Sold To Mr. Milano (Evil Empires Book 1)

by Daniella Wright

  I cut my eyes over to her, noticing that she had started to shake in her restraints, even if she was doing her very best to hide it. She kept her chin tilted upwards with a defiant glare, but I could see the terror in her eyes.

  “Go on then...What do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I had my reasons,” she answered gingerly.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. I let it out so freely and boisterously that it echoed off the chamber walls, making her squirm even more.

  “Finally you’ve learned to choose your words more carefully! To think of how much you spewed all of your useless nonsense before, and now...Nothing? I guess you’re not so big and tough as you wanted to think you were. You couldn’t have been...to cling to a rouse like that to protect yourself.”

  “I did what I had to do,” she answered through tight, trembling lips.

  I marched closer, keeping my eyes locked on hers with a deadly stare. “And when you face your father now...if you ever see the light of day again, that is...How well do you think he will take to it?” I stopped within inches of her, close enough to feel her hot, labored breaths on my cheek, and trailed a finger along her cheek. “To see all of these beautiful features completely rearranged and misshapen. He won’t even recognize you.”

  She jerked her head to the side to avoid my touch, writhing against the wall to move herself as far away from me as she could. I returned to my predatory stalking around the room.

  “That’s good,” I grinned. “It’s better that you don’t say much at first. I’m rather enjoying thinking over all the ways in which I’m going to hurt you...and make you regret you were even born, much less charming your way onto my estate.”

  “I don’t fear facing my father again,” she stated confidently. “No matter what you do to me. He is still ten times the man you will ever be.”

  A different kind of anger stirred inside with her words. “Don’t pretend to know what kind of man I am, Alicia. It is far worse than anything you’ve ever heard.”

  Her face twisted and then she erupted into laughter. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? To prove you’re some kind of big, strong, evil man...the biggest and baddest one of all. All these years I’ve heard of the infamous Alberto Milano’s reputation and it’s nothing more than a show!”

  I let out a grumbling roar of rage and lunged towards her, gripping my big hand around her jaw to force her to look at me. Her nostrils flared as her chest heaved with her eyes glued to me.

  “Would your father look at you the same if he knew his precious daughter had been defiled by his biggest enemy? Imagine going back to his arms knowing that I had my way with you. Would he still seem like such an honorable man then!? When you had to face the disappointment and disgust in his eyes!?”

  That was enough to make her stop laughing. I was done laughing too...Done playing her games. Out of everything in life that I might have been prepared to submit to or be made a fool by...some dumb, arrogant woman like her was not about to be one of them. She was pushing me closer to the edge of showing her exactly what kind of man I was.

  “You’re going to tell me what you know,” I continued. “What is it that you think you learned during your time here that you were in such a hurry to dash off and report back to the great detective?”

  “I don’t know anything,” she insisted. “I was just going out for an evening ride. This whole thing has been blown out of proportion.”

  I eyed her up and down with anger pumping through my veins. Her blouse strained tightly against her breasts that bulged out with her arms chained up and stretched out on either side of her supple body. I walked closer to her again, taking in her scent of sweat.

  “I do wonder, Alicia. If you aren’t pregnant...have you ever been touched? Maybe all this talk of what a real man is because you’ve never known one. You’ve never had someone break you in.”

  A new twisted expression of disgust formed on her face, but the door creaked open, interrupting us. Several men came filing in with a table and a leather roll of tools. With the table in place, they unrolled the assortment of torture devices. I made the usual show of holding a few of them up to inspect them so Alicia could see. I heard the faintest whimpers of anguish escaping her plump lips with the sight of what I held in my hands.

  The men followed the usual routine and went over to tighten her chains. Another grabbed a few vice grips from the leather case and waited nearby. Alicia’s body whipped back and forth, hopelessly struggling to break free. She looked at me with stunned and questioning eyes. She didn’t think I would allow anyone else to torture her, and she was right. This was for me and only me to enjoy.

