35
SCAR
Enzo arrived at the mansion a short while later, meeting me in the hallway where I went to talk with him before Madison and I left. Samara refused to leave Irina’s side, staring at her still form on the bed as if she could will life back into her.
Irina thought I was foolish enough to believe she was sleeping, but I knew the rhythm of her breathing in sleep well from all my months of watching her on the cameras I’d installed in her apartment.
Only after she was safe had I been able to watch the footage of the day she’d been captured. Only then had I been brave enough to watch what she’d endured and how she’d fought. She was stronger than anyone gave her credit for, a force to be reckoned with, if only she allowed herself to see it.
She’d come out on the other side of this if I had to drag her there kicking and screaming, but, in the meantime, I had other people to make squeal.
“Eyes on her at all times,” I ordered Enzo, watching as he nodded back to me.
“I won’t let anything happen to her,” he agreed. There was something solemn in his voice, something dejected in the way the man held his head. Considering the fact that he and Sadie had survived the attack at the warehouse and managed to kill the people who’d tried to hurt them, there was only one thing that could be bothering the man. “It’s my fault,” he added, nodding his head toward the bedroom door behind me.
“It’s not,” I responded, as much as I wanted to blame everyone and everything for the fact that she’d been taken in the first place. Having seen the number of men and the weapons Bryan had faced, I couldn’t even find it in me to blame the man who’d been charged that day with her safety.
He’d tried. Tried to buy her enough time to escape, even knowing there wasn’t a chance for his survival.
“Should have put more than one man on her,” Enzo said, shaking his head. “We knew there was a risk.”
“We’re also in the middle of a war. We don’t have enough men to double up on everyone all the time. She’s safe here now. That will have to be enough,” I said, refusing to accept anything else. If I blamed my friends for what had happened to Irina, I’d never be able to get through the day.
I needed them more than they needed me. Needed to lean on them in a time of crisis, and the Bellandi Estate was the safest place I could keep Irina locked away until the war was over.
Until the fuckers who had touched her were six feet under.
I poked my head into the bedroom, gesturing at Madison to come with me. In another world, I might have felt guilty for what I was about to expose a teen girl to. The world where butterflies were crushed beneath the shoes of men who didn’t deserve to look at them.
But not in this one.
* * *
Rafael greeted me outside the warehouse, his head tilted to the side as he watched Madison climb down from the passenger seat. “Interesting choice of companion,” he commented, giving her a once over. I was sure it was odd for him to look at a girl Madison’s age and think of the abuse she’d nearly suffered.
His future wife was around the same age.
I grunted in response, striding past him and tearing open the warehouse door. I motioned Madison inside, letting the door swing shut behind me while Rafael Ibarra chuckled darkly.
The man had probably killed men for less.
He pulled it open behind us, calling out to me as we approached the corner that would take me to the freezer. “Scar,” he said, something in his deep voice making me pause. “You should know that my methods are a little more...extreme than your executioner’s. Make sure she is ready for what she will find inside.”
More extreme than a man who liked to flay his victims alive.
Lovely.
I shoved forward, rounding the corner with Madison trailing less confidently at my heels. Simon stood outside the freezer doors for once, his face looking green in a way that I wouldn’t have expected from the man who was very familiar with Ryker’s methods.
I didn’t pause.
Simon pulled the door open, unleashing the scent of death through the warehouse. The metallic tinge of blood assaulted my senses, sending me staggering back a step as I halted before entering the freezer. Simon nodded, pinching his nose closed with two fingers and nodding me in. “Hurry the fuck up so I can close this thing.”
From inside, somebody screamed. The sound was nearly as high-pitched as Irina in her moments of terror, and something in it soothed me.
Even if she never had to face it, Irina would have the vengeance she deserved.
I’d bring her a present from each of the men who’d touched her, and one day, when she was stronger, I’d lay them at her feet as an apology for how greatly I’d failed her.
