I pushed Lily past him. His eyes followed us all the way to the back of the corridor. When we turned the corner, we came face to face with a steel door, which was left ajar. A cry of pain carried out from below and made me shiver.
Lily clutched my arm, blue eyes wide. “What was that?”
I swallowed. I had a pretty good idea what was going on but I wasn’t going to tell her that. “I don’t know.” I took a step closer to the door, then hesitated. I couldn’t take Lily with me, but I couldn’t leave her alone in the hallway when there were so many creepy fucks running around. I opened the door and peered down a long, dark staircase. Light spilled out from somewhere in the basement. Lily was almost pressed against my back, her breath hot against my neck.
“You don’t want to go down there, right?” she whispered.
“Yes, but you will stay on the stairs.”
Lily followed me a few steps down before I gave her a warning look. “Stay there. Promise me.”
Another cry sounded from below.
Lily flinched. “Okay. I promise.”
I wasn’t sure if she meant it but she looked freaked out enough that I was willing to take the risk. I crept down the remaining steps, but halted on the last step, scared of what I might see. Exhaling, I stepped down and found myself in a huge basement. Bile shot up my throat. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what the mob did to their enemies, especially if they wanted to get information out of them, but hearing stories and actually coming face to face with the horrendous reality of it were two very different things.
I braced my hand against the rough wall, my fingers curling around the hard edge. Two men were bound to chairs. Matteo and a tall, heavily muscled guy seemed to be in charge of pressing information out of them, while Romero stood back, but he must have had some part in their torture too because his hands were covered in blood, and so were his clothes. But it was nothing compared to the sight of Matteo. His white shirt was covered in blood, his rolled up sleeves revealed blood-covered skin. There was red and red and red, so many different shades of it. But the worst, God the worst thing, was his face. There was no pity, no mercy, no nothing. There wasn’t excitement or eagerness either, that was what I tried to cling to. At least he didn’t get off on what he was doing. He didn’t seem to feel anything judging from his expression.
I’d always known his easy-going, playful, flirty attitude was a mask to cover up the ugly truth, but again knowing and having that knowledge confirmed in such a brutal way were two very different pair of shoes. Maybe if I’d been more naïve I could have convinced myself that Matteo was doing this because he’d had to bury his father today, because he was grief-stricken and needed an outlet for the pain, but I knew better. This was common mob business. Grief had nothing to do with it.
One of the tied up Russians was the man who’d hurt me and I knew that was why Matteo had chosen him as his victim.
I’d always wanted out of the world I’d been born in, this fucked up brutal world I knew, but in this moment I made the decision to actually try to flee. No matter the cost, no matter what it took and what I had to do, I would escape this hell. How could anyone want to stay when they saw this?
I knew people got used to these things, but I didn’t want to get used to them. I could already tell that I had less trouble with blood every time I saw it. How much longer until the sight of someone being tortured would do nothing for me? How much longer until the voice in my head that said the Russian bastard deserved it and would have done the same to me if given the chance, wasn’t a quiet whisper but a roaring shout?
Something brushed my arm and I jerked back, barely stifling a cry of surprise. Lily stood beside me, and then everything went very quickly. I opened my mouth to send her back up but at the same time her eyes settled on the scene in the center of the room, and I knew things would get very ugly. I’d heart Lily scream before but that had been nothing in comparison to the sound breaking free from her lips when she saw the blood and the men who’d lost it. Have you ever wondered about the sound fluffy lambs make when they are slaughtered? I imagined it was something like this.
I actually flinched away from Lily. Her eyes went wide, then dilated scarily, her face taking on an expression that scared the shit out of me. All eyes jerked toward us. Matteo released the Russian, narrowed his dark eyes at me, as if I was the one doing something wrong. Lily kept up her screaming, a high-pitched wail that made the hairs on my neck rise.
“Romero!” Matteo snarled, nodding toward my sister. “Take care of Liliana.”
Romero advanced on us. Tall and imposing.
Lily had always fawned over him, but now even she couldn’t see anything but the killer in him. His hands were red. Red from blood, and Lily completely lost her shit. I could only stare. I was unable to move. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice was telling me to talk to my sister, to try to calm her, to do something, anything, but that voice was drowned out by the terrified static filling my head.
The steel door slammed against the wall above our heads and then Luca was suddenly there. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Nobody replied.
Romero spoke to my sister in a soothing voice. “Calm down, Lily. Everything is okay.”
Really? The scene in front of us told a very different story. Nothing about this was okay.