Scarred Regrets (Bellandi Crime Syndicate 5)

72

IRINA

Rafael and Calix flanked me, the Bellandi warehouse looming over us as they guided me from the SUV. The dirt and grime of the infamous torture house settled over me, and I wondered where the woman I’d once been lived now that she’d left me.

There was no whisper of her voice in my ear. No reminder of my humanity to plague me as I prepared to face the girl—no, the young woman—who’d nearly destroyed me. “You good?” Calix asked, his voice gentle in contrast to the hardness of Rafael on my other side.

They walked me to the door, Rafael moving to pull it open as I stepped inside. The moment it closed, the scent of death and decay surrounded me.

“I’m okay,” I whispered, my heart climbing into my throat. They’d tried to warn me of what I might see, of the things that would haunt my dreams for years to come if I walked into that freezer. Rafael had turned it into a medieval torture chamber since coming from Ibiza, the evidence of it marking every corner.

“What are those?” I asked, staring at the jars that lined the wall on the aisle the two men led me down. Eyeballs floated in some kind of clear liquid, staring out and unseeing as they seemed to watch me walk along the path.

“Those would be the eyes of Darragh’s men who watched him rape you,” Rafael said, his voice cool and disinterested. “Your husband had planned to give you Darragh’s cock on a stick as a gift, but I understand you made that an impossibility.”

Was it weird to feel regret for ruining Scar’s gift if it was a severed cock on a stick?

“That makes me feel oddly sad,” I said, glancing over at Calix where he laughed under his breath. It was more muted than normal, hesitant in the grief he felt. He might not have known Simon as well as some of the others, but a death was a death.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said, catching my wrist and pulling me to a stop outside the freezer door.

“He’s right,” Rafael said, raising his chin. “The Bellandis may not like to kill women, but I assure you I have no such qualms when it comes to someone who betrays me. I will make sure she suffers for what she did to you.”

Glancing up to his mismatched eyes, I knew he meant every word. He would not hesitate to torture and kill a seventeen year old woman, because her crimes justified it.

But I needed to understand. I needed that closure.

“I can do it. I need to do it,” I said, uncertain if I was trying to convince them or myself. Rafael studied my face for a moment before he nodded solemnly and pulled the freezer door open.

I stepped into the open doorway, the first thing that bombarded me the moment the air rushed out of the room was the smell.

Then came the screams.

“Where the fuck is he?” Ryker grunted, shoving an ice pick through a man’s hand and crucifying him to the twisted and bent cross hanging from the opposite wall.

“Rafe likes to play games with religion. It’s a long story involving his daddy dearest,” Calix said, murmuring the words at my back as I stepped into the space.

“He’ll do much worse to me if I fucking tell you,” the man snarled, curling his fingers around the ice pick as Ryker moved to the other hand.

Scar hauled a limp body out of a chair, dragging it to the corner where he deposited it into a pile of death. Corpses stacked upon one another, waiting to go to the incinerator and be turned to ash.

Madison stood in the center of it all, her blond hair matted and stuck to her face. She trembled on wobbly legs, her arms tied above her head as she dangled from the ceiling. Her bare toes hardly touched the floor, her body clothed against the cold air in the freezer even as her toes turned blue.

“My brother will make you wish you never touched me. You thought what he did to you before was bad?” she asked, her mouth twisting as she peeled her lips back to reveal her teeth. “There will be nothing but ribbons of skin left of you when he’s done.”

“Your brother?” I asked, understanding dawning over me. I didn’t know when or why he’d decided to put his sister in that basement, maybe to listen to any plans the women might have formulated among themselves.

Acting as a mole, betraying those who she should have had understanding and compassion for. Or maybe it was some other reason entirely. In the end, it didn’t matter.

I lifted the bag off my shoulder, staring down at the inky black hair held within. Darragh’s blue eyes were open, staring up at mine lifelessly as I reached a hand into the blood-filled pouch and grabbed him by those strands of hair.

Lifting it from the bag, I glanced over toward Scar and watched him grin in amusement. He had left with Ryker to hunt down Madison the night before, leaving me to struggle through my nightmares alone for the first time in weeks.

If he hadn’t found her so quickly, I might have wanted her to suffer more for the fact that I didn’t have my husband beside me in bed at night.

Pulling Darragh’s severed head free, I lifted it until my arm extended in front of me, dangling it directly in front of Madison’s face and watching as her brow furrowed.

There was a moment when she tried to understand what she was seeing, when she fumbled to grasp her new reality.

Her mouth parted in shock as her brain finally processed the face staring back at her. I tossed Darragh’s head at her feet, the stub where his throat had been touching her toes when it stopped rolling.

“You fucking bitch!” she screamed, lunging for me and fighting against the binds that held her suspended.

“Now you sound just like him. I see the family resemblance,” I said, leaning forward. I caught her swinging body, ceasing her struggles with my blood-covered hands on her hips. “My only regret is that I cannot do to you what was done to me. That none of these men are foul enough to touch you, unlike your disgusting dog of a brother.”

“You’re pathetic,” she laughed. “Relying on your man to do your dirty work. You going to let him kill me? Do you know how turned on men get when they kill a woman? How much their blood pumps down to that dangling piece of flesh between their legs?”

Her voice carried between us, the sweet timbre of it stained and tainted with the filth in her words. Words that no teenage girl should ever speak, let alone have intimate knowledge of.

Torn between the fact that Madison—if that even was her name—needed help and the fact that she’d insinuated my husband would be turned on by the flesh of her body, I hovered at the edge of a cliff.

At the brink of the death of all that I’d been before.

“He always did watch me a little too intently,” she said, looking out the side of her eye toward where Scar watched in disinterest.

He quirked a brow, channeling the kind of arrogance I would have expected to find on Rafael Ibarra’s face when something disappointed him. “I’d watch a rat eat its own tail, too. Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart.”

“You are barely even a woman,” I said, snagging Madison’s attention as I spoke. I leaned in, whispering the following words. “If I was actually threatened by you, I’d kill you myself and then fuck Scar on your bleeding corpse.”

The sound of Calix’s hiss and Rafael’s stunned laughter sounded behind me.

“Definitely a Regas,” Calix muttered.

I turned toward my husband, holding out a hand for him to come and stand beside me. He obliged, placing a knife in my hand when he approached. I stared down at it, recognizing the blade the moment my hand curled around it.

Darragh’s.

I leaned in, holding Madison’s stunned gaze with mine as I took Scar’s hand and covered mine with it. He gripped my hand. I grasped her brother’s knife.

“But you aren’t worth shit,” I finished, touching the tip of the dagger to her sternum. Scar adjusted the angle, guiding me with his hand on mine as we thrust it up between her ribs.

She gasped, her eyes dropping to stare at the spot where we’d stabbed her.

Scar shifted as she bled, wrapping his arms around me from behind and changing hands. As soon as he had a better grip, he shoved my arm forward. Running her through, stabbing until the hilt touched her shirt, I felt the moment the flesh of her heart gave way. Felt the sudden expulsion of even more blood that covered my palm, staining Scar and me with her death.

Together.

Some people were worth helping. Some people were too far gone. In the end, a person came down to the series of choices we made. Nothing defined us but who we chose to be and who we chose to hurt.

I chose to hurt the fucking cunt who had almost lost me my sanity, and I would sleep like a baby at night knowing that vengeance was mine.