He laughed when he saw me looking.
“Think you’re the only one with tricks, Ace?” He stopped shuffling the cards around and they filtered back into a stack in his hand. He kept back a few though in one hand. Stepping forward, he held up an ace of hearts and hovered it over my face. “That’s you. Ace of hearts. You stole my daughter’s heart.”
He next picked the ace of spades.
“You alerted me yesterday to the presence of the leader of the Spades. You could only know about people like that if you were somebody special. Very special. Not just an ex-marine. That would be too low level. Well below the paygrade.” He held out the king next and shoved it into my face. “That is me. I am the fucking king and I allowed you to come into my circle, infiltrate and screw with me.”
Screw with him?
Fuck, it wasn’t him who was screwed. It was me. I was the one who was screwed here. I was screwed from that first fucking night when I accepted this mission. Right from then I was a dead man signing himself away to shit.
I continued to look at him. He held up the last card.
The queen of hearts.
“Jia…” He breathed. “My little girl. You turned her against me. You… just the presence of you turned her against me. There were so many warnings I gave you and you failed to heed them. I told you she belonged to Armand and you still persisted. I told you to stay away from her and you still persisted. I told her I’d kill you if you continued your secret affair and that didn’t stop you either. Now she hates me. She doesn’t have to say it. I could see it in her eyes. She hates me. But she is my weakness and as you quite rightly alerted me, I have to protect her. So Xander Cage, talk. Who commissioned you to steal from me?”
I pulled in a sharp breath and blew it out.
Fucking bastard. He thought I was just going to talk because he’d been torturing me.
No.
Not at all. I wished Ethan could see me now. Granted the man would get me out, but I figured the sight of me would put him in his place for questioning my duties.
When he commissioned me for this mission he told me that Claire would do it.
Claire would do this too. She wouldn’t say anything and would rather die than cave.
I wasn’t about to make anybody ashamed of me.
“A clown,” I replied, at least my words were coherent.
He laughed. “A clown. That’s original. A better answer than the last guy who was in your shoes gave. A clown. When I was a boy in Italy, my father was the revered Vermont Marchesi. Still is. Even at eighty five years old. He passed the torch to my older brother. Know why?” He looked to me with expectancy.
“Why?” I only answered to humor him.
“He knew I was destined for greater things, bigger things than overseeing the business. And realistically what the hell could be bigger than that? The Marchesis are one of the biggest families in Italia. Renowned all over, the name commands respect. The name is La Cosa Nostra itself. Few can claim it but we do because we know how to handle ourselves. We know not to strike a man down more than necessary because then he won’t be able to talk.”
He babbled on. I would have loved to smart mouth him and tell him I didn’t give a shit about his family or his tradition, or his lessons. I didn’t care about any of it. I supposed though, that he was about to get to the point of his story. Giovanni didn’t talk shit. Not like this. Not unless there was a point to it.
“That is why I’m not giving you the torture I dealt earlier, son. Let me impart some wisdom to you and maybe you’ll talk.” He stopped and stared at me. Those sharp eyes of his seemed sharper. “The Ra don’t just act in a sporadic fashion. Something has to alert them to the presence of something they may want. Someone. Someone who knows a thing or two of value. That’s just the run of the mill Ra. The Spades are a whole other story. The worse faction of The Ra led by the notorious bastard Balthazar Kane. Someone spoke to him personally. As in they have his number and called him up for a chat. If you know about him, Xander Cage, you know that’s no mere thing to do. The man is a ghost.”
I was listening. Fucking listening because he had my damn attention for the truth in his words.
Giovanni set the card pack down on the ground below us and pulled the joker out. “People mistake him. But guess what - he’s the most powerful piece.” He chuckled. “That motherfucker has everybody fooled. Guess why? Nobody knows who he is. Nobody fucking knows who he is and he can infiltrate anybody, manipulate anybody. Fucking fool the shit out of you to get what he wants. That’s the fucking joker. It’s not you, Ace. Nope. You have more skin than that. The joker in this game is someone who managed to fool all of us and I don’t know who it is. I suspect though that he worked his way somehow, enough to drag a guy like you into the game. Those are my thoughts and I’m never wrong, Xander Cage. So, tell me. Who sent you to steal those prints.”
Fucking asshole.
He could talk shit all he wanted he wasn’t getting anything out of me, not a damn fucking thing.
If there’s one thing I always knew, it was to know who to trust and what to say and when. Now would not be one of those times when I talked.
“A clown,” I repeated and he shook his head.
He snarled but then his face resumed some normalcy and he put his finger to his temple and tapped signaling he was thinking. “Ex-Marine… I always thought it didn’t fit that you wanted to work for me. Let me guess… let me guess. You know what suits you and the whole situation? Some sort of agent. That’s what I think. You’re some sort of agent and I don’t mean a fed.”
Well I had to hand it to him. I could see where Jia got her sense of awareness from, she’d guessed the same.
They were wrong though.
I was on this mission acting indeed like an agent, but I wasn’t one though. Not officially.
