He laughed aloud as he slid behind the wheel. He so enjoyed watching Arturo work, almost as much as Arturo enjoyed working. Still, he was going to have to find out exactly what happened, how the widow had died. He hated losing that income. Arturo was good at what he did, but sometimes he was a little too enthusiastic.
Luigi couldn't get too angry with his oldest friend, not when there were times when he was a little too enthusiastic himself. It was easy to forget the women brought them in money when they were having such a good time. Sometimes clients forgot that as well, but that was okay, because then they paid for that mistake over and over. If Arturo or Luigi killed the golden goose, they got nothing but that moment's pleasure from it.
He spent the rest of the drive fantasizing about giving Angeline to a couple of the men who were regular customers, men who had killed twice. They liked to make their purchase together. Of course Luigi charged them double, and since they'd killed twice, he made certain to give them the girl who brought in the least amount of money - just in case. Arturo had to clean up quite a mess both times.
It would be fun to film Angeline's slow, torturous death. He couldn't chance it, of course, but still, thinking about it was one of his favorite pastimes. Bringing anyone else in on Angeline's death would be a risk he couldn't afford to take. He planned the next best thing. He'd already discussed just how sweet Angeline would die with Arturo. His best friend had agreed to take her to the privacy of training school and spend a few hours with her before Luigi killed her.
Angeline had always been far too arrogant and haughty to ever talk to Arturo. She didn't like him in her house and made no bones about letting both Luigi and Arturo know. Arturo would love to get her to himself in that training school. The instruments he had weren't toys. He knew how to cause a woman such pain she would beg for death. He was equally as good at humiliation. Arturo hated Angeline almost as much as Luigi did.
She always treated their soldiers with a kind of disdain and frowned on Luigi being friends with someone who never rose above personal bodyguard in the organization. She harped on the fact that her father would never have tolerated Arturo's familiarity with the boss. She was just the opposite of Lissa. Lissa threw her arms around Arturo, hugged him with genuine affection, joked with him, treated him like family and had, on more than one occasion, taken care of him when he was ill. If there was anyone Arturo cared anything for other than Luigi, it was Lissa. Still, like Luigi, Arturo knew Lissa had to die. It would be sad, but it was necessary.
Luigi turned the vehicle onto the long winding drive to the back part of the property. He'd scored with the building, snatching it up the moment it was on the market. In town, yet secluded, no one would ever have a clue what went on there. He loved being there with the women, and his enemies, all at his mercy inside the soundproof building, surrounded by the rest of the town. No one ever suspected.
As the car approached the last bend, nearly overgrown with foliage, he saw an orange-red glow. Frowning, he automatically accelerated and then slammed on the brakes as the building came into view. There were no flames on the outside, but windows were breaking, and through them he could see a vicious, hungry blaze leaping greedily at the walls and seeping under the doorway. The outside walls were black and blistered with the incredible heat.
Arturo must not have returned yet. He caught up his phone as he backed down the drive fast. Punching in Arturo's number, he swore as it went to voice mail. "The building's on fire. Inside. I can see the flames. Call me. Now."
Heart pounding, he drove fast away from the fire. He didn't want to be anywhere near the place when the fire department came. He had no idea how much of the inside of the building would be destroyed, but he knew the investigators often could read a lot in the ashes. He was going to have to spread money around to get the official report and either bury it, tweak it, or let it go at what they found. Thankfully, he knew Arturo had gotten the widow's body out of there.
What the hell happened? What had started the fire? Clearly it had started inside. Swearing again, he sent a text to Arturo. Call me now. An order. Where was the son of a bitch? What game was he playing? He should have disposed of the widow's body, picked up a woman for the two of them to play with and already be in the building. There was no car there. Unless...
Had he seen a vehicle? Parked down from the building under the trees? In the shadows? He rubbed at the frown lines in his forehead. Had there been a car? He slowed down and pulled over to park, trying to think. If he went back to look, would the fire department get there and catch him there? He didn't want questions. Arturo never parked that far away from the building, but maybe he had.
Swearing, he turned around and started back up the drive.
Casimir stood outside the inferno, feeding the flames, wishing, for the first time in his life, he could hear the screams of his mark. Arturo deserved death a hundred times over. He despised men like Arturo, men who enjoyed the pain of others. Men born, not shaped, into monsters.
What does that make you? The wind whispered the question in his ear. What did it make him? He wanted Arturo to suffer. He needed him to suffer. To do this terrible thing, allow it to be personal when his code was so rigid, unbending, when he swore to live by that code and yet he still didn't move.
The building was old and wooden with a flat roof. It had obviously been a small warehouse or storage building, but had been renovated more than once. The place had one bathroom, and the rest of the space, maybe a thousand square feet, had been divided into three rooms. The small reception area where Arturo and Luigi could watch television and take a respite from their work as well as a small bedroom where the women they brought there could sleep - when they were allowed sleep. The main room was the "classroom."
Casimir thought in those terms. He'd seen similar classrooms before. Dungeons that held every type of contraption for bondage as well as the necessities for inflicting pain. He remembered every one of those items.
