Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ENZO
C hecking my phone, I see a message from Nico confirming which wet room he and Etta settled on before relaying the address to the driver. I also see that we’ve been sent updates while we finished up the meeting. The girl is at the hospital safely in Doc Em’s care, Sinclair is already at the wet room, and Stefano and Luc are heading back to the warehouses to carry on with the full inventory I asked for. We need to know what’s currently in our arsenal.
I lace my fingers with Aurora’s, running my thumb over the back of her hand. Taking over as underboss has been a steep learning curve. However, it’s been a good distraction from the intense physical therapy the surgeon recommended. If Doc Em hadn’t insisted I keep going with it, I’d have given up after the first week. It was worth it though, as I’ve regained almost complete mobility in my shoulder and the pain has eased considerably, which is handy since Aurora allowed her inner rigger out to play. That was a surprise .
Every time she lays her hands on me, she exposes a new hidden desire. The ropes, the squeeze of her grip round my neck. And fuck me. When she said the word collar, I felt like my mind had ascended to a different level of consciousness. Even thinking about it now makes my pulse race. Just the idea of her placing something on me that declares me as hers makes my cock throb.
However, every time I try to picture anything metal around my neck, I’m assaulted by vivid flashes of my time with Max. The iron collar in the cell. The barbed wire on the St Andrew’s Cross. The heavy chains he used to strap me to the surgical table. They race around my mind like cattle stampeding, getting more out of control the longer they’re allowed to run free.
Aurora must notice the shift in my mood because she’s turned our hands over and has started mirroring me, running her thumb gently over the back of mine.
“I’m okay, just went to a dark place there for a moment,” I say, trying to reassure her.
She kisses my cheek with the lightest of touches. “It’s okay to not be okay all the time. If anyone understands that, it’s me. You want to talk about it?”
I glance towards the driver and she nods, understanding that it’s not something I want to discuss now. “I think it’s about time I talk to someone, about when I was… away. Though I’m not sure it should be you. I’d do anything to make sure you never have to think about those things again,” I say, my voice low and barely above a whisper.
“There’s nothing you can’t say to me, but whatever you would prefer, mio re, ” she says, bringing my hand to her lips and kissing my fingers.
I close my eyes and nod, focussing on the gentle back and forth of the pad of her thumb as it strokes across my skin. Her touch is the only thing that chases the images away.
It takes around twenty minutes to make it across town through traffic and by the time we pull off the street, my heart rate has settled and I’m feeling more centred. We’re on the East side, not far from where they found me. Our proximity to the place I nearly died should pull me straight back to my maudlin thoughts, but instead, it reminds me that I survived.
Stepping out of the car, I walk around to open the door for Aurora. Once she’s clear, I close it and tap on the roof, signalling Michael to leave.
“Are you ready to have some fun?” she asks, stretching up onto the tips of her toes and easing my face down to hers. “I think maybe we should take this opportunity to vent some of our internalised rage.”
“Not sure this is the healthiest form of self-expression, but it sounds like a plan,” I reply, pulling away and stretching out my neck and shoulders. “Let's do this.”
We enter through the side door of what from the outside looks like a storage facility. After being funnelled through a little corridor, we exit into a hexagonal room with a rolling shutter on each wall, two of which are open wide. Above each shutter is a series of numbers separated by hyphens, and after staring at them quizzically for a few moments, Aurora leans over and explains, “It’s the max voltage in each room and the number of devices you can have in operation at any one time. Etta loves her gadgets, but is very much a safety first girl.”
“You approved this?” I say, raising an eyebrow at her.
“As a leader, I encourage creativity… Besides, electroshock is an effective method of interrogation.”
I glance between the two rooms with their shutters open. They’re opposite each other and both of our guests, who look half dead, are facing forwards, strapped to the back wall of each double garage-sized unit, forced to watch each other. Sinclair is sitting at a desk off to one side, typing furiously while Benny and Nico are currently in the room to our left, fiddling with the knobs of a rather viscous-looking contraption.
“Please tell me they’re not dead already?” Aurora shouts towards Nico.
Hooking a thumb over his shoulder, Nico replies, “This one’s just passed out again, and the other one wouldn’t stop crying, so I knocked him out. I’m sure they’ll come round soon.”
I lean over Sinclair’s shoulder and take a look at his screen. I have no idea why, because as usual I have no fucking idea what any of it means but invading his space when he’s in a hyperfocus is usually the least jarring way to pull him out of it and get him to explain the importance of what he’s working on.