Sucking back a deep lungful of even remotely fresh air, I stepped into the room. Madison followed behind me, her eyes wide with terror as she looked around the warehouse freezer that had transformed since Rafael had come to Chicago.
Ryker was more understated in his methods, preferring to get his hands dirty and carve people with knives. Rafael had a deep appreciation for eras long since gone, placing great value on the archaic torture methods of medieval times.
A metal bath sat in one corner of the room, a closed heating unit placed beneath it so the water within boiled. Next to the tub, the body of what had once been a man sat leaning against the wall with his hands chained above his head. He was nude, the entirety of his body covered in burns and blisters while he shivered in the cold air that bit at his melted skin.
On the other side of the room, a man hung upside down from an apparatus attached to the ceiling. His legs were spread, each foot hooked into a boot that held him in place. He too was naked, his groin sawed through until just below his abdomen. What had once been his cock was nothing but a shredded mess of flesh, but the wound barely bled.
Not with all the blood rushing to his head, prolonging his life and his suffering.
Behind me, Madison vomited, the acrid smell blending in with what was already permeating the freezer. “What the fuck were you thinking bringing her here?” Ryker asked, stepping away from his latest victim. His hands were drenched in blood, the red staining all the way up his forearms as he deposited his favored filet knife on the bench where he kept his tools. The man he’d been dealing with sat in the chair, his head lolled to the side even though he remained conscious.
Half his hair was peeled off, Ryker having cut the skin beneath it to reveal the raw flesh and his skull. I raised a brow as I stared at the unusual placement for the flaying.
Ryker usually preferred fleshier areas to work with.
“He had pretty hair,” he said, shrugging his shoulders as he looked back at his victim for a moment. There was a smirk on his face when he turned his attention to me once again. “Not so pretty now.”
Rafael stepped into the freezer, eyeing where Madison had heaved with distaste and stepping around it as if the death surrounding him was somehow favorable. “Just because you do not have nice hair, does not mean you must vilify those who do,” he said, picking up one of the long needles off the table of tools.
He went to one of the men who appeared to be unharmed as of yet, standing in front of him while the man fought against the restraints strapping him to the metal chair beneath him. Rafael tested the end of the needle, pricking his finger with the point and watching as blood welled. “What do you value the most? Your eyes or your cock?” he asked the man, tapping the needle against his own cheek while he thought it over.
I left him to it, turning my attention back to Madison. “Which one raped Irina?” I asked her, not daring to touch her to soothe the sickness in her body. I might tolerate the touch of my butterfly better now, but I didn’t dare to assume that would carry over to others, as well.
“I don’t know for sure,” she said, forcing herself to stand up straight. She met my eyes with hers, seeming to not dare to look around and take in the carnage of the rest of the room.
Watching as Rafael grabbed a pair of forceps and grabbed the shriveled cock of his victim with them, I couldn’t quite force myself to blame her. Especially not when he inserted the needle into the man’s urethra, the screams bouncing off the freezer walls until I swore I would still hear them ringing when I was dead and buried.
“What do you mean?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest. The entire reason I’d agreed to bring the girl was so she could identify which men I needed to take a piece of before I killed them.
“They took her upstairs. I can’t say for sure if they touched her, but I heard them talking when they brought her back to the basement,” Madison said, swallowing loudly. She glanced over at where Ryker had resumed his scalping, despite Rafael’s poke about his own cropped hair.
“What did they say?”
“I think…” She paused, turning her attention back to me. “I think they mostly just watched. Darragh was the one who raped her.”
“And which one is Darragh?” I asked, staring at the men around the room. I hoped it wasn’t the man who’d been boiled alive. His cock would be unrecognizable, and I hoped Irina would remember what it looked like, so she could shove it up his own ass one day when I finally permitted his death.
“None of them,” Madison said, shaking her head. “Darragh isn’t here.”
“The man who raped Irina isn’t here?” I asked, everything in my body stilling. She shook her head, her eyes wide in fear. I forced my feet to move to the closest person, the boiled husk of a man who lay on the floor. Grabbing him by the hair, I tore his neck back so sharply that his burns cracked and bled. “Did you touch Irina Ryan?” I asked.