The skylight cracked and shattered as heat rose and there was nowhere for it to go. Instantly the oxygen pouring in fed the flames, so it wasn't as necessary for him to exert himself to keep the fire going. Still, he wanted the blaze hot, burning everything to the ground, destroying Arturo and Luigi's playground. Taking it all. Taking each room. The bedroom had fuel - the beds, mattresses and cheap dressers. Paper strewn around. Luigi and Arturo weren't neat and they didn't give the women much time to be neat and tidy either. Mostly though, it was the soundproofing they had padded the walls and ceiling with in order to keep the screams of the women from being heard that provided the best fuel. And that was pure irony.
The blackened windows began to crack. Spiderweb. The outside walls turned a color much like paper when a flame burned from the other side. They blackened slowly in an alligator-skin pattern and then here and there a flame broke through. Flames leapt out of the skylight, indicating inside the fire was towering, completely engulfing each room.
He kept feeding the flames, burning the building hot and wild, making certain that Arturo died by fire, not by smoke inhalation. He wished he could hear the man suffer each lick of flame, hear him scream for mercy the way his numerous victims had.
Shaking his head, he lifted his face to the sky as the outside walls continued to blacken and more windows shattered. Flames licked along the sills hungrily and danced toward the night. His chest hurt as he made his way back toward his rented vehicle. The car sat under the trees, deep in the shadows. He slipped inside and continued to watch the conflagration. He had to control the flames so there was no chance of them spreading. Fortunately the building was a distance from other buildings, but he didn't want to take chances. He had enough sins on his soul with what he'd just done.
He couldn't go back to Lissa this way. Not like this. He sat there, trying to feel remorse, but he just couldn't drum up any. Was it too late for him? Had he crossed a line he couldn't come back from? It didn't make sense that he'd finally found her and now, he'd let a mark get to him. He'd dealt with ped
ophiles, monsters involved in human trafficking rings, killers, a dozen other types of criminals and never once had he lost it, but this time - this was just the last straw. He'd had his fill.
Twin lights pierced the night, and he swung his gaze from the burning building to the back entrance road. It was mostly overgrown, but Luigi tended to use it. Fewer people would see his vehicle on that road than on the main one. He was a little surprised to see the man, since Luigi knew Arturo had killed Cosmos's wife.
Luigi halted his car the moment he saw the building in flames. He sat there staring and then abruptly backed down the road again. For one moment, Casimir wanted to chase him down and do the same thing to him, burn him alive, make him suffer for all the suffering he caused. Instead, he gripped the steering wheel hard and made himself breathe the need away.
He had to follow the plan. He knew better than to deviate. Casimir knew he didn't have a lot of time. He had to get to the hotel where Lissa Piner would be meeting with the owners the next day, hopefully tamper with the security tapes and meet with the head of security as Tomasso. He also needed to return the rental car. He drove without lights until he was back on the main street.
Casimir hadn't come to her. Lissa paced back and forth in her room, her belly tied in hard knots of fear and her chest hurting from the terrible pressure there. She knew he was back. He was safe. He hadn't come to her. She yanked her fingers through her hair in sheer agitation, unsure of herself. She wasn't a woman to be uncertain. She made split-second, life-or-death decisions with confidence - but this was different. She wished she could call one of her sisters and ask advice.
Why wouldn't he come to her? That was what she had to figure out and then she would know what to do. He could be injured. She paced more, rubbing her hand up and down her thigh. Her palm itched. Her heart hurt. She hated indecision. What if he was injured and couldn't come to her? She pressed her palm harder against her bare thigh. He would call her, using the mark on her palm. He had told her that was possible.
The need to go to him was strong. She blew out her breath and made up her mind. Whatever was wrong - and something was - she needed to be with him. To share whatever was wrong with him. Instinctively, she knew he would be there for her no matter what. Having made up her mind, she didn't hesitate. She yanked open her door and nearly ran right into her uncle. He was reaching for the doorknob.
"Tio Luigi, what is it?" she asked. She'd never seen him look the way he did in that moment. Visibly upset. Agitated. It was no act. He was pale beneath his olive skin, and there were lines carved deep into his face. He'd never looked older. She caught his arms and held on tight. "You look..." Terrible. Rattled.
"Come with me. The only man not accounted for is Tomasso."
"Tomasso?" she echoed. "Tell me what's wrong? Has that horrid man done something to you?" She turned toward the stairs. "I'll kill him myself."
"No, no, Giacinta," Luigi protested, catching her to him. His distress was very real. He actually clung to her. "I want to make certain he's in that room. Then I need to find out where he's been and what time he got back."
She detested him calling her Giacinta. Her real name. The name her father and mother had given her, but now wasn't the time to protest. She had to act out the charade perfectly, no matter what she felt inside.
"He went to the hotel this evening to check with their head of security and make arrangements for my arrival tomorrow. You gave him those instructions yourself. He told me he was going to go while I was in my meeting with you." She frowned at him. "We discussed it, remember? Tio, you need to tell me what's wrong. What happened to upset you this way?"
"I think Arturo's dead." He spat the words at her and then sagged, his weight nearly knocking her over.
