by Bethany-Kris
Gentle.
Slow.
Kind.
All things he was not given in these rooms.
“You have to give them what they want,” Alessio murmured, “do you hear me?”
“They want too much.”
“You have to.”
He didn’t reply because he didn’t feel like repeating himself.
Alessio’s sigh echoed beside him, his thumb sweeping Corrado’s mouth again. “Stubborn. That’s what you are. It’s a process, Corrado, you have to trust it.”
“I gave them everything.”
All that he could give, anyway.
“The rest, I’m keeping,” he mumbled.
Silently, Alessio leaned in, and pressed his forehead to the side of Corrado’s cheek. He didn’t linger there for very long. Just quick enough for Corrado to feel his warmth, and know his presence was real. This hadn’t been something that the darkness did to his mind—it wasn’t another trick.
“I gotta go,” Alessio quietly, his words whispering along Corrado’s bruised skin.
“I know.”
“Trust the process.”
He did.
Just not the way they wanted him to.
• • •
Another round in the fucking tank.
Another round in the dark room.
Corrado wanted it to end.
It was a mantra in his mind now—one that wouldn’t leave him alone during his waking hours. Which was damn near constantly. He found it hard to sleep in the darkness now. Impossible, really. He was sure humans weren’t made to go days and days and days without sleep, but somehow, he was doing it.
Or ... he was falling asleep and waking up without realizing it. He closed his eyes to darkness and opened them to the same thing. Time was irrelevant, and he didn’t even comprehend when it was passing him by.
The first time they put him in the dark room, he hated the floor. Sure, he liked it more than being dunked into the tank for several minutes at a time without being allowed to breathe, but he still fucking hated it. Cold, wet, and cracked ... there was no way to get comfortable, and he was convinced that coldness soaked into his bones constantly. And the wetness? He was never going to get dry.
Now, though?
Now, he didn’t care at all. The discomfort he used to feel at being on the floor of the dark room was a moot point to everything else. He didn’t get chilled from the cold, and the wetness making his dirty clothes irritate his bruised skin further was a background thought.
He simply didn’t feel it at all.
Even the tank didn’t bother him so much now. That had been the worst—trying to overcome the realization that, yes, he was probably going to die in that fucking water if they kept the top on him for another ten seconds. His vision would blacken, and his lungs protested so much when he was under the water that he was sure death was imminent.
Now, he just wished it would happen.
If it was going to kill him, then do it.
Resting on his stomach in the dark room, Corrado’s head rested on his arms, and he faced what he suspected was the door. He couldn’t be sure because they still brought him in here with a hood over his head to confuse the hell out of him.
It worked, too.
Every damn time.
Still, he laid there and waited.
For a beating.
For food.
For light.
Drumming his fingers to the floor, a sharp thought sliced through his mind—something he’d not really considered before right now. He was bored.
The beatings wouldn’t kill him.
The food would be fine.
The light didn’t last.
And he was just ... bored.
Corrado blinked, but what else could he do?
He stayed on the floor.
Bored.
He wasn’t sure how long he was down there like that, waiting for something that wouldn’t come. Long enough that he realized, somehow without a sense of time, that they were incredibly late bringing him food. And it had been a span of time since the team came in to try and beat the pride out of him, too.
He was on the floor for long enough that he was sure he would die there, wasted and broken, but it seemed like The League had one more surprise for him. Once again, when the buzz rang out in the room to signal the door opening, he didn’t move an inch.
A beating?
Food?
Les?
He doubted it would be Alessio.
It was actually ... no one.
The door stayed open, light spilling in to streak across the floor from the corridor. No one came to stand there. Nothing happened at all.
Corrado kept waiting.
Still, nothing changed.
The door stayed open.
Maybe it was because his body had been put through hell, and his mind was currently shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, but he didn’t move, either. He stayed right there on the floor, watching the light spill in and waiting for something to happen.
Anything.
It was the not knowing that bothered him the most. He’d become accustomed to their routine down here, and what he could expect to happen to him. He found comfort in that—in the knowing. And right now, he didn’t know a fucking thing.
Minutes passed.
Then, maybe an hour.
It took Corrado entirely too long to get up from the floor when he realized no one was coming, and the door had been purposefully opened. Or, he suspected that was the case. They didn’t open it if they didn’t mean to.
Stumbling, weak, and nauseous with every step he took, Corrado left the dark room. He couldn’t properly process things in the light, but he forced himself to walk down the corridor. How long did that take?
Too long.
And then another corridor.
Stairs that made his bones ache.
At the top of those, he found a black door with a camera overhead. He stared up at it because the door didn’t actually have a handle on it for him to open it. Tipping his head to the side, he waited for a second before a buzz echoed, and that door opened, too.
