A Thousand Cuts (Underworld Kings)

Harris was not important enough to interview anyone, he was just a uniform. But Detective Andrews had taken notice of him, one of the few in the department who didn’t seem to be on the Don’s payroll. He was conducting the interview with the boyfriend—fiancé, Harris mentally corrected himself, remembering the diamond sparkling on the girl’s bloody finger.

Eighteen was young to be engaged. Too young. Harris remembered those kinds of couples from school, who could not be separated, making permanent decisions at an age where almost everything was temporary. They were intense. They were the kinds of kids who thought Romeo and Juliet was a romance—as if a suicide pact was anything but fucking toxic.

He was first on the scene, Cristian Romano. He was home alone getting ready for the party, no security footage placing him at the scene when the murders took place. A strong suspect, since he was from the wrong side of the tracks, in love with the daughter. It could’ve been that she changed her mind, had come to her senses and decided that marriage was the wrong idea. A young boy, fuck, any man who gets rejected, is a dangerous creature.

The kid was apparently part of the fold, since the Don swore black and blue that there was no way he could’ve had anything to do with this. That was a big statement in his business, where even those related by blood could turn in an instant.

Regardless of the Don’s insistence, they had to interview the kid. Even though the entire department was a corrupt joke, they had to at least pretend to follow protocols. Harris also knew that Andrews suspected the kid. He was a year older than the daughter, having graduated from a fancy private school the previous year. His employer on record was ‘Bella’, the famous Italian restaurant in the city that was known for its pasta alla Norma and the fact it was owned by the Catalano family. He apparently worked as a bookkeeper for the restaurant and the chain of laundromats also owned by the family. Handling the money was a super fucking important job, since those businesses laundered what Harris could guess was in the millions of dollars. One mistake could mean the entire organization could come crumbling down.

And the Don had given this responsibility to the kid fucking his daughter.

Clearly he was made or at least in the process.

Which meant that the gate guard would be used to letting him into the family estate without hesitation, that the guards wouldn’t be defensive as he walked up to them, the daughter would not put up a fight as he shot her eight times. After brutally raping her, that was.

He hadn’t put up any kind of fight when Andrews brought him in for the interview, though the Don had. He’d tried to insist that his high paid, slimy lawyer be there, but the kid had waved it off.

So he was sitting here, chain smoking, without representation. It could be a huge break in the case. He was just a kid, after all. Or that’s what Harris had thought before he sat in on the interview.

Entering the room after Andrews, he soon realized that no vestige of childhood or innocence remained inside Cristian Romano.

They had barely sat down when the kid spoke first.

“You think it was me, right?” he asked, voice expressionless, eyes dull. Everything about him was flat. Emotionless. Except the way his hands shook as he took a drag of his smoke.

Harris had seen a lot of guilty men unblinking in the face of interrogation, cool as anything, speaking in similarly flat tones, regarding him with the same dull eyes. The perfect act.

But he’d never seen someone’s hands shake like that. Like it was coming from the fucking core of them.

No, this kid wasn’t guilty. Harris had started training as soon as he turned eighteen and had been a cop for four years. It only took him six months to spot guilt. Innocence, not so much, because everyone was guilty of something. This kid was guilty of loving the wrong person, marrying into the wrong family, one where death was a way of life, and he had not been prepared for it.

“It’s always the boyfriend. Or the husband,” Cristian continued, taking another long drag. “Because I loved her so fucking much, it almost makes sense that I’d be the one who killed her. Because a love like that, it doesn’t end any other way, right? There’s no happy ending when you’ve got a feeling like that. It’s not allowed.”

He crushed his smoke in the ashtray in the middle of the table, immediately lighting another.

“Human beings are not meant to be that happy,” he added after an inhale. “We fuck it up for ourselves instead of the world fucking it up. So in your eyes, it makes sense for me to have killed her, because then it wouldn’t hurt so much if she left me by other means.”