“I’ve seen pictures of them. I think they’d make nice whores. But then, looks don’t matter so much, do they? If they’re ugly, they’ll service the fuckers who are too tight to pay for the premium product.”
Prostitutes.
They ran hookers.
Of course they did.
The Irish did too.
Fuck, the Russians. The Albanians. Everyone got a piece of the action on subjugating women.
Tears flooded my eyes as I thought about what had been happening in that hellhole. The beds. The rooms. The cries and the moans.
But I wasn’t naive.
I knew what my brothers were involved in, knew what my da had done to get the money for this building with the Ra—the IRA—we lived under a roof funded on the backs of other people’s sorrows.
“You weren’t just a snake in the grass. You were a traitor. You stolemywoman frommybedroom and thought you could get away withit?”
His claiming offered no reassurance.
“I like the symmetry of this. It’s very eye for an eye, but you should have figured it out by now, Dante—we don’t take one eye. We take both. We take your tongue and your fingers and your dick too.”
My brain switched off. I didn’t end the call. Didn’t ask who was there, listening into this conversation, giving me thisinformation. I knew Stan wasn’t. This wasn’t him offering me vengeance. If he knew I listened in, I bet he’d never have talked about women that way.
No, this wasn’t something for the female gaze—or ears, in this instance.
I was in too much pain to curl into a ball.
Instead, I stared at the ceiling, listening to the man I thought I loved whisper the vilest shit to break another’s spirit.
The most amazing part was that it didn’t include a single grunt of exertion or a scream of agony.
No, Stan slashed at Dante’s metaphorical jugular, drained him of hope, and then packed salt into verbal wounds that amplified his victim’s fear.
I sucked in a breath when an odd rattling sound caught my attention and I heard someone ask, “You wouldn’t, would you, Stan?”
My heart fluttered with hope. That Stan immediately quashed.
“Turn your stomach, Chad?”
No answer was forthcoming until the other guy queried, “What’s with the meds?”
I gritted my teeth because Stan and drugs. Fuck. What else had he created? What other torment had he brought to this godforsaken planet?
“Rory ever tell you about C-L-O?”
“What is it?”
“A recreational drug.”I heard the sounds of an ampoule being snapped. I’d heard it so often in my working life that it was as obvious to me as the sound of a coffee machine hissing in the kitchen. “It’ll make him hallucinate.”
Hallucinate?!
My brows lifted.
Stan was… fuck, smart. Smarter than I’d realized. Smarter than, maybe, he let on. But he wasted those smarts on?—
“Why do you want him to do that?”