  “No,” I barked, holding up a hand to stop them. “Leave us.” The men obeyed and marched back out of the room as I locked the door behind them.

  “So, that’s the plan then, Alberto?” Her voice shaked. “You’ll torture me only to find out I still have nothing to tell you?”

  “I’ll do whatever I want to you,” I answered calmly and suggestively. I wanted to see her squirm with disgust for me again.

  “Figures that a man like you would just take what he wanted. You wouldn’t know how to win a woman over into actually loving you, so you’d pillage her the same way you do the lands of Argentina.”

  “And a woman like you does what...lies and manipulates her way into getting whatever she wants?” I leaned in close to her ear, watching tendrils of her loose hair sway from my breath. “Don’t tempt me, Alicia. The way I pillage the lands is much more civilized than what I would do to you.”

  “There is nothing civilized about you or anything you do,” she sobbed under her breath, aching from the tightened chains. “And you don’t know what kind of woman I am.”

  “Let’s find out. Shall we?”

  I tightened the chains again with a sudden and startling crank of the spools. She screamed, but mostly out of dread. I knew they still weren’t tight enough to really hurt her...not in the way a man would be stretched out if he were in her place. But the discomfort and the anticipation of how much further it could go was enough to make her cry out for me to stop.

  “I’ll ask you again. What do you know? If Don Martino was standing in front of you right now...what would you tell him?”

  “I don’t know anything!” she answered more vehemently this time.

  “Nothing? Nothing at all?” I turned the crank again.

  “If I did know anything I’d rather be ripped in half then ever tell you!”

  I stepped away from the cranks, knowing she would be ripped in half if I didn’t restrain myself. I would have to find some other way to make her talk. I walked over to the door and opened it to give instructions to one of the men outside. They set off to fulfill my request, leaving me alone with Alicia once again.

  I marveled at how disheveled and frazzled she looked, but somehow a defiant strength still shined through it all. I wasn’t sure I had ever met a woman who was so tough, but I knew I would find a way to break her down. Even some of the strongest men hadn’t been able to hold up under my questioning, and I was certain she would be no different.

  8

  Alicia

  I was surprised that Alberto stopped cranking the chains I was attached to. I expected him to keep tightening them until my bones broke, but instead, he only let them cause a terrible sting. No real damage was done. Then there was the leather roll of tools waiting on the table in the corner - some of them not even fully washed of blood from their last use. But he didn’t use those either. At least not yet.

  I knew he was a bad man. He didn’t have the reputation that he did for no reason. I had heard he was cold-hearted and ruthless. He would do things that would make other men like him squirm and feel sick. He was without a conscience. I knew all of that, but why was he not destroying me the way I expected him to?

  He paced the room in front of me like a restless wild animal waiting to pounce, but everything seemed to be teaming up inside of him without fully seeping out. It’s l
ike there was some invisible line he wouldn’t allow himself to cross, and judging by the way his skin was taking on a flushed red tint and the gleam of sweat, not being able to cross that line seemed to be getting to him.

  I wanted whatever was going to happen to be over with. I was in the right frame of mind to endure this, even if it meant I died. If he did kill me, what I knew would be useless. If I told him, he would likely kill me anyway. The outcome for me was the same regardless, so all I had to cling to was the principle of the matter. I couldn’t let him win. I couldn’t give him what he wanted.

  Withstanding interrogation was something I had been secretly preparing for. My father taught me many things, but this was not something he would have ever had the stomach for. He didn’t want to imagine me ending up here enough to even discuss it. But I knew my curious spirit and the drive I had for justice, and always thought I might end up in this very spot one day. I clung to what I had studied. I had to forget that I knew anything at all so that when the real torture began, it wouldn’t accidentally slip out.

  But Alberto’s stalling made me squirm. Maybe that’s why he did it. If that was the case, I was determined to ruin that for him as well. I rolled my neck to soothe my tightened muscles. My bones let out a loud, soothing crack.