In the next corridor, he realized all the other doors stayed firmly shut. He was being guided through The League’s complex. Only allowed to walk where they allowed him to, and granted entry to the corridors and stairwells where they wanted him to be.
The dark room taught him something else.
Trust them.
They could and would do a lot to him—everything and anything to break him, or take from him, but they wouldn’t kill him. They wanted him to understand that. They needed him to trust their process, and listen.
Orders were not always verbal.
Requests, not always obvious.
Lessons, found between the lines.
They got their point across.
But he still had his pride.
Corrado followed whoever was controlling the doors, and guiding him. His steps were far too slow, and painful. But he pushed through it because if anything, those rooms downstairs taught him he could handle a hell of a lot more than a little bit of pain.
Pain would pass.
Or he would get used to it.
One or the other.
Soon, he started to recognize the corridors, even though the doors to the rooms were still tightly shut as he passed them. Only one—the first room he’d spent any amount of time in when he first arrived at The League—was open.
The knife room.
Corrado stood in the doorway, and watched the man standing about twenty feet from the target blocks. He either didn’t care that Corrado was behind him, or he hadn’t noticed his arrival. Flicking his wrist back, Alessio tossed a knife that spun through the air so fast, it was nothing more than a blur before it embedded itself directly into the middle of the red circle on the target.
“Good shot,” Corrado mumbled.
Alessio didn’t startle at his words, simply glanced over his shoulder with a kind gaze that drifted
over him like he was taking him in without judgement or comment. “Takes practice—you’ll learn, too, if you excel in it.”
Huh.
Corrado swallowed the thickness in his throat, managing to ask, “Is letting me out to wander the halls part of the process, too?”
Alessio picked up another knife from the table beside him, but instead of throwing that one, he flipped it over and over in his palm. “Possibly. It all depends on the prospect, and what they need, I think.”
Ah.
Corrado understood.
He didn’t need to be explicitly told.
They were going to kill him down there trying to take from him what he wouldn’t give, and so, someone decided that it was better to compromise. And here he was, out.
“Want to try?” Alessio asked, holding out the knife for Corrado to take.
He didn’t move.
His body hurt too much.
“What happens now?”
Alessio arched a brow. “Phase two.”
“What is—”
“Recovery for a short bit, then the tests begin to find where you excel the most, so they can focus, and hone your skills.”
“Well, all right.”
What could he say to that?
“Corrado.”
He looked up, meeting Alessio’s gaze across the room. “Yeah?”
“You did well.”
“I feel like death.”
Alessio grinned. “You look like it, too.”
He cleared his throat. “I spent my eighteenth birthday in those rooms.”
Silence coated the space between the two of them. Not for long, though.
“I spent mine watching you,” Alessio returned.
“Oh.”
Alessio offered the knife again. “You’re probably too weak, but you can try, if you want.”
“I thought rich hands weren’t meant to touch those, only pay someone else to do it.”
“I can be wrong sometimes.”
“Can you?”
Alessio gave him a look.
“Can you really?” Corrado pressed.
“Don’t get used to it,” Alessio told him.
Corrado smiled. “Good to know.”
9.
Alessio
“I know what you said. Eighteen, Dare.”
The current source of Alessio’s irritation—although if he were being an honest man, he had a lot of those annoyances lately—didn’t turn away from the electronic map that covered the touchscreen on his office wall. He waved a hand over his shoulder, like Alessio was a fly he was trying to bat away.
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Annoying, isn’t it?” Dare returned. “You do the same thing to literally everyone else, Les. If you don’t like when people ignore you, perhaps you should attempt to stop doing it to us. You’re beyond the annoying stage where I can use your age as an excuse for your bad fucking attitude. Besides, what I need more than you out on an assignment is for you to listen.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t all get what we want.”
“Keep thinking that way, and see where it gets you.”
Alessio glared at the back of Dare’s head, willing the man to combust right on the spot. Sometimes, it was the little things that inspired the worst kinds of reactions in him. This was certainly one of those things.
Again, if he were being honest, there were many.
This was a big one, though.
“I went through all that training for you to keep me—”
“I have several job offers on the table right now,” Dare interjected, still seemingly unwilling to turn around and face Alessio in the doorway. “And while some will go to others, because they have the specific skills for those assignments, I am deciding which one might be best for you. I don’t take every job that comes in from clients who don’t have a contract with a specific League member, and a lot of these are exactly that.”
“So, I’ll have an assignment soon, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
Fuck.
Frustration slipped through Alessio’s bloodstream, heavy and thick. Like every other conversation he tried to have with Dare, he suspected this one was going to end the same exact way as it always did. Dare talking him in circles, Alessio getting pissed, and after he’d walked away, he would realize he didn’t get shit that he wanted.
“I want an assignment,” Alessio said.
“And you will get one when you are ready for one.”
“I’m ready now!”
