by Bethany-Kris
“I guess.”
“You don’t like it, though,” Dare replied.
“Not this time.”
“Hmm.”
On the screens, a battered Corrado had finally made it to the basement. The team stood outside of the two large, metal doors on either side of them that would lead into the dark room, or the tank room.
“They’re about to begin,” Dare said. “You should probably leave.”
Alessio didn’t move.
“I think I better stay, actually.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
• • •
Safely behind one-way glass, Alessio watched the scene that seemed surreal happening beyond cement walls. The light from the hallway in the complex’s basement allowed him the ability to see inside the tank room, but no one in there could see him.
Well, the one person in there.
The straightjacket attached to a chain and cable keeping Corrado suspended over a square tank of water that was just big enough to drown a man when he was dropped into it—if he didn’t figure out how to save himself the first couple of dunks—was tight to his body. His eyes drifted closed, tiredness from the last few days of being rotated between the tank and the dark room finally getting to him.
It happened to everyone.
That was when this became most dangerous.
Alessio’s gaze darted to the chain as it jerked. At the same time, Corrado’s eyes flew wide open, and for a brief second, he swore the man was looking right at him though the small window he was able to watch through.
He knew it wasn’t possible, though.
It lasted all of a half of a second before Corrado was dropped. Like a sack of dead weight, really. Right into the tank, where freezing cold water awaited him, and a top attached to an automatic arm slammed closed right after.
Alessio dragged in a sharp breath and stared upward, knowing what was happening inside the tank room now. He didn’t have to watch it happen to know. Fuck, he knew it all too well as it was, honestly.
Corrado would struggle.
Under water.
Straight jacket on.
The top wouldn’t budge.
More water pumped in.
His body remained constantly cold, wet, and aching. From the rotational beatings, and the lack of food and water. His mind would be spinning and out of control—fear and panic welling and rushing like the waves of the water inside that tank, making sure he thought at all times, this was it. This was the moment he would die.
Every dunk became longer.
A second here.
Two there.
Until he was under water for up to three and half minutes, or so. Until his vision began to blacken, and he swallowed water because the body’s natural reaction was to try to breathe at that point, even if it meant no air would be waiting for him.
He’d fight against all of it—his own panic, the water, the need to breathe, and even the walls of the tank surrounding him.
And then the top would flip up, the chain would drag him out, and he would hang again ... waiting to be dropped into the water for another round of hell.
Over.
And over.
And over again.
Until the dark room.
Currently, that’s where Corrado’s twin was being held. He was about due for a beating, too, come to think of it, which meant he probably shouldn’t be down here. The rotational beatings and the occasional bit of food and water were the only markers of time passing down in these fucking rooms.
It seemed cruel.
Pointless, even.
Alessio, and every other person who had gone through this training, would be the first to say they came out better for it—physically, and mentally. They were the last to panic, and the first to face everything without fear.
When you’d been so close to death time and time again ... everything that came after was nothing compared to it, really. Everything else was just a bonus, he figured.
“What are you doing down here?”
Alessio didn’t turn at the sound of Cree’s voice, but he did look back through the one-way glass to see Corrado being pulled out of the water, almost entirely unconscious, but not quite. Just almost.
“Watching,” Alessio murmured.
“You shouldn’t be down here.”
“I know.”
Cree came to stand next to him and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “He’s going to be difficult ... to break, I mean. His pride holds him back. All of that has to go ... the pride, dignity ... the harder it is to take those things from him, the longer this process goes on.”
Yeah.
He knew that, too.
“What about the other one?” Alessio asked, glancing over his shoulder at the dark room where Chris was having his rotation. “How did that go in the tank?”
“He about broke the fucking top trying to get out, one of the jacket’s arms came undone ... I have never seen someone fight that hard against it, and I have seen some things happen down in these rooms.”
“Adrenaline?”
“Likely,” Cree returned. “His second rotation in the tank starts tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes, or if we get a different result.”
Of course.
Alessio knew how this went.
Break the body; break the mind.
“As for you,” the man said next to him, “you don’t need to be down here reliving your own time in these rooms because you feel something for one of the two currently experiencing theirs. You realize that, don’t you?”
He did.
All Alessio could think to reply was, “But shouldn’t I?”
8.
Corrado
“Stay down.”
Corrado didn’t.
His knees ached, and his legs shook so badly he was sure they were going to give out the second he put all of his weight back onto them, but he still forced his body back up. Back to his feet, he didn’t stand quite as straight as he did the last ten times, not when he couldn’t breathe doing it.
The straighter his spine, the worse the pain became. He trembled from the top of his head to his toes pressing against cold, damp cement. The amount of effort it took to pull his body up from the ground that time was clearly more than he realized.
