VINCENZO
Ottavio tried to speak again—desperate, as if begging could rewrite the fate already sealed over him.
The effect was immediate. Violent.
The blade shifted inside his face, tearing through already ruined flesh, grinding harder against bone and teeth.
A wet, choking scream forced its way out of him—garbled, broken, barely human.
Blood surged fresh from the wound, thicker now, bubbling around the steel as his body convulsed.
His knees buckled, but the restraints kept him upright just enough to continue suffering.
Let him feel it.
Let him live in it.
His breathing came in ragged bursts, each inhale wet, each exhale worse.
And yet—
He still found a way to speak.
“You... bas—tard...” he gargled, the words mangled beyond recognition, torn apart by the blade lodged through his mouth. Blood spilled over his lips with every syllable. “Son of a... bi—tch...”
I said nothing. Just watched.
His eyes burned with something that refused to die.
Hatred.
Always hatred.
“It... wasn’t... just me...” he forced out, each word dragged through broken flesh, trembling on the edge of collapse. “that fucked... that bitch...”
His gaze flickered—briefly, deliberately—to Loretta. Then back to me.
My fist clenched so hard my palm split.
“Men... pay a fortune to have her...” he rasped, a sick, twisted satisfaction curling through the ruin of his expression. “Vasquez... the one who took you years ago... he became one of my best clients. Paid more than most—just to have her... over and over...”
His voice hitched, broken into wet, gurgling fragments.
“And I let him.”
A low, vicious silence followed—like the world itself recoiled from the words.
“I loved hearing her scream,” he breathed, a cruel, fading grin ghosting across his ruined face. “She made me money... my sweetest asset...”
Something inside me snapped.
Rage surged through me—hot, blinding.
My chest tightened as the truth settled in—he wasn’t just part of the world I’d heard whispers about... he was one of the monsters inside it.
I knew of that kind of place—where people traded their own children like currency, paying and profiting from their suffering—but I never imagined he would be among them.
A cold, sick disgust rose in my throat.
