Page 49 of The Don’s Omega

When I don’t speak, he adds, “I have no idea who hired me.”

“I thought you couldn’t say no to the person who hired you.” I laugh humorlessly. “How’s that work if you don’t know who hired you?”

His eyes flicker. “I… I just got a feeling I couldn’t say no.”

Carlo rolls his eyes. “Jesus Christ, this guy’s not too bright, is he?”

“Fuck you,” Renzo snarls at Carlo.

“No, thanks,” Carlo says drolly. “I don’t fuck dead men.”

I sigh. “I need a name, Renzo. Who hired you?”

Renzo licks his lips. “I… I got a call. I never met anyone.”

“Last chance, Renzo. Who hired you?” I pick up the knife from the table. The blade is short and curved and very sharp. I keep all my tools sharp because dull instruments make everything so much more work.

“I told you.” Renzo’s voice is harder now. He thinks he can outlast me. Outlast the pain. “I don’t know names.”

I tilt my head, holding his obstinate gaze. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen, Renzo. I’m going to ask you the same question, and if you give me the same answer, I’m going to take something from you. A finger. An ear. Something you’ll miss. And then I’ll ask again. And we’ll keep going, you and I, round after round, until one of two things happens. Either you tell me the truth, or you run out of things I can take.”

Renzo narrows his eyes. “I don’t know who hired me.”

“Okay,” I say quietly, pulling on latex gloves. “We’ll do it your way.”

I start with his right ear.

The knife is sharp enough that the first cut is almost surgical. Renzo screams. It’s a raw, guttural sound. It fills the basement and bounces off the cinder block, dying somewhere in the soundproofing. Gino, in his chair a few feet away, begins hyperventilating. Blood runs down the side of Renzo’s neck and soaks into the collar of his shirt. The ear is still attached but barely, hanging by a strip of cartilage.

I wipe the blade on my pant leg and squat in front of him. His face is white. His breathing is ragged, sawing in and out through clenched teeth.

“Who hired you, Renzo?”

“Fuck you.” He spits at my feet.

I lift one brow. “Wrong answer.”

“Like I said,” Carlo mutters. “He’s not very bright.”

I finish the ear. It comes away cleanly and I set it on the metal table beside the pliers. The sound Renzo makes when he sees it there, separated from his body and sitting on a steel surface, is not a scream. It’s something worse. A moan that comes from the deepest, most animal part of a man’s brain, the part that understands on a cellular level that something has been lost that cannot be returned.

“I’m going to let you sit there and think about the situation you’re in, Renzo. No one is going to save you. This person you’re loyal to doesn’t give a shit about you. I can take you apart piece by piece until you’re dead, or you can give me what I want and this will be over.”

I give him ten minutes. I sit in a folding chair and I wait. Patience is the weapon most people underestimate. Pain opens the door, but it’s the silence afterward that breaks men. The silence is where a man sits and contemplates what’s coming next. The imagination is always worse than reality, and Renzo’s imagination has a freshly severed ear to fuel it.

At the seven-minute mark, his breathing changes. The rigid, defiant set of his body begins to soften. Not surrender, not yet, but the beginning of it. He’s weighing his loyalty to whoever hired him against the very immediate reality of what I’m going to do to him next.

When the ten minutes is up, I stand and move to him again. “Let’s try again. Who hired you?”

His jaw is clenched so tight the tendons in his neck stand out like cables. Blood has soaked his collar and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone from the first ear. He’s pale, sweating, but his eyes are still hard. Still holding.

“I told you,” he rasps. “I don’t know names.”

I nod and pick up the knife from the table. Renzo’s gaze follows it the way a hawk watches a rabbit.

“You’ve got one ear left, Renzo. I want you to think about that. Really think about it.” I move behind him. He tries to turn his head to track me but I put my hand on his skull and hold it still. “One ear left. After that, I take something from between your legs. Maybe your balls. Maybe your cock. Maybe both.”

“If you’re going to kill me anyway, who cares what you take?” Renzo spits out.