Fuck, I want to somehow reach in there and save her.
Nolan tells her to say hi to the camera, but Victoria remains firmly seated, glaring at him. I can’t help but smile at her stubbornness and courage in the face of adversity.
That’s my girl.
But then Nolan is wrenching Victoria’s arm behind her back, forcing her to scream. The scream pierces me like an ice pick going right through me to my very soul.
Nolan releases her and holds up a newspaper to the camera next. The date is from three days ago. Fuck, she’s been going through this hell for three days. She could be…she could be dead already, and I wouldn’t even know it.
“I have your daughter, Ciccone,”Nolan says on the video, bringing my attention back to him.“Your only daughter. Your only flesh and blood.”
I watch as Nolan moves behind Victoria, his hand wrapping around her neck. I grip the armrests of Baz’s chair so hard I can hear the leather cracking under the force. “That son of a bitch,” I growl as Nolan lowers his hand and squeezes her breast. “He’s a dead man,” I spit out through clenched teeth.
“I’m afraid it gets worse, my friend,” Baz tells me.
I listen to Nolan ranting and raving about the death of his son and how Victoria is going to pay for her father’s sins. This is all about the death of Teague, Nolan’s youngest son. Ciccone tortured the kid for information about the Irish Mob and then sent him back to his father in pieces. What the fuck did Ciccone think was gonna happen? Did he think Nolan was just gonna roll over and die?
Now Victoria will have to suffer for what Ciccone has done.Again.Just like she suffered when I tried to get my own revenge on her father.
When Nolan snaps his fingers and two men come over and grab Victoria, I’m not prepared for what happens next. The two men take her to a giant, metal tub in the center of the room. She’s forced to bend over the edge, and I can see her legs kicking wildly as water spills out over the edges of the tub.
“Fuck!” I abruptly stand up. I start to turn away. I don’t want to watch this, but I force myself to return to the desk, to sit down and watch every torturous second of her ordeal. I force myself to watch them try to break her.
She fights the men every step of the way, spewing curses at them and trying to plead with Nolan in between rounds of being dunked under water.
By the end of it, Victoria is a sobbing, shivering mess, but she still fights the men as they carry her away, somewhere offscreen.
I can still hear her screams after the video cuts off. It’s as if they’ve been seared into my mind, set to repeat forever.
“This happened three days ago. How many more of these videos are there?”
Baz hesitates before saying, “One more that I was able to find.”
Curling my hands into fists on the armrests, I tell him, “Show me.”