  I sighed and moaned from the sensation. “Ah, thank you for the workout, Alberto. I needed that. My neck has been too stiff lately. The mattresses around here...they’re not what I would have expected from someone with as big of a fortune as yours.”

  I braced myself for him to turn and tear into me, but he was unmoved. He wasn’t falling for my provocations. What was he waiting for? He had his torture tools right there in front of him, just a few feet away. He had these cranks and surely a million others tricks up his sleeve to put someone into agony. But so far all he had done was whisper something to the men outside. I couldn’t make out what it was. I swallowed hard and tried not to let my fear show. Whatever was coming...was it even worse than anything I had prepared myself for? Too horrifying to imagine?

  There was a knock, prompting Alberto to go retrieve something from the men outside. I took in a deep breath, not knowing what to expect to see in his hands when he turned around. It seemed to be happening in slow motion. He rolled in a wooden cart on wheels, but it was covered in an old dirty tarp so that I couldn’t see what it carried. When he ripped it away with a sound that echoed against the stone walls, I saw a row of buckets. Several rows, actually, of silver buckets that were dripping with something along the edges.

  A heavy feeling of dread settled into my chest. What could be in those buckets? Acid, I thought. Or something like it. I tried to prepare myself for whatever unbearable things I would feel when he did what he intended to do with them. He was no longer hesitating. He picked one of them up and rushed forward, sloshing its contents across my body.

  I screamed instinctively, expecting to feel immeasurable pain. I thought my skin would begin to melt and that I would see my own bones showing through my skin by the time he was done. It would be a slow death, but I would die with honor. I was prepared for the worst.

  But as I calmed down, I realized any pain I thought I felt was simply the sting of ice. It wasn’t acid at all, but simply cold water. And while it was mildly irritating to have it thrown across me, the wall, and the floor rather than to be able to drink it, it was not the horrid torture I was expecting. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “Water!?” I cackled, sounding almost evil in my relief. “That’s how you think you will make me talk!? Cold water!?” I laughed even harder as I said it out loud. “It will take more than that to make me talk. You don’t have what it takes, Alberto. You could kill me if you wanted, and yet...you splash me with water!”

  He tried not to seem phased by me teasing him, but I could see the rage boiling up inside of him. His eyes twitched and his nostrils flared. With a rolling growl, he splashed another bucket of icy water across me, and didn’t hesitate to throw another one on right after that.

  The double blow of the stinging cold did get to me more that time. It went up my nose and down my throat, causing me to cough. While I had been sweaty and hot moments ago, I was now freezing, and the stone wall behind me wasn’t helping any. But it was still tame compared to what I was waiting for. Nonetheless, Alberto could see that I was irritated and was looking quite pleased with himself. I couldn’t let him get away with that smug smile.

  “This is nothing,” I said, hiding my doubts. “I do believe you’re losing your touch, Mr. Milano. Perhaps you aren’t everything I believed you to be. I don’t even appear to be pregnant anymore, and you’re still taking it easy on me. You’re weak.”

  My voice broke with disgust as I said it, and it sent him charging towards me in a rage, but this time he didn’t have a bucket in his hands. It was just me and him, face to face. I expected to see pure hatred in his dark eyes as he stared back at me, but there was something missing. There was a softness that I knew I had to be imagining. No decent man could do the things he did. And while he may not have been snapping my fingers like twigs or ripping out my teeth with pliers, I was still freezing and chained to a wall. Whatever I thought I could see buried within him was a lie.

  He broke away without saying a word and hit me with another blow of water. Each time it was sharper and painful than the one before. I realized this was the tactic. It was a slow build of my muscles seizing up from the cold. I couldn’t wipe anything from my eyes or even curl over myself for warmth. But no matter how tense it could, I refused to cave into him.

  “What if I really don’t know anything?” I suggested as I spat another rush of dripping water from my face. “You might even suspect that I don’t know anything, and you’re just trying to save face. Your brothers are taunting you and belittling you because you’ve been had. I fooled you. And you think the only way you can fix it is to draw something out of me...So you can pretend that bringing me here wasn’t for nothing.”