Sinclair may know how we all tick, but he’s not the only one that knows how best to support this team.
“Fill us in then. What did we miss?” I say when he finally stops typing.
Leaning back from the screen, Sinclair looks a little surprised to see us. “Shit, sorry, didn’t hear you come in.”
“It’s all good. What’s got you working away so feverishly over here? Don’t tell me these fuckwits had valuable information.”
Sinclair laughs. “Yes, and no. It’s what we thought. They supply girls to The Knights and in return the fraternity is compensated generously. But that’s not all Max has tasked them with.”
“What do you mean?” Aurora asks .
Sinclair leans forward again and pulls up some bank statements on the screen. “If the victims fit certain criteria, they’re delivered directly to Max, not The Knights.”
“Are you telling me these fucks are not just sentencing their victims to sexual slavery, but if they’re his type, they’re delivering them to a serial killer ?” Aurora questions, unable to suppress the rage in her voice, shouting out the last part through gritted teeth while turning her head to glare at our guests.
The emotion radiating off her is echoed inside me. Knowing that these women are paying the price for my freedom feels like a bullet to the chest. If I were back there, chained in his basement, then he wouldn’t need these girls. My stomach churns and bile burns my oesophagus, forcing me to swallow it back down.
“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying,” Sinclair replies, his voice sounding raw, obviously as sickened as we are.
“How the fuck did this arrangement even start?” I bark. “How did they even get on Max’s radar?”
Sinclair winces and takes a deep breath. “I’m afraid that’s my fault.” His tone is solemn and pained, like he’s disappointed in himself. I look at Sin, completely dumbfounded at how any of this would track back to him. He runs a hand over his face before dropping it to his laptop and turning the screen towards Aurora.
“I don’t speak cyber-geek, Sin. I’m going to need your words,” Aurora informs him, looking as confused as I feel.
Sin stands and starts pacing back and forth behind the desk. He looks like a caged lion, wild-eyed and tightly wound.
“Okay, so while the guys were working them over, I was thinking. What were the chances of Max just stumbling across them?” He glances at both of us and while I shake my head, Aurora shrugs. “Like… non existent. Then it hit me. The reason Nico and Benny went after these pricks in the first place was because there was a job posted to deal with them on The Syndicate assignment listings.”
He throws us another pained look and again I shake my head and wave my hand, encouraging him to continue. “I’m gonna need more than this, Sin.”
“Mateo tasked me to look into the profit drops at the clubs and I traced it back to rumours circulating, saying our clubs weren’t safe. It didn’t take much trawling through the security feeds to identify that a group of predatory assholes were targeting women and essentially scaring off half our clientele. As soon as I had enough information on them, I posted the assignment and didn’t think anything more of it once I knew it was being dealt with.”
“I still don’t see how this is your fault?” I say.
Sinclair huffs out an irritated breath before continuing, “Don’t you see? Everyone—including Max—had access to all their information. I highlighted their MO to anyone within The Syndicate who was reviewing assignments. I might as well gift wrapped them for him.”
“Firstly, that’s bullshit. We share information like this on a daily fucking basis with people across the entire organisation. You can cut this self-deprecating pity party out right now, Sin,” Aurora says, storming around the desk and poking him in the shoulder with one of her razor-sharp nails. While she’s not trying to hurt him, he still recoils. I may love the feel of her nails when she drags them over my skin, but when she’s in a temper, they fucking hurt as she jabs you with them. Fucking vicious little honey badger is what she is sometimes.
“Secondly.” Her voice gentles and her hands cup his cheeks. She tilts his jaw up until he’s forced to lift his gaze to hers. “There’s no fucking way you could have predicted he would use that information the way that he has. Do you hear me?”
Sinclair’s shoulders rise and he heaves out a steadying breath. My mind is running a mile a minute, mulling over what Sinclair has just said.
“So your theory is that Max himself was reviewing all the job listings? Can you track it back to him?” I ask.
“I might be able to track an IP back to him, but it’s a dark server. We deliberately don’t use profiles. We only see who accepts the job and we don’t store that information once they’ve been paid, for obvious reasons.”
“But you might be able to track the IPs. See who viewed what jobs?”
“Maybe, why? What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that it’s interesting Max has targeted and absorbed so many other low-level gangs and criminals so quickly. Can you check how many of them had bounties out for them?” I reply.
