“Are you two chatting now?” I ask.
“We are exchanging information,” says Kat.
“She will be dead afterwards. The men in the room are a minimum of twice her age, she will be ripped apart and end up as a used doll buried somewhere no one will find her,” I say harshly.
Kat narrows her eyes at me.
“Rose, are you envious of her?” she asks, and I explode.
“Envious?” I shout. “Of that thing? She is a stone in my shoe that pokes me every day a bit more!”
“Then, what is it that enrages you so much?” she asks. “I mean, look at you. If you aren’t envious, might it be that you are intrigued by her?”
“I am not intrigued!” I curse.
Anger rises in me. That thing. Intrigued? If I am one thing, I am repulsed. And an image flashes through my mind. Accompanied by a feeling. A feeling of consuming superiority and a pull. A pull I felt for this one second, where she looked me in the eyes with a flicker in hers, pressed against the wall, blood on her face, her chest heaving up and down, and I called her a filthy whore—and she liked it.
It was the moment I knew she had a degradation kink, and the reason she didn’t break from what we did to her. It is what intrigued me for this one single moment. Because I see it as a personal challenge to break the one who has to pay the debt. The debt I now might never collect, because I cannot kill her. Because she is a human to me now. And she also knows where my son’s body is. I have to wait until I know, and then someone else can kill her.
“Not intrigued, huh?” Kat chuckles.
“Do you know where they’re meeting?” I ask to navigate the topic away.
“She didn’t say, somewhere remote.”
“The contacts I have don’t either.”
“I mean, I could pull cell phone log data from towers, there must be what, two dozen people meeting?”
“They won’t be foolish enough to allow cell phone use,” I say. “There won’t be guns or anything else allowed in the room.”
The afternoon goes by, and we hear nothing.
“I’m telling you, she is dead already.”
“She isn’t, if she were, I would know,” says Kat.
“And why is that?”
“Because she implemented a security measure so we can react.”
I sit up straight.
“Why am I only hearing this now?”
I don’t like it. I don’t like them close. I don’t like them talkingabout things I am not involved in. It takes control from me, and I am always in control.
“Because you have been an arrogant pain in the ass,” Kat says.
I roll my eyes and get up and walk to the kitchen. Turn, and pace up and down. There is so much at stake, and I hate that most of it relies on an insubordinate twenty-four-year-old who is too happy, bubbly and naive for this harsh world.
“Have you heard anything from Adria?” asks Kat.
“Nothing. She will have heard. And if not the other capo mandamentos, Adria will most certainly come for her. Adria wanted to kill Giuseppe more than I did. You saw how much emotion was behind it.”
At that moment, Kat’s phone rings.
“Yes,” she says as she answers the call.