She staggered, her arms going around his waist to help him sit on the bottom stair. She crouched down in front of him. "You think? But you don't know? Why do you think he might be dead? And what does Tomasso have to do with his death? Tomasso likes Arturo. Everyone likes Arturo. Tomasso talked about him all the time."
Luigi shook his head. "No. No, Gia." He lapsed into Italian, talking rapidly, rocking himself back and forth, telling her the police had come to tell him about the burned building. There was a body inside. A man. He'd burned to death. He'd been locked into cuffs, a sex game of some kind. The police believed it was a sex game gone wrong and the woman he'd been playing the game with had been Cosmos's widow.
"What?" Lissa widened her eyes in feigned shock. "Were they having an affair? You know Arturo better than anyone. He's been on vacation. Did he run off with her? Was he into kinky sex games? Bondage? You have to tell me, Tio. I don't care what he was into. It won't make me think less of him. If I'm going to help you figure out what happened, you have to tell me the truth."
Luigi lifted his face to look at her. Then he nodded. "He was with her. She went to him after Cosmos died. They liked each other. Cosmos would have killed Arturo if she'd run off with him before that. No one could know. I've admitted this to the police. Cosmos is dead. There's nothing he can do now."
"Were there two bodies in the fire?"
He shook his head, looking older than ever. "Only one. Only a man's body. There was no car. The police found a suicide note at the Agosto estate from the widow. She said she accidentally killed Arturo, her one love, and she flung herself over the cliff after her husband."
Lissa sank back on her heels, her mouth open, one hand covering it in shock. "Oh, no. Tio. But if you know she accidentally killed him, then why do you think Tomasso has something to do with his death?"
He dug his fingers into her shoulder in a bruising grip. "You don't understand. I spoke to Arturo earlier. He had accidentally killed her in their sex games. She liked pain. She got off on pain. He always obliged her, but this time she had some kind of reaction, she couldn't breathe. He tried to save her. He called me sobbing. I told him to take her back to her house and dispose of her body there. He was alive. She was the dead one. He was alive. How did he get back to the building without a car? How did he get into the cuffs? How did the fire start? There had to be someone else there."
She was silent a moment. "You think that someone was Tomasso? Did he know Cosmos's wife as well?"
Luigi shook his head. "I don't know, but everyone else is accounted for."
"Then we'll go talk to him. Make certain he's home. But, Luigi, is it possible Arturo was so upset over the death of the woman he loved that he killed himself? Is there a way to put himself in the cuffs and rig a fire?"
"No. No. He would never do that. He would talk to me. No, Gia, someone did this terrible thing, and we have to find out who it was and punish them. Kill them. Make them suffer and then kill them."
For the first time in her life, Lissa had something genuine to compare with her uncle's acting. This was genuine grief. Instead of feeling compassion for him, she felt anger. Betrayal. When he'd come to her and taken her out of the hiding hole her father had told her to run to, this was not how he'd been. The grief back then had been acting. Totally.
She forced herself to put her arms around him. He was actually trembling. "I'll go to see if Tomasso is in his room, but really, as much as I dislike his arrogance, you know there is no reason for him to do such a thing. We have to look outside the family. Would Aldo come after you this way? If he suspected you had something to do with Cosmos's death? If he saw Arturo near the house, with Cosmos's widow, he might have drawn conclusions."
She patted his knee when he continued to sit there, shaking his head, his body so stunned she knew he was incapable of walking. "I'll be right back," she told him, and turned away.
Luigi caught her wrist so that she was forced to turn back to him and give him a small smile. "What is it, Tio?"
"You're a good girl, Giacinta. A good girl."
A girl he planned to kill. It was all she could do not to jerk her wrist away.
"Remember to call me Lissa, Tio. Even now, we can't make a mistake," she reminded gently.
She didn'
t want to think too much about Arturo's death herself. He'd been kind to her when she'd been a child. Kind when Luigi was distant. Hugging her when her uncle didn't. When Luigi had been a stern taskmaster, teaching her the art of assassination, it had been Arturo who had been the one to dry her tears when her uncle was angry with her. He wasn't that man, but still, those were her memories of him.
"Go to your study, Tio. Call the hotel. Check to see if Tomasso was there tonight. You taught me well. I'll have a conversation with him and see if he knows anything. Trust me to get to the truth."
She had to help him stand, which necessitated touching him again. She felt repugnance at the closeness, at the way he leaned on her. Patted her shoulder. Acted like she mattered to him, when he was already plotting her death. Women meant nothing to him, not even his own flesh and blood. Evidently, his own brother hadn't either. But Arturo, Arturo had mattered.
She waited until he was back down the first flight of stairs and down the hall before she hurried up the stairs to the men's quarters. Knowing the security cameras were on, she knocked, when she wanted to rush right in.
Tomasso opened the door. He looked as if he'd been asleep, but she knew better. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of soft sweatpants and was pulling a T-shirt over his head with one hand. He stepped back to give her entrance and closed the door after her.
"Luigi wanted me to check to make certain you were here," she announced without preamble, watching him closely. Studying his face. Something was very wrong. His face was a mask, and his eyes didn't warm when they rested on her. "He's calling the hotel right now to make certain you were there."
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