Would he be able to do it again?
Corrado didn’t know.
Fuck him if he wouldn’t try.
Keeping his hands resting against his knees to give him a bit more support so he didn’t topple over entirely—that was not happening—he took a few quick inhales to try and soothe the pain flaring in his side.
Was that his fucking kidney?
His ribs?
A collapsed lung?
All of the above?
Likely.
“You’re a stubborn fuck, you know that?”
Corrado didn’t reply to the voice in the darkness because that was the thing ... he barely saw a flicker of them in the blackened room before they struck out at him again with those goddamn bamboo rods. Flexible, and painful, the rods didn’t do serious damage to his body. Typically no blood, and nothing that was going to force them to pull him out of these fucking rooms, but they still hurt. They bruised, and they broke.
It didn’t matter.
He’d learned early on during these rotational beatings when he was in the dark room—a far better place than the tank, as far as he was concerned—that they were looking for something from him. And maybe it was his stubbornness or his damn pride, but he refused to give it to them.
Today, they wanted him to stay on the floor.
Just stay down, they kept saying.
Corrado got back up. Every single time they put him to his knees, or on his back, he forced his body back up to his feet. If they wanted him down there on the ground like a dog, then they were going to have to make sure he couldn’t get back up.
Simple as that.
It was stupid.
Part of him knew that.
T
he beating—their lesson—would end as soon as he continued to follow their directions. As soon as he lost himself in the darkness of the room where he wasn’t sure where the blackness ended and he began, it would end because they broke him.
Corrado didn’t want to be broken.
Not like that.
“Stay down,” the order came again.
This voice was new—it didn’t belong to Cree, or some of the others he’d become accustomed to joining him in the tank or the dark room. Then again, they barely spoke at all so he couldn’t honestly say it was a new person. They very well might have been involved in this phase of his training for the entire time, but tonight was the first time they chose to spoke.
He preferred it when they didn’t speak.
It pissed him off more.
Corrado dragged in a painful breath, one that hurt right down to the marrow in his bones—old blood made his tongue have a rusty flavor that seemed thick; the smell of piss lingered in the room, but he wasn’t even sure if that was from him, or not; the stench of vomit clung to the walls, wherever the fuck they were.
This place was hell.
Dignity?
What was that?
Probably in that bucket in the corner where he was expected to use the bathroom, for fuck’s sake. He still had his fucking pride. The pride was what was going to kill him here. Of that, he was most sure. If he could just give it up, right along with his dignity and everything else they had ripped away from him in these goddamn rooms, then this would end.
Corrado knew it.
He’d figured out the trick.
Pride was a bitch, though. The one thing he wouldn’t give up to anyone for anything. Ever. He didn’t know if that was the Guzzi in him—although, he wouldn’t blame his twin a bit if Chris had already given up and given in to this process—or if it was simply the way his brain was wired.
It was pride that made him drag in one more quick breath, settle into the pain of what was going to come next when he made the move, and then he focused all his efforts into making his muscles do what he needed and wanted them to do. Which was stand—entirely straight again, not bent at the knees to give him support and rest from the ache radiating throughout his entire body.
No, straight.
All the way up again.
In the darkness, one’s eyes might eventually become accustomed to it. Not so much so that they would be able to see everything like they could in the daytime, but just enough that where it only seemed like black space before, now there were shadows.
Corrado watched one of the shadows move. It came fast, the strike hard. Right against his chest was where it landed, the second coming right after to crack him against his knees. That one probably hurt the worst.
If he never saw bamboo again, it would be a great day for him. He’d decided. Not that he had time to think on that for too long.
He was on the floor again, blinking up at darkness and choking on the laughter that crawled its way out of his throat. The sound of his own distress and sardonic amusement echoed in the space, reverberating back to his spot on the cold, damp floor to taunt him.
Except he liked that sound.
It was better than the hell he usually found here.
“Stay down,” he was told again.
Fuck that.
Corrado rolled over to his knees despite the way his entire body protested at the action. There was pain, and then there was agony. Some people liked to use those words interchangeably like they were the same things.
Here, he learned they were not.
He wished he felt simple pain, now.
Only pain.
Instead, he felt agony—straight, pure agony everywhere. And not just from the beatings ... not just from the way his body felt broken, and ready to be done with this. No, because inside his mind, and in his heart, it was as though he were being torn in two.
The part that wanted to stop.
The part that needed to continue.
They would not break him.
He would not beg.
But fuck ... were they going to kill him trying?
He didn’t know.
“God, stay down,” he heard somewhere behind him.
