Page 1 of Vow Of Fire

1

THE ART OF EXTRACTION

Dante

Ileaned against the far wall of the basement, arms crossed, studying the traitor tied to the chair.

Alberto Ferro was shaking, his face and hair slick with blood and sweat. His cheap suit was in shreds, torn when Rocco grabbed him off the street earlier today. His lip was split down the middle, blood mingling with saliva as he whimpered through his half-open mouth. His left eye was swollen shut, and a nasty bruise was forming on his right cheekbone.

It wasn’t pretty.

I’d given Rocco twenty minutes alone with him, and that had been enough. The guy was a quivering wreck.

The naked bulb hanging above the chair flickered in the dim light of the filthy warehouse. Rocco stood to the side, cracking his knuckles one at a time. The sound was unhurried, and all the more disturbing for it.

Alberto flinched, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him. Izzy had found Rocco a few years back at an underground boxing match, pulling him off some guy he was beating the shit out of on the pit floor. According to my sister, he’d been a monster down there.

My family paid him well to keep doing what he loved. Breaking people.

In the chair, Alberto wept.

I let him.

Six of my men were dead. Blake. Reggie. Cam. Three more whose families I’d visited only that morning, whose wives I’d looked in the eye and lied to.

No, they didn’t suffer. It was a quick death.

My jaw tightened. They didn’t need to know the truth.

But that wasn’t all. Three million in product gone. An entire fucking shipment. Our route into the country compromised. An ambush no one had seen coming, executed with information that could only have come from inside the gallery whose containers we’d used.

So Alberto could cry for as long as he wanted. I had time.

A long beat passed, after which I nodded at Rocco. He pursed his lips and melted into the shadows. His job was done. I’d take it from here.

“Alberto,” I said in a low voice, stepping out from the shadows. His unswollen eye widened, as if seeing me for the first time. Beneath the mess on his face, he paled.

“You know who I am?”

He nodded. “D—Dante Mar—Marc…” He couldn’t get the words out.

“That’s right.” I cut him off. “You and I are going to talk about last Tuesday night.”

He drew in a shuddering breath. “I don’t know anything about that. I told Mr. Rocco that⁠—”

I crouched in front of him, elbows on my knees. Close enough to smell the blood on his breath. We were eye to eye. This way I could read him better. I’d know if he was lying.

There was a click as Rocco let himself out.

The deserted warehouse sat in a rundown part of Brooklyn, sufficiently soundproofed and reinforced that no one would hear the screams of the people we brought here.

Nobody could get inside, either. Half the buildings in this neighborhood were condemned or owned by men like me. This one was both.

It stank of dust, diesel, and violence. Although we usually cleaned up the blood, there were still dark stains on the ground and a faint metallic stench in the air.

The cops didn’t come around here much, probably because nothing that went down in these parts was ever solved. It didn’t do anything for their closure rates.

Suited me fine.