There was only one person who’d summed me up the right way and it was my biggest enemy.
Balthazar Kane.
“I am… a thief,” I answered and Giovanni nodded.
“Yes. I agree, Ace of hearts. You are a thief. A skilled one because I don’t know how you figured out where I put those prints. Not even my knights know about my chamber. Not even them and no one I showed that chamber to would have told you about it. I’m skilled at my job too. I didn’t become the king for my cooking skills. There’s more than one way to make a thief talk.”
As if on cue, a bolt of electricity jolted through me. It was sharper than the last bout and more powerful. The voltage must have been higher.
It knocked me out instantly.
Chapter Forty-Four
Xander
Time…
What time was it?
What time is it?
For a man who didn’t have long to live I probably shouldn’t be so obsessed with the time. What did it matter really?
It wasn’t as if I could do anything. I was here, useless as shit.
Useless to everybody, including myself.
In my final moments I just wanted to think of her…
Jia…
Jia Marchesi, age twenty six, artist. Daughter of Giovanni Marchesi the Vegas Mafia King.
She was the innocent in the mix.
I was told that when I was given the mission brief.
Usually when we talked about innocents like that, it meant we weren’t to involve them. As agents we weren’t supposed to allow harm to come to them and most of all, we were supposed to be careful with them.
Be careful not to get them caught in the crossfire. Be careful of them getting close because the people we were targeting could sway them.
I broke every rule in the book with my innocent. I didn’t just involve her, I got involved with her.
I got involved with her and it made me reckless.
It didn’t matter now. I’d be selfish now and I could think of her for however long I had left.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes. There was a clock on the wall. I think Giovanni put it there to add to the tor
ture.
I was attached to two metal pillars. Cuffed to them like I was in some risqué sex club, fuck, maybe that’s what it was, some kind of torture chamber.
Giovanni wasn’t the kind of man to like the risqué. But torture? Yes.
This apparatus I was attached to was definitely for torture. Torture to death kind of torture. Nothing more than that, nothing less.
The clock on the wall said it was three o’clock.
I just wasn’t sure if it was three o’clock in the same day, three in the morning, or three p.m. the next day.
If it was any of the latter, it meant I wasn’t thinking of her at a time when I knew she’d be thinking of me.
Jia.
She was going to Italy with Armand. She’d board a plane and fly off with him, out of the country. Far away from me. Far, so very far away from me.
I wanted to think of her at a time when I thought she’d be thinking about me. Boarding that plane. And looking out the window as it took off. That was what I imagined.
I imagined she’d cry and Armand wouldn’t comfort her.
He’d leave her to cry for me. He’d hate her for it.
I hope she didn’t cry because maybe he’d beat her for it. Or other things.
I wouldn’t be there to save her.
If it was three pm the same day—Monday—then it hadn’t happened yet.
If it was still Monday then that meant Giovanni would have been torturing me since last night when he captured me and I probably would have passed out a few times from the torture.
If it was still Monday then it would have been earlier that Jia came by and came through for me. She didn’t talk. She didn’t tell her father who I really was and that I came to steal from him. She knew practically everything about my presence here. Everything. Yet, she held her silence for me, just as she promised she would.
My girl came through for me and showed I could trust her, even when she watched me being tortured for the information and knew the torture meant death.
If it was still Monday then that’s what happened earlier today.
Giovanni came to me several times after, to try and get me to talk.
Asking me the same questions over and over again.
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
I gave the same answer. I told him a fucking clown sent me. Granted he wasn’t to know that in my rookie days of being a secret agent I thought of Ethan as a clown, because of the bizarre shit he used to ask us to do.
Fuck, I thought he was clowning around when he made Claire captain of our team and not me.
I thought it was a joke until he pointed out that my girl had more balls than me. Turned out he was right. I’d stopped thinking of him as the clown then.
But he’d become the clown again for the purposes of today, if it was still today, because I wasn’t dropping names.
I’d left Wes with two requests on what he should do if I failed in my grand plan to steal the blueprints. I asked him to tell Ethan what happened and then to tell Jia I loved her. That’s what I asked him to do.
Whether or not it was still Monday, he would have known by now that I’d failed. Enough time had passed since Giovanni captured me to alert Wes to my failure.
I was supposed to message him when I got out of the secret chamber.
That never happened.
Wes would have known to take the next steps if he didn’t hear from me.
It was so difficult to know what to do sometimes.
Sometimes when you thought you were doing the right thing. It turned out to be the wrong fucking thing to do.
In my case it always seemed like I was wrong whatever I did.
I thought by getting the prints myself I was going to be one step ahead of everybody. Not just Balthazar and his Spades, but everybody.
I thought it would give me an edge, something to work with and it would protect everyone else who was part of the mission.
Instead, I blew the mission out of the water and here I was. Captured.
Who knew what could be happening now?
Both Giovanni and The Chameleon knew of my presence, and they were so very far from stupid. Giovanni guessed right that I was an agent. He also knew I had to be of the special variety to disturb the nest.
I was pretty sure that global threat I was so worried about would come to pass.
