Page 37 of Dangerous Deception

15

RAFFAELE

Flesh impacts flesh with a slick, wetshlucksound. Skin splits under the impact, bones creak and complain, and a muffled grunt of pain rises from the victim beneath me.

Not that I will ever call him that.

This twisted excuse for a human being put Adelina in the worst position possible, and I’m going to make him suffer for it. Since I rescued Adelina from that foul apartment complex, this scumbag by the name of Jim has been subject to lengthy and prolonged pain at the hands of Vito. Something I would have spent every second doing myself, but I couldn’t pull myself away from Adelina until now. She asked me to stay with her, and that is a request I will never refuse.

Especially not now.

But given that she’s resting after spending the day grieving her lost friend, I have enough time to finally get some real answers from this piece of shit.

Jim gurgles around his blood-soaked gag, pulling frantically at his rope bindings but to no avail. Vito is an expert at tying knots, and this fucker isn’t going anywhere tied upright to several wooden boards. I roll my head around my shouldersand deliver another fierce blow to his badly bruised ribs. Then another, and another. At this moment, he’s nothing more than a meat punching bag earning every blow from my anger and frustration.

Blood trickles down his torso from the hundreds of incisions Vito made all over his body. His hair is gone, badly shaved with scissors that knocked and scraped his skin. One nipple was lost to some form of torture, and the mangled mess of his pathetic, disgusting cock between his legs brings me minimal joy. He’s lucky he’s even still alive, given how strongly I desire to kill him repeatedly for every second he held my girl hostage and assaulted her.

I beat him until my shoulders ache and sweat rolls down my spine, gathering in the waistband of my pants. Panting, I deliver a final blow to the bastard’s blackened stomach and step back. Vito appears out of the shadows with a towel and hands it to me with a grim look.

He shares my anger.

While Vito has no emotional connection to Adelina, her capture and assault reflect badly on how capable he is at ensuring the protection of me and my people. Revenge is also dear to his heart.

I step back and allow Vito to proceed with the next step in Jim’s torture as I dry the sweat from my skin. Vito pulls a lever to the side of the device Jim is strapped to, and it violently tips backward. Jim whimpers in fear, his chest heaving with desperate breaths he’s barely able to get through his broken nose. Vito drops a wooden bucket underneath the man’s head, then pumps the lever so that he’s angled down and his head hangs below his feet.

Then Vito grabs a bottle of liquid from the nearby table, places a dirtied rag over Jim’s face and nose, and pours.

The desperate, gurgled sounds of waterboarding fill the small basement cell that will be Jim’s crypt. Not that the bastard deserves anything so elegant.

As Vito works, I lean back against my table near the door. The laptop sitting there pulls my attention, and I tap the spacebar with a heavy heart. A video begins to play, filling the air with Adelina’s panicked begging and sobbing in between the noises of torture. It hadn’t taken long to track down the livestream she had been featured on, and outside of torturing Jim, Vito was working on getting the entire black market site shut down.

Italian hands don’t deal in human trafficking.

It’s a line we have never andwillnever cross.

Watching Adelina’s torture is something I will never share with her. Her pain is her own in this regard, but I needed to know exactly what happened to her, right down to the last minuscule detail. Jim’s fate was sealed the moment he slipped something into Adelina’s drink at the bar, but to make sure his last moments on this earth are appropriately painful, I had to know.

The twisted laughter of Jim and his now-dead companion, Geoff, rises from the screen, sending waves of hotragethrough my blood.

Jim may have been the one who drugged her, but Geoff was the one who assaulted her. I killed him far too quickly.

Tossing my rag onto the table, I slam the laptop shut and motion to Vito to bring an end to his torture. Vito empties the last of his bottle all over Jim, then pumps the lever to bring Jim back to an upright position.

His face is a deep shade of purple and his abdomen concaves with each desperate, meager breath he’s able to take in through his gag. Vito drags the soaked cloth away from his face, and Jim splutters as the gag is torn from his split, bleeding lips.

“Fuck!” he croaks hoarsely, coughing up a lungful of water. “F–Fuck…”

“Pathetic,” I growl, crossing my arms across my chest and gripping tightly onto my biceps to prevent me from pulverizing the bastard for speaking. “I’m only going to give you one chance to give me the answers I need, do you understand? One chance. Speak out of turn and I’ll rip off that pathetic thing you call a dick and shove it down your throat. Got it?”

Jim’s head sags forward, and his arms tremble from trying to keep it up. He nods as blood drools from his lower lip.

“This.” I tilt my head back to the laptop. “Who runs the auction?”

Jim shrugs. “I–I got no idea.”

I step forward, and Jim surges back against his bindings in a panic.

“I s–swear, man! I got no idea, that’s not my gig! It’s not!”

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