“That’s fucking clever. He must have targeted organisations that we’d weakened, making it easier to absorb their manpower,” Sinclair muses.
“I want you to confirm that’s how he targeted them, but I also want you to see if there’s a common IP and then check if there’s anyone he’s working with that we don’t know about?”
Sinclair springs into action, yanking out the chair and planting himself firmly down. From the rapid clacking of the keys and the determined set of his jaw, I know there’ll be no disturbing him anytime soon, so I cock my head at Aurora and pull her attention to Nico and Benny.
At the back of the unit I see our old friend Jack Heatherington III slumped forwards and hanging heavily against the chains wrapped around his wrists and ankles. Nico and Benny seem bored out of their minds, now done tinkering with the machine on the back wall. Nico looks up as we approach and lifts his chin in Sin’s direction. “How’s he doing?”
“Taking things a little too personally, but he’s looking into whether he used The Syndicate assignments to source his new allies,” I say.
Walking over, I inspect the damage so far on President Fuckboy. He doesn’t look as if he has much left in him. His face is pulverised, but that’s not what’s got him looking like his next breath might be his last. Angry red marks cover his torso, some large and blotchy, others look like fern leaves arcing out across the plains of his chest. I arch a brow at Nico.
“What? I was experimenting with amps verses volts,” he cries, his voice oozing with faux innocence. “Etta told me to test the toys to their full capacity.”
I bob my head at Nico and chuckle. “As long as he’s still breathing, I guess.”
“Yeah, I’m going to have some fun with this one,” Aurora says. “Have you got everything out of this one?”
Benny chips in. “Yeah, not that he’s the sharpest tool in the box. It seems once he found out he would get paid to do what he loves best, and someone else would clean up the mess, he didn’t ask many questions.”
“What about the other one?” I probe.
“We got dates and addresses. Sinclair verified them and sent the information across to Gabriella already,” Benny says and then adds, “Any update on the girl we found in his car?”
“She’s stable and with Doc Em. Won’t know more for a few hours,” I reply.
The mention of the latest of their victims causes a shadow to descend over Aurora’s eyes. Her irises, usually so vibrant and bright, are now dark and overcast. Like the gold flecks have somehow tarnished .
“I’m going to need you to take this one off the wall for me and strap him over that table,” Aurora says. “Then you can go and play with the other one. Leave this one to me.”
Benny and Nico unshackle his arms while I drag the table over to her. He drops like a dead weight, flopping forward face first onto the concrete floor. There’s a sickening crack and I can’t tell from the mangled state of his face as they haul him up, whether he just broke his nose or his jaw. However, it seems the pain was enough to rouse him from his comatose state.
There’s no fight left in him. His body remains slack, but I can hear his pathetic mumbling pleas. He’s not praying for any type of divine intervention or begging us to stop. He’s crying for his daddy.
That tracks.
She signals me to help her move the table closer to the electro shock generator and I start to see what she has in mind when she instructs them to lay him on his stomach, legs dangling, before pulling his underwear down around his ankles. Considering it looks like he waxes every square inch of his chest, the last thing I expect to see mooning back at me is an ass covered in the thickest hair I’ve ever seen. What is he—part bear?
Pulling the chains free of the iron rings, Nico uses them to bind him to the tabletop before freeing one ankle from his clothes and spreading his legs wide, chaining them to the table legs. Nico then steers Aurora to a bag on the floor by the generator.
“Here’s all the attachments. Simply connect them to the cables and you can control the intensity of charge using these two dials.” He kisses the top of her head before adding, “I’m going to wake up Mr Walker. Wouldn’t want him to miss the show. ”
“No, we wouldn’t,” she says with a viscous smile that lights up her face and lifts the clouds shrouding her eyes.
I should feel disconcerted by the malevolent energy reverberating between Aurora and Nico right now. But these two men deserve everything they have coming to them. Although, as Aurora bends down and pulls out a large metal rod, I begin to think that maybe it’s not something I’m going to want to watch up close.
“Need a hand?” I ask Nico as he heads across to the opposite unit. He chuckles and mutters something about my needing a stronger stomach, but he waves me over and I follow eagerly.
I haven’t even made it out of the door when the wailing starts, swiftly followed by the scent of burning flesh. It makes my nose twitch and leaves a horrid, cloying scent in the air.