Corrado couldn’t.
That wasn’t how he was made.
They could take the rest of it from him—a lot of it, they already had. Should they want his dignity so he wouldn’t understand what shame felt like? Fine, take it. If they needed his body to learn to enjoy pain and discomfort so it could never be used against him? Great, they had that now. Did they need to take his emotions and twist them like his dark thoughts, lost to blackened walls and the water that rushed into his lungs every time they put him in the tank? Okay, he no longer cared.
But not his pride.
That was his.
• • •
There were times when the darkness of the rooms seemed like an old friend to Corrado. He found comfort in the rooms when he was totally alone—when the time bled together because he no longer knew what day it was.
Ha.
That was funny.
He had no clue how long he’d been doing this.
Days?
Weeks?
Months?
It could be any or all of those things, he understood. There was no real thing for him to use to mark the time in these rooms. Not when the people came just enough to give him food, as little as that was, or to beat the hell out of him again.
Never mind when they switched rooms.
Hood over his head.
Rough hands.
Harsh orders in his ears.
Still, he found comfort in the silence and the darkness. Oh, it played tricks on him, sure. The darkness chased away his ability to sleep, making him wired and staring into black space until he was sure he fell asleep just like that.
Sitting there.
With his eyes open.
Some people couldn’t take darkness.
Corrado found he liked it.
He’d started measuring his breaths to combat the pain he constantly battled, but even that wasn’t helping now. Nothing helped.
A buzz speared through the silence of the room, but unlike before when Corrado was new to these rooms, he no longer froze in fear and panic at the sound. That buzzer meant one of three things, and none of them made him afraid anymore.
One, a room switch.
Two, a beating.
Three, food and water.
There was no fourth option, and he had become so used to it being either a room switch or a beating far more often than food that he no longer gave a damn. He wasn’t going to start in fear every time they came into the room for him—maybe they wanted that, or perhaps they liked it too much.
Whatever it was, he wouldn’t be doing it.
The door opening was the only bit of light he got to see now. Just a slate of bright yellow color that seemed so blinding when the door moved that he had to look away from it so that his eyes didn’t sting. Although, the one thing that never changed regardless if they were bringing him food or there to deliver a beating was the fact that the whole team entered the room.
All five of them.
Or was it six?
Corrado wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter.
All of them contributed to his training. In one way or another.
Except this time, only one person was haloed by the light of the door. His shadow stretched along the cement floor with the stream of color, dragging through wet spots and cracks only to stop right before Corrado’s feet.
A part of him just knew who it was. Maybe by the body shape, or the shaggy hair that the figure pushed back with one hand.
“Les,” he mumbled.
It was easier than saying Alessio’s full name.
His mouth hurt.
It all fucking hurt.
Alessio crossed the floor with quick steps, and never once did the door close behind him. Something else that was entirely unusual. When the team stepped
into the rooms, the door always closed behind them. Like they were worried he might try to bolt, and they decided to take the option away altogether.
Not this time.
Corrado blinked as Alessio kneeled down beside him, and set a couple of items to the floor. He tried to take in his features, but he was pretty sure one of his eyes were swollen shut, and he couldn’t see all that well in the darkness anyway. Not with that added bit of light shadowing Alessio’s face as he put together something he’d set on the floor.
“You called me Les this time.”
Corrado chuckled, but that hurt, too. “Don’t get used to it, okay?”
“Mmm, here,” Alessio said quietly, “drink.”
Corrado didn’t even bother to ask what it was that the man offered him—but it was cool, had a fruity flavor, if not a bit chalky, too. Still, he drank it down, eventually taking the bottle directly from Alessio to hold it up himself with shaking hands that clenched too tightly around the plastic, so much so that he spilled a bit.
Alessio didn’t seem to mind.
“It has vitamins, and ... other things,” Alessio explained, even though Corrado hadn’t asked. “It’ll help; you’ve been down here too long, and you need something.”
“How long?”
“A month.”
That long?
Corrado tried to settle that, but he couldn’t. Not that it mattered, as his mind wasn’t working that well, anyway. Even there, it seemed like all he could think about was darkness and silence. Was that a part of the plan, too?
“Chris?”
Alessio, seemingly understanding his question even though he hadn’t given much detail, said, “He started phase two last week.”
But he was out of the rooms.
Out of the tank.
Corrado could breathe easier for that.
He hadn’t startled when the door was open, or when he realized it was Alessio that came into the room, but he did jump a bit when something warm pressed against the side of his face in the darkness. Alessio’s hand, he quickly knew. His palm curved against Corrado’s jaw, and then his thumb drifted over the swell of his bottom lip.