Dare pointed at the map he’d been surveying since the moment Alessio came to his office. “That’s a mountain range there—do you think a complex within a mountain would be a possibility? A back up, we’ll call it. Just in case something happened, and I needed to move out the main area of operation for safety reasons.”
“I ... what?”
“A complex inside a mountain range.”
“What does that have anything to do with the fact I want to go out on an assignment?” Alessio demanded.
Dare glanced over his shoulder, his brow furrowing. “Oh, I thought you realized I was done with that conversation. So, if you don’t want to indulge these new plans of mine, you don’t need to keep standing there.”
Alessio balked.
It took him entirely too long to come up with a suitable response to that, and it wasn’t nearly as insulting as he wanted it to be. Shame, really.
“You’re impossible,” he snapped at Dare.
“But am I really, though?”
“Yes.”
“And you wonder where you get it from, no?”
The two of them stared at one another for a spread of time, neither of them moving an inch or giving a damn inch. Finally, Alessio’s irritation spilled over as he made a disgusted noise under his breath and turned to leave the office.
At his back, Dare called, “And don’t bother the trainees today, Les, they need to focus.”
“I want an assignment!”
“Soon.”
Yeah, right.
To Dare, that could mean months.
Fuck it.
He’d go to Cree.
• • •
Prospects for The League were given one week to recover after phase one before phase two began in full force. A single week with whatever medical care they needed, all the rest that would put them mostly back on their feet again, and then it was back to business as normal.
If intensive, seven-day-a-week training was normal.
The prospects were shoved from one thing to the next—tested on every skill The League could throw at them within a few weeks, and once they figured out where someone really excelled, then that’s where they started to focus.
For himself, it had been weapons.
Knives, guns, and more.
Any weapon they put in his hands, he could use. And he could probably use it in several different ways to kill someone, if that was the need. He could also make a weapon out of just about anything because to him, everything was dangerous enough to kill. He just needed to figure out he wanted to do it.
Corrado and Chris were still in their second week of skill testing. Which was why he wasn’t very surprised to find Cree hanging a few steps back from the mats set out on the gym floor where the twins were currently working with a League member who excelled in weapons, and specifically, fighting with weapons.
“What do you need?” Cree asked before Alessio had even spoke behind him.
He sighed. “I hate when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Know where I am.”
“Yes, it’s a terrible thing that I concern myself with your whereabouts so that I can make sure you’re not finding some trouble when I’m not looking.”
Just like Dare.
Alessio decided he wasn’t falling down this rabbit hole again today. He’d done that already with Dare, and he wasn’t doing it with Cree. It would end worse than the first time, that was a fucking guarantee. Cree was e
ven less likely to take his shit.
“So, what do you want?” Cree asked.
Alessio’s gaze cut to the mat when a smack echoed. The stick of bamboo Oliver was using as a stand-in for a weapon—it still hurt like a motherfucker, but it was safer—cracked against the back of Corrado’s legs, and sent him sprawling to the mat with a hissed shit falling from his cringing lips.
He flinched, too.
That one hurt.
On the other side of the mat, watching from a safe distance because it probably wasn’t his turn yet, Chris clicked his tongue, and looked like he was ready to back away altogether. That was the thing about The League.
No one said the training was stupid.
The same shit they used to break them with were the same tools they used to train them later. No doubt, the twins had more than enough of bamboo sticks being used to leave bruises on their body after the rooms downstairs. So, that meant they were either going to learn fast how to avoid those fucking strikes, or they were going to get knocked down time and time again.
It was a mind fuck, really.
“Les,” Cree said again.
Yeah, yeah.
The whole reason he was here, right.
He kept one gaze on Corrado who pushed up from the mat with a snarl under his breath to face Oliver once again. Only this time, Oliver was smirking a little too much for Alessio’s liking. It was one thing to be trained, but it was quite another when someone took it a little too far, and began taunting you at the same time when you failed.
“Dare,” Alessio said, “you need to talk to him.”
Cree raised a single black eyebrow, but didn’t look away from the mats. “Why would I need to do that?”
“I want an assignment.”
“And he won’t give you one?”
“Exactly that.”
Thud.
Alessio turned in just enough time to see Corrado crash to the mat, only this time, on his back. His arms flew out wide, and his eyes squeezed shut as the air rushed from his lips with a heavy whoosh. Oliver’s laughter echoed in the gym as he pointed the stick of bamboo in Corrado’s direction on the mat, his sneer wicked and amused.
“Come on, now, get up,” Oliver said, his hand tightening further around the middle of the stick as he rounded the mats to come slightly closer to Corrado’s prone form. “I heard you kept doing that in the dark room, yeah? You kept getting up, didn’t you? Even when you were supposed to stay the fuck down, so don’t disappoint me now, shithead. Get up.”