I yawn pointedly. The kidnapped are so fucking boring. ‘Why am I here?’ ‘Please let me go?’ ‘I have a family…’ Things won’t get fun again until the others are back downstairs.
“Mr…” She blinks at me. “I don’t know your name?”
“You can call me Doc.”
“Doc, can you please let me go?”
With a sigh, I pull my butterfly knife from my pocket and flick out the blade. “What was that?”
She shuts up.
I pick my thumbnail with the point. There’s a little blood under the nail. Not from today. Probably from when Adriano and I worked over Nicci Fattore. I wish I’d cut Parker, sliced his eyelid, or taken a finger. But I did tongue his virgin bride and Adri pissed in his face. We have plenty of time to make the ugly fuck pay.
I can feel the brat watching me. I count the seconds until she asks another stupid question.One, two, three—
“What are you going to do to me?” Her voice is clear but there’s a little wobble at the edges. She’s a minute from tears, max. “Can you please tell me where I am?”
“Stop talking.”
“Please just… Why is this happening?”
“Tesorina, I don’t know why you think I carry a knife, but keep talking and I’ll bleed you all over the carpet.”
Her mouth snaps closed, and she starts whimpering into her hands like a bunny. I like when girls cry, but she’s not doing it properly. She’s sniffling like a five-year-old who lost her teddy bear.
I groan at the molded ceiling. “Fucking hell, can you quit your whining?”
She looks up at me. She’s even paler now—and she didn’t have a lot of color to lose. She looks half-dead. But then maybe she’ll be entirely dead by the end of the night. That’s Morelli’s call.
“How many people died?”
I frown. “The fuck do you mean?”
“The explosions. How many people died? Do you know?”
I lower my knife. I could tell her that her whole family’s dead, but looking at her grey complexion, the news might kill her, and then I’d be in the shit. “No one died, Tits.”
“But… the explosions?”
“C4 down in the sewers. So, I guess some NYC plumbing died. You gonna cry about it?”
January stares into the middle distance. “Everyone’s safe?”
“Yup. You’re the only person who got fucked over in this arrangement.”
“Oh.”
I expect her to start bawling, but she just blinks rapidly. “So, are you really a doctor?”
I stare at her. For a girl with unicorn stickers on the back of her phone, I wasn’t expecting this much backchat. “Does it matter if I’m really a doctor?”
“I… No. I just don’t know what to call you.”
I grab the front of my jeans. “You can use Father Monastero, if you want. That got me hard.”
She flinches. “I don’t…”
I laugh. “Or you can keep playing innocent,lurida sgualdrina.That gets me hard too.”