As we pass Sinclair, I whip out my phone and send a message to Etta. If we’re going to keep using this place, then they need to improve the ventilation. I'm all the way to the back of the opposite cell and the scent of burning ass hair is still assaulting my nostrils. Hell, it feels like it’s imprinted on me at this point.
“Let’s get Charlie here, a front row seat,” Nico says, already hauling him down from the wall. “Rise and shine, Chucky. We have a special treat for you.”
Getting a chair, I pull it over and Nico makes short work of strapping him to it. We drag it across to the first unit where Nico opens a water bottle and pours it over his head. Sleeping Beauty wakes with a start, spluttering and coughing, inhaling the water flowing over his face. It takes him a few seconds to stop hacking once Nico’s emptied the bottle, but as he comes to his senses, his eyelids flare so wide I can see an abnormal amount of the whites of his eyes.
“We told you everything. Please don’t do this. We didn’t know who he was. We didn’t know what they were doing with the girls,” he screeches, spewing a torrent of lies and excuses.
Aurora comes to stand in front of him, gently swaying the large metal rod from side to side.
“Uh-uh-uh, Mr Walker. There are many things I don’t tolerate, and lying is just the first on the list,” Aurora chastises in an unsettlingly even tone. “I don’t expect you to fully comprehend how much of a monster you’ve aligned yourself with, but you can’t possibly think I’ll believe that you didn’t know what would happen to those girls when you delivered them?”
Charles’s eyes dart between each one of us and I can’t figure out if he’s silently pleading with us to step in and help him or simply trying to figure out how fucked he is. When he’s met with four stony faces, he drops his chin to his chest and a pathetic whimper erupts from his lips. He quickly devolves into a mess of snot and snivelling. Aurora rolls her eyes, and I can’t help but chuckle at her disdain.
“We knew what would happen to them.” His voice is meek and if I thought this man had an ounce of humanity, I’d almost believe it held a hint of regret in its tone.
Aurora crouches in front of him, dropping one knee to the floor and resting her elbow on the other. “What about the girls you took to him? Tell me, Mr Walker—do you know what he does to them?”
He shakes his head slowly and shuts his eyes tightly, but that doesn’t deter her.
“Which do you think is worse? Being trafficked into a life of sexual servitude or being gifted to a serial killer? You tell me.”
His head shoots up. “I didn’t know he was killing them,” he shrieks, his words laced with panic.
Nico lunges forward, launching a swift hook across his jaw. “You can’t be this fucking stupid. Don’t you dare lie to us,” he roars. “They all fucking die. Whether it’s quick and painful at the hands of a fucking monster, or whether they’re disposed of by a pimp when their body gives out.”
Benny steps in front of Nico, pushing him back towards the wall and then holding his palms up. “You’ve had your fun with them. Let him find out what Don Bianchi has in store for him,” he says with a soothing tone and sly smirk.
Standing tall, head back and huffing like a bull about to charge, Nico forces his eyes from Charles to Benny. The second their eyes lock, I can see Nico’s tension subside. There’s movement behind me as Sinclair leaves his laptop and joins us.
“And I called dibs on this one,” Sinclair announces before laying his hand on Charles’s shoulder and squeezing so hard his knuckles whiten.
“Oh, this will be fun, Sinclair. Do you want to go tandem or take it in turns?”
“Ladies first, colibrì. I do love to watch you work. There’s always such artistry to your savagery. Why don’t you show Charlie here what might be in store for him?”
That’s all the encouragement Aurora needs to begin. It’s brutal and barbarous and no less than either one of them deserve. She starts by making sure Jack knows how it feels to be violated. Taking the metal rod in her hand and ramming it into his asshole in one swift and ruthless motion. She doesn’t stop, thrusting over and over again, ignoring every plea, every bargain, every apology that spews from his mouth.
Just when I think I can’t take a moment more of his caterwauling she forces the metal bar as far as she’s able and lets go, leaving it inside him before she walks to the other end of the table and leans over on her elbows.
Bound to the table, Jack cranes his head up, desperately trying to meet her eyes, begging for mercy.
“Did you give any of the women you drugged and raped mercy? Or did you carry on? Passing them around until you’d all had your fill?” she asks, her tone dripping with malice and hatred. “Did you stop when they begged?”
He shakes his head and drops his brow to the table with a dull thud, obviously having seen in her eyes that his fate is sealed.
