Mateo
Ithadonlybeen a few days since Cecilia came to the high-rise. Ronan was coming undone little by little with each passing day. She was like a disease spreading through us, taking over him and turning him into the worst version of himself.
The problem wasn’t her though, it was that he couldn’t have her.
She was making Santo weak too. He flat out told Zerkos he was out of the trials this year and wouldn’t be doing any of it. Lucky for him, Ronan wasn’t the type to put up a fight when we set boundaries. It was probably his best quality as a leader, he understood that if you pushed someone past a certain brink there was a risk that you would never get them back.
Our friendship was too important, and the trials aside, there was a lot more the Black Crow Brotherhood had their hands in than vigilante human traffic rescues. Santo’s time was probably better spent teaching the newer guys down on the third floor how to file the guns or working with our lawyer Dezmond to purchase our next real estate investment.
I personally thought his talents were best put to use figuring out which judge we were going to extort next. The law around here was crooked as hell and Santo had a knack for finding people and finding out what they were hiding from everyone else. Anytime a new District Attorney or Judge was appointed to our area, it was only a matter of a few days before Santo would show up to their house with an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Threats worked, but there was nothing that kept someone in power under your heel like blackmail did, and Santo was good at getting the dirt. All his years spent scuffling in the grime with Los Muertos turned him into someone we valued higher than ourselves. He was the equivalent of a Swiss Army Knife, dressed up as a gang leader.
Now Cecilia was undeniably hot as fuck, but I couldn’t comprehend how someone had so much power over my brothers, and it was concerning to see them fold like paper under her weight. I was here to help Berserk get his revenge, and I’d keep reminding him of it too.
I walked out from my bedroom into our kitchen, lured by the smell of something delicious and buttery. My eyes landed on Santo in the kitchen flipping an omelet, and I scrunched my eyebrows at him in confusion.
“Wait, are you cooking for her?” I asked, and he shrugged his shoulders at me. Santo was a damn good cook. It wasn’t out of the norm for him to be cooking something up, he was basically the only one out of us who used the kitchen. The problem was that he was especially cooking a meal for one of our prisoners.
“So, you aren’t going to work on breaking her, and you are going to cook hot meals for her. Just her. Specifically. Is that right?” I asked him, and again he just shrugged his shoulders at me. I grunted my irritation at him, and he dropped the omelet onto the plate before setting the pan back down on the stove.
“Listen, I don’t expect you to understand, but I don’t need this shit. I’m not taking it from Zerkos, and I’m sure as hell not taking it from you either. Cecilia was my friend. I’m not hurting her. We’re just as bad as the people we try to save the others from if we do this to her.” He grabbed the plate and turned his back to me as he made his way towards the elevator. Probably taking the bitch her food right now.
I had seen him gut men like a fish, but he had morals whispering in his ear over this.
His words were echoing in my mind, and I tried my best to pretend like they weren’t phasing me, but I was only lying to myself. And what good did that shit do? The pressure in my head was building up again so I dragged myself back to my bedroom and opened the Cello case.
I stroked the strings with the horsehair bow until the sonata played its way out of me, but the pounding against my brain wouldn’t let up as usual. I used a bit more pressure against the strings, almost pushing a fine line of playing through my emotions and flat out abusing my instrument.
“ARGH!” I yelled, throwing the bow, and knocking the cello off to the side in anger. I looked up to see Santo standing in the doorway and he lifted an eyebrow at me. “Fuck off!” I shouted and he pulled up the corner of his lip into a smile and stepped across the hall into his own bedroom.
I picked up my ninety-year-old cello and silently apologized to it for my previous outburst, before putting it back into its leather casing. I reached into my nightstand for the jar of weed and the grinder and began the ritualistic process of rolling a joint. Once it was rolled, I sparked it up and opened up one of my bedroom windows. My phone almost immediately buzzed, and I looked down at it.
Berserk: I know you’re gonna go to the rooftop with that joint right?
I sent a middle finger emoji and took a drag. I didn’t know how that fucker could smell that shit from four floors down, but he could. I exhaled and immediately the medicinal properties of it started easing the high-pitched whining in my ears. My shoulders dropped as I started to relax for the first time in days. Just as I was sinking down into the chair closest to me and closing my eyes to fade away into the depths of my own mind the blaring of my phone’s alarm rang out jarring my eyes open.
Every four hours, like clockwork, someone was down there. Food, bathroom, torture, sleep. That was the schedule until they broke. I had already been down there this morning for their usual wake up call, but with Santo bowing out of the game early I was stuck pulling extra shifts in the kennels. I silenced the alarm and reluctantly made my way down.
I could hear the two Russians speaking to each other in their language before I even got to the kennels. Chiyo, the Asian one, was laying facing the wall with her back to the world, while Cecilia laid on her bed. Her entire upper body was hanging off the edge, her head almost grazing the floor as her black hair draped all over the concrete floor.
“What are you doing?” I asked her while turning the key into the lock of the kennel door before pushing it open.
“Making Serotonin,” she answered before getting herself right side up. “Being upside down makes me want to kill myself a little less.”
“Well, I guess it’s a good thing there’s nothing in here you can hurt yourself with then.” I let her know, but mentally I was scanning the room to be sure, because that was a possibility, I didn’t think any of us would be prepared for right now. I sure as shit didn’t want to deal with a dead chick, and Zerkos would for sure lose his mind if she off-ed herself. I pulled the string out of her hoodie completely and she shouted, “Hey!” in protest at me.
I walked over to the Russian girls, Anya and Oksana and took their hoodie strings as well for good measure, before doing the same to Chiyo. Never had this come up as an issue before but you never fucking know.
“Across the hall. Let’s go. You know the drill already.” I herded Cecilia over to the other kennel across from their sleeping quarters and the look she gave me was almost venomous, enough to kill but I just shoved her in carelessly.
I secured her wrists to the cuffs and chains screwed into the wall so that her arms were lifted high above her head. She didn’t look away from me the entire time, her eyes searching mine, but for what I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what she was looking for in them, because nothing good was left in me anymore. She wouldn’t find it here with me. I bent down to lock her feet into place against the wall.
“You won’t break me,” She spat the words out at me. “Stronger hijos de puta have not broken me; you think you can?”
There was a sinister smile painting her face and I rose up to meet her, grabbing her chin firmly between my fingers, “Either way it’ll be fun to try, don’t you think?”