Maybe…
There was always a maybe, but in this case I didn’t know.
The situation was pretty bad.
The minute my mind started clearing up, a jolt of electricity ran through me and Giovanni’s face came into my view.
Holy fuck!
I screamed. It was so fucking painful. So damn painful. Like a thousand knives piercing through my body. That was what it felt like.
Knives, swords, blades.
Pain beyond belief. Pain beyond measure.
They turned up the voltage again and administered another wave that made me heave like I was going to vomit. I was pretty sure I would have if I’d eaten. But there was nothing to come up.
Fucking hell.
How was I still alive?
Giovanni came right up into my face and snarled.
I’d foolishly thought he’d left me but he hadn’t. Neither had the prick who was giving me the electric shocks. He was still very much here.
My ass was still being tortured. It hadn’t fucking stopped.
Giovanni held up a hand and the electricity zapped away as it was switched off.
“Xander Cage, I’m growing tired of this. As you know I’m a very busy man. Very busy. I don’t have time for shit like this,” he taunted.
Fucking asshole. I didn’t give a flying fuck about his schedule.
“Tell me what I want to know and this will be over. I’ll kill you and you’ll be dead. No more pain, son. Why would you prolong the torture? I never figured you for a man who liked pain. Come on tell me who sent you? Who sent you to steal my prints?”
The one fucking kick I got out of this was watching him squirm every time I gave an answer. It gave me strength to find my voice.
“A clo...wn. And, the prints aren’t yours.”
This time he didn’t squirm, he answered me with a kick to my stomach that would have made me double over if I wasn’t cuffed to the fucking pillars.
The pain from the kick and the electrical shocks were just too much. Once again I saw stars and felt my consciousness slipping.
Slipping away.
“You’re a fool, you know that. I keep telling you you’re the fool. Being used. Being fucking used. I told you The Ra wouldn’t have gotten involved if somebody hadn’t alerted them. Those prints are mine while they are in my care. The whole thing was covert. Oh so covert. Shhhh.” He pressed his fingers to his lips. “Covert and silent. I shouldn’t have people like the Ra on my ass. No, and the Spades? Fucking hell Xander Cage. You know as much as me that mobsters keep their noses out of anything they don’t belong in. No, no, no. We have enough wealth, but we still want more. Too dangerous, and we say no. We actually say no to things that are beyond us. This thing wasn’t beyond me when I first agreed to it, then it became so. Like fuck.”
He was talking out of his fucking ass. I wasn’t sure if he expected me to feel sorry for him or, what his point was.
If I were even ten percent myself I would have told him to go fuck himself.
He leaned forward again and dropped a playing card.
The queen of hearts.
Jia. That was her.
She was the queen of my heart. The asshole knew what he was doing to me.
“It’s fine. Play the game of silence, you fucktard. We’ll resume this but rest assured, I haven’t even begun yet to show you the extent of how truly evil I can be. Those shocks were nothing. That was just to try and crack the surface, but you refuse to cooperate. It’s all good. Ace.” He slapped my cheek and backed away.
He’d taken to ca
lling me Ace earlier; assuming this was the same day.
“When you see me again, it’ll be death and I’ll take pleasure in killing your ass, but I’ll make you suffer first. Maybe I’ll cut your dick off for screwing around with my little girl, and I’ll make you watch me kick it around in the dirt.” He laughed then backed right out of my view.
Footsteps sounded then faded into nothingness. I couldn’t hear anymore. I hung my head down and stared at the queen of hearts.
The image blurred into the ground and my mind drifted again. I drifted into the nothingness for what was likely hours. I didn’t know.
It was more footsteps that woke me up. I blinked and geared myself up to see Giovanni again. He said he’d kill me. I didn’t need any more pain. Maybe I would will myself to die somehow. Maybe I could just try to force my body to give up so it wouldn’t have to go through any more.
The face that stood before me was not, however, Giovanni’s.
It was Frankie.
Frankie, one of the knights. The only guy I could really say I got on with here. What would he do?
Had Giovanni sent him to kill me, knowing we’d been close to being called friends?
Was that what this was?
“Kid, boy I wished you’d listened to me. They messed you up bad,” he remarked. Despair clouded his russet eyes as his gaze assessed me.
My lips parted but I couldn’t talk. My throat was so dry and my body weak.
But… not too weak to take note of what he did next. He pulled out a key and moved to undo the cuff on my right hand.
“Get this side Vin,” he instructed, glancing over his shoulder.
Surprise took me when Vinny stepped forward and took hold of my right side, holding me up so I wouldn’t drop to the ground.
In the meantime Frankie unlocked the cuff on my left hand and took hold of my left side. Both of them supported me. I looked from one to the other, not quite sure what they were doing yet. These two guys after all, were Giovanni’s most trusted people. His capos.
“What … what are you doing?” I asked weakly.
“What the fuck does it look like we’re doing, prick?” Vinny threw back.
“Just don’t talk.” Frankie told me. “Here to rescue you from shit. Capisce?”
Game of Love : A Mafia Romance Page 36