“As much as there’s a certain catharsis to this particular punishment, I think given our surroundings, there’s a way for me to teach this lesson in a much more effective manner,” she says. With great heaving sobs wracking his body and tears streaming down his face, Jack turns his face from his friend at the same time as Charles flinches and looks away.
I fist my hand through Charles's hair, yanking his head back up. “You’re not going to want to miss this bit,” I grate out, refusing to allow him tohave a reprieve from the horror in front of him.
Aurora stands and stalks back to the wall, tapping the tips of her nails against the generator, teasing him with the gentle snick as she walks her fingers towards the dials. I’d almost forgotten the wires dangling off the end of the rod still wedged deep inside his ass. It seems that he had too, because he doesn’t make a peep as she circles the pad of her finger leisurely around the rim of the dial.
She pinches the dial between her thumb and forefinger and twists. Charles screams out a horrified cry a fraction of a second before Jack does, but Jack's screams are louder. The second the current goes live, Jack’s body starts convulsing. The rigidity of his body fluctuates in time to the changes Aurora is making to the two dials on the wall. She fiddles until Jack arches his back into a permanent spasm, straining against the ties.
Aurora drops her hand and leaves it running.
The smell of burning flesh gets stronger and stronger, and I find myself missing the aroma of burning hair from earlier. His body is flexing so hard he can’t open his mouth to release his scream. Instead, all we can hear is a desperate muffled cry scraping against his vocal cords.
While it feels like forever, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes for Jack’s heart to give out. There’s a garbled choking noise before his cries die and all that remains is the persistent hum of the generator still running. Jack’s muscles don’t fully relax until Aurora turns the dials back to zero.
Charles’s heaving sobs pull our focus to him. He’s a mess—lost to his own terror—and running his mouth in a nonsensical stream of worthless apologies. More than one of us roll our eyes at his hysterics before Aurora nods towards Sinclair.
“He’s all yours, Sin.”
Sinclair isn’t one for theatrics. If it were Nico or even Aurora, I’m sure that they would be tossing Jack’s body aside and preparing the same fate for Charles here. But Sinclair is more understated. I doubt anything will ever scare Charles as much as the thought that he will suffer the same fate. His whimpers betray that much. Which is why he doesn’t see the next part coming.
Thinking that Sinclair is leaning down to loosen his ties in order to drag him over to the table, he’s not ready for the viper-like strike as Sin buries a large hunting knife in the centre of his chest. He glances down at the handle protruding from him while the life drains from his features, freezing his expression in a death mask of shock and surprise.
Fucking idiot, who’s got the time or patience to butt fuck another one of them with an electrified rod? We got all we needed from them, and Tweedledum is just as dead as Tweedledee. Time to move on.
Aurora takes her phone from her back pocket and walks out of the unit, assuming a perch on the side of the desk .
“Etta. Do you want the good news or bad news?” she says, pausing only momentarily before continuing, “Bad news is that I made a little bit of a mess. Good news is that we’re all big fans of this set up.” There’s some nodding while she listens to Etta's response before her eyes flick to mine and she pulls the phone away from her face to shout at me. “Did you fucking complain to Etta about the ventilation?”
“I did not make a complaint. I made a suggestion, and it’s a valid concern. No one likes the smell of burning flesh,” I say defensively.
“He’s got a point, phoenix. I’m gonna be smelling fricasseed frat boy for hours. These clothes are going straight in the trash when we get home. It’s bullshit when people say it smells like bacon. It smells like something up and died in a crock-pot,” Nico adds.
“Etta says you can all go fuck yourselves and you're welcome for having it ready on short notice,” Aurora calls out to us before lowering her voice. They talk back and forth for a while before she ends the call.
“Etta says to roll down the shutters and leave it for the clean-up crew. They’ll be a couple of hours. Apparently, there was an incident on the North side. Some local heavies decided to pick a fight with some businesses under our protection. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t end well for them when Leandro turned up,” Aurora relays.
“You gotta love Leandro. He gets the job done,” Benny pipes up.
“There’s no denying protection was the best fit for him,” I say, nodding my agreement.
“I wouldn’t fuck with him,” Sinclair adds as he picks his stuff up from the desk and packs it away. “I got dropped here so we can all head back together.”
“There’s a garage through that door. Pick-up’s through there,” Nico says.
“Let’s go then. And you’re not wrong. I need at least three showers to get the smell of burning asshole out of my hair,” Aurora shouts back to us.
“Thanks for that image. Coulda done without that, mia guerrierotta .”