He shook his head, screwing his eyes closed against the pain. “No,” he mumbled, his voice barely audible with the strain it took. I imagined the heat of being boiled alive did a number on the esophagus.
“Who did?” I asked him, leaning into his space so he could see me when those eyes peeled open.
He swallowed, shaking his head when I pressed my knuckles into the worst of the burns on his chest. “Just Darragh. Wanted her all to himself.”
“Who cut her? Who beat her?”
“Was all him. Did her arm when he took her. Did her leg and beat her when she protected the girl. He cut her stomach while he fucked her on the desk,” he wheezed, his stare turning to a glare when I released his hair. “Shoved his favorite knife handle inside her fucking pussy when he was done with it, and then fucked her ass while she was bleeding. Does that answer your question, Bellandi scum?”
I went still, my body sinking into the place where nothing existed but the rage building inside of me. “I have one question left,” I said, the calmness in my voice matching the casualness of my posture as I strode to the table and picked up a knife. “Did you watch?”
“Of course I fucking watched. She’s a hot little piece and she screamed so fucking pretty,” he snarled, practically begging me for the death he thought I would deliver in my rage.
I nodded, pursing my lips as I tore his head back once again. The knife touched the skin just beneath his eye, pressing in until blood welled beneath it. Madison gagged behind me as I shoved through the eyelid he squeezed shut in a pathetic bid to save his eye. I curved the tip of the knife around the edge of the eyeball itself, severing it from the connective tissue holding it in place while he screamed.
It fell into my palm with a pop as it came free, the wetness of it making me cringe. Rafael helpfully handed me a jar from the shelf, letting me drop the unseeing orb into the glass. I moved to the other, watching as Rafael leaned forward and poked at the empty eye socket with the needle he’d shoved up the other guy’s cock.
“Hope he was clean. Syphilis of the eye socket sounds slightly unpleasant to me.”
“I think that’s probably the least of his worries at the moment,” Rafe said, leaning back and staring down at the man as I pulled the second eyeball free and dropped it into the jar. “It is amazing how much a face resembles a skull once you remove the eyes.”
“Amazing isn’t quite the word I would use,” Madison croaked, curling into herself by the freezer door. I should let her go wait outside with Simon, but something about her being there felt right.
Like she belonged in that room, witnessing the destruction the Bellandis would sow when one of our own was hurt.
There were five other men in the room. Five men who might have witnessed Irina’s pain. Ten eyeballs to remove.
“Have they told you anything?” I asked, turning to Ryker in question as I stepped up to the next man. The one hanging upside down would have to wait until Rafael was done playing with him. Cutting out his eyeballs would give the blood rushing to his head a place to drain, speeding his death far too much for the devil’s taste.
“They don’t have a clue where Tiernan and Darragh are. We’ve asked, and I think we’ve properly motivated them to tell the truth. It makes sense that Tiernan would keep his circle small, knowing we’re looking for him,” Ryker answered, sawing through the last piece of scalp until the man’s hair fell to the floor in a wet, bloody heap.
“That will leave a stain,” Madison said dryly, staring down at it as she swallowed. She’d gotten a little of her natural color back, working through the worst of her sickness as the shock wore off.
Ryker chuckled. “I think I like her.”
Considering the concrete floor of the freezer was covered in red and brown stains from old blood, I hardly thought the stains mattered. Pressure washing could only wipe away so much blood, and with a war in the city, the freezer ran red with it.
I jerked back the second man’s head, ignoring the way he pressed his thighs together as if that would save his little dick from me, if I wanted to be like Rafael and use him as a science experiment. “Did you touch her?” I asked, watching as the man shook his head.
He pleaded for his life, begging for freedom but offering nothing in return. There was nothing a man like him could give outside of information, and unfortunately he had none.
There was no forgiveness for men who crushed butterflies.
There was no mercy in war.