Chapter 33: Secret Baby for the Italian Mafia King: Chapter 33

I wake up drowning. I cough the water out of my lungs, and it comes up red. I blink the lights of the room into focus again. Stretch my wrists against the knot tying me to the chair.

Conscious again, I think blearily. That’s annoying.

“One more time, Ren. From the top. Where is Nadia?” Atlas asks.

His accomplice had to drag himself out of the situation and go get stitches, holding a flap of skin against his leaky jugular. Still remember that. Still taste that.

I spit again, not quite sure what’s my blood anymore. Atlas rounds me, looking for information I don’t have.

“We both know you didn’t give her up, Ren. You didn’t just let her go where you couldn’t follow. A man doesn’t chase a woman for years and then watch her walk off with his kid in tow.” My eyes flash up before I can think better of it, and Atlas smirks. “So, she is yours? Kind of figured, but you never really know. Women these days.”

Nadia’s not like that, I say. Or I think it. The world swims in and out of focus again.

Atlas shoves up my sleeve, takes in the scar there. He clicks his tongue against his teeth.

“That’s a doozy, that,” he says. “I always wondered what it looked like under there. Morbid curiosity, you know?”

He slides the knife over the skin, cutting into the topmost layer like cutting a thin, translucent sliver of onion.

“You don’t feel that, huh?” he asks.

And I don’t.

My brain has decided we have enough real pain; we don’t need to add any more.

“What about this one?” he asks, walking over to my other arm. I brace, hands clenched into two white fists as the knife drags, skinning a piece of my flesh off like cleaning a thing already dead.

My scream goes down into my stomach. I swallow it again and again, force myself to growl through it and tense against the pain. I tell myself it’s not any worse than road rash, but it’s a hell of a lot worse.

“Where’s she at, Ren? Before I start freshening up on my high school anatomy class with your circulatory system.”

I stare at the lights overhead until Atlas’s face blocks it out. His hair is longer than when we first met, a little greasy, too, like he’s been on the road.

“I don’t know,” I say. It comes out in a pant.

He’s not going to believe me, but pain really can rip the truth right out of you.

Atlas flips the knife around, then slams it clean through my good hand. I don’t swallow that scream. Pain makes the world wobble in my vision. Tilt in and out.

I grit down and bear it again, drawing a deep, steely breath. I know how to deal with pain. I’ve dealt with it for a long time.

Atlas clicks his teeth again. The sound just as grating as any of the wounds he’s given me. The pain fades as quickly as it comes.

“Oh, don’t do that now,” Atlas says, the words sawing out between his teeth as he cleans off the knife. “Going into shock, that’s just going to piss me off a little more. Draw this whole thing out longer than it needs to be.”

I try to say that I’m not in shock, but when the words come out as a slurry murmur, I think I might be in shock.

I sit up, trying to claw my senses back. Pull at the zip ties.

“You know, I have just the thing for this,” he says, “Sort of a…specialty of mine. I’ve had plenty of stubborn holdouts who got a little too much brain trauma too early or just didn’t respond to a good beating. But that’s alright. I’ve got something else. Sort of a one-size-fits-all solution.”

He steps around me and leaves me looking at a lopsided kitchen with a row of souvenir shot glasses lined up on the windowsill, the blinds shut. I lift my heavy head, and the room isn’t lopsided anymore.

When Atlas returns again, he steps around me with something in his hands. “Had to go out to the garage to get it,” he says, and sits a can of kerosene down at my feet. He lights a match and presses it to the cigarette between his teeth. A cold panic seeps low into my stomach.

I look at the clock hanging on the wall, its second hand tick-tick-ticking away. Six minutes. That’s a long time. God, that’s a long time.

“Sort of an old friend of yours, too, I take it,” he says, gesturing to the can. I writhe against the chair. Kick. Thrash. The whole thing upends, sending me and the chair onto the floor.

“Don’t have to cause all that fuss, Ren. Just tell me what I want to know. Where’s she at?”

“Fuck you.”

Atlas sighs and hauls me upright again with a heaving grunt.

“Alright,” he says, taking the can of kerosene and splashing it onto my shoes.

“You’re gonna burn up your own goddamn kitchen—” I ask.

“Not my kitchen,” he shrugs, careless. “But I’ve got a fire extinguisher. We’re gonna do this nice and slow, Ren. A controlled burn, just like they do out in California. Your parents, that was just a wildfire.”

My eyes flick up, study his face. His smile cuts like a blade.

“Yeah,” he says, filling in the question I didn’t ask. “Sorry. And just in case you do decide you’re dying for this girl, you might as well know before you get to the afterlife and start causing a big embarrassing scene there—it wasn’t Nadia’s dad who put me on that hit; it was her uncle.”

The pain is running circles around my head like Harper spinning on that carousel. Like Nadia and me, spinning around and around in the bar.

The stench of the kerosene singes my nostrils before it’s even lit.

Atlas takes one last drag of his cigarette, then holds it out.

“You ready?” he asks.

I look at the clock again.

“Might as well,” I agree.

Atlas smiles, almost looks pained as he nods back to me.

“Well, just remember, Ren. We can stop anytime. You just have to tell me where she’s at.”

“I’ll burn, thanks.”

He steps closer. The smell of burning nicotine fills my nostrils as I stare down the flare of the cigarette’s end, red and hot, the ashes slowly eating away at themselves as he draws on it and then holds it out over the small puddle at my feet. The smallest ember. That’s all it will take.

I feel the sweat on the back of my neck. Too hot already.

We both wait, time stretching on unbearably long in just those few seconds. But I know better than to think the anticipation is worse than the pain that comes after. It’s not. Not when it comes to burning.

Atlas’s phone chirps from the counter. He smirks, puts the cigarette back in his lips and strides over to check it. His mouth sags, and he growls something under his breath.

“Well, goddamn Ren,” he sighs, staring into the screen with an expression I don’t understand. “Looks like you don’t have to tell me shit. You can die with all the dignity you’d like.”

My head snaps up, understanding dawning. It is the face of a man who just lost $250,000.

“They already got her.”

***

I take one of the cigarettes from the box left on the counter and I put it between my lips. Atlas lies on the floor at my feet, his hair a dark, wet halo. I look down at the half-conscious, kerosene-soaked man as though we’ve never met. He gargles on his teeth.

I turn this way and that, taking in the destroyed kitchen all around me. Broken shot glasses at my feet, everything on the counter overturned. One arm of the chair I was tied to has snapped off, and my wrist