  “You take pride in that?” He asked with a sharp inhale. “To deceive people?”

  “To deceive you? Yes. You are not like other people. You’re a monster, and I would lie to you all over again if I could.”

  “Just because you’re not pregnant doesn’t mean you’re not a whore,” he hissed before splashing me again.

  “And I’d still rather be a whore than be a sad excuse for a man like you,” I defended coldly.

  He threw the remaining buckets over me with a fury, sending each one crashing to the corner of the room with a terrible sound once it was emptied. The shock of it in my ears as they echoed between the walls was a lot to take in along with the cold sting on my shivering skin. It overwhelmed my senses, and I could feel my vigor fading. I kept spouting off whatever insult I could, even though I worried what would happen now that he was out of water to throw on me.

  “It’s disappointing really to see you like this...Desperately trying to prove what a big strong man you are while lacking the courage to actually follow through with anything.”

  My chest heaved as my bottom lip quivered from the icy chill that pounded through my bones. My clothes were sagging heavily from my body, clinging to my curves. My nipples were hardened and cutting through the soaked white fabric that was now see-through. Alberto noticed all of this too, and couldn’t keep from feasting his eyes on the sight. It made me cringe to be stuck there with no way to ward off his wandering vision moving over me.

  “I’ll ask you again,” he said in a low rasp. “What do you know? What is it that you were rushing off to tell your father?”

  I almost blurted that I wasn’t rushing off at all. I wanted to confess that I was only trying to find out more than what I had discovered in the basement, if for nothing more than to rub it in his face that he was wrong. But for as much fun as that would be, it wouldn’t do me any good. And once I started letting that slip, the rest of it may start spilling out too. At least I did know about the unclaimed goods hidden away in his basement, and I could piece together how they u
sed those things as leverage in their other nefarious dealings. I wouldn’t give that much up. Maybe I still stood a chance of getting out of here and reporting them. It wasn’t the half of what they were up to, but it only took small charges to put everything else to a halt.

  “I will never tell you anything, Alberto.” My words were strong, but the delivery was weak. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about a warm blanket and a bowl of soup. It would feel so good to sit in front of a fire, curled up in a ball, relieving the strain of my stressed muscles and limbs.

  His big black boots stomped across the floor, moving closer to me. They stomped through the puddling water and I shivered even more as the splashed drops hit me. It was a wonder I felt them at all with how drenched and freezing I already was.

  This was it, I thought again. This was when he would snap and reach out to strangle me. But he had a strange look in his eyes that made me fear for something much worse. Flaming up with all of that rage and hatred for me was a lustful look of desire...one that he seemed to be struggling to control.

  Once he was within a foot of me, he lunged forward to close the gap between us. He pressed his entire body against mine, forcing my spine up to the hard stone behind me. I realized suddenly that his hand was gripped tightly around my throat, almost enough to leave marks but not hard enough to completely keep me from breathing. His hand trembled, and I wondered what part of his urges he was fighting to resist. Was it his desire to kill me...or his desire for something else?

  My throat rolled across his palm as I swallowed to speak. My voice struggled to rise over the tense grip of his hand. “Why use your bare hands? Why not use any one of those tools waiting for you over there? You’re taking advantage of me because I am a woman. You coward!”

  I wanted to spit in his face, but he tightened his grip more and snarled back at me. “You’re more of a man than most men I know.”

  It seemed to both pain him and delight him to admit it. There was nothing left between us, and as much as he seemed to want to choke me, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. I couldn’t turn my head to look away from him. All I could do was stare back into the abyss of his eyes and try to sort through what he might be thinking. The longer I stared, it was harder to even be certain of what I was thinking. An inexplicable warmth began flowing through me, maybe from his body heat alone. I told myself that was why I was suddenly longing for him not to move away...for him to stay close to me just like this. It had to be because of the heat emanating from his body and nothing more.