Stephan

I shoved Carmine onto the plank in the basement of the warehouse with a gun to the back of his head. Nino strapped down his legs, and I worked on his arms and head, fastening Carmine to the wooden board so he couldn’t move an inch. He thought he could hold a knife to my brother’s throat and continue breathing.

What a stupid motherfucker.

Carmine was from the old regime. Nothing and no one could scare him. I had to look hard, but the fear was evident in his eyes. He hadn’t spoken since we dragged his sorry ass out of a whorehouse with his pants down, mid-blowjob. I’d tracked him down through a tip from a friend. Nino had the bright idea to ambush him while he was getting his dick sucked.

Because he’d wronged Nino more than me, I reached for the jug of water on the table behind me and handed it to Nino.

His eyes lit with excitement when he popped the top on the bottle. Nino wanted to be the one to make this man suffer. We’d made a deal that Carmine and his men were his kills. Their blood would be on his hands. And I would help him.

Nino tipped the bottle, dumping water in Carmine’s mouth and down his nose. He fought it, his body thrashing and begging to rip free from his shackles. Even the strongest men couldn’t handle being waterboarded. It was one of the cruelest forms of torture.

“Where’s Chris Rizzoli?” I yelled at Carmine, and Nino eased up for a second to give him a chance to answer.

A beat passed where Carmine turned his head to the side and coughed on the water.

“Answer me.” My voice echoed through the vacant room in the basement of the warehouse my father owned.

“You’re gonna kill me no matter what,” Carmine muttered, out of breath. “Go ahead and fucking do it.”

Nino repeated the same process as before. This asshole would tell us what we wanted, or he would drown to death. It was his choice. All we cared about was information. Carmine was right. He was a dead man no matter what. Chris Rizzoli and his new crew were traitors. He was a loose end our family had to tie up.

“Keep going,” I told Nino and then looked at Carmine. “Easy way or hard way, doesn’t matter to me. We can do this all night.”

Carmine wasn’t phased by our threat. He was a man of honor, willing to die for a pointless cause. Between my father’s connections and Senator Parisi’s, Chris and his men would pay for whatever information they had on the Senator. The cover-up was deep, that much was obvious.

But what the hell were they hiding that was important enough to go after our own men and start a war? I was helping Nino with Carmine to give him the revenge he deserved. But I was also pursuing Rizzoli because I wanted to know what secret he was hiding. If it warranted a full-scale search party, it had to be big.

Nino tipped the bottle over. It was like a flood taking Carmine under, as if he were being held under water. Men always caved under this much pressure. Over the years, I’d learned a lot of torture techniques in this room. I knew the scent of blood, bleach, and death anywhere. It was a familiar smell no one should have known by heart. But the abandoned warehouse where we tortured our victims was becoming like my second home.

My childhood was far from normal, and my adulthood was even more unusual. When kids my age were taught how to ride a bike, I was shown how to shoot a gun. I was a perfect shot by the time I was ten years old. With the cold metal in my hand and my finger on the trigger, I felt alive, in control. I was never more in my element. That’s how I knew my father made the right choice to raise Nino and me to become members of his army. No son of Giovanni DeLuca would be anything other than a Made man.

I laughed at Nino for the way he taunted Carmine. Every time he thought Nino would ease up, he went even harder on him. Nino loved the thrill of the kill, the high better than sex for him. Unlike my brother, I saw torture as a means to an end, though I would have been lying to myself if I didn’t admit I enjoyed a just kill on occasion. Some men had it coming to them.

I cupped my hand on Nino’s shoulder. “Take a break.”

Moving my hand from his shoulder, I stepped forward and hovered over Carmine. “One more chance, Carmine, before I shove that bottle down your fucking throat.”

“Fuck you, DeLuca,” Carmine spat, water and mucus streaming down his chin.

I looked at Nino and nodded at the water bottle next to Carmine’s head. Nino understood and drizzled some of the water on Carmine’s forehead. A wicked, joker like grin turned up the corners of Nino’s mouth as the water ran down Carmine’s nose and into his eyes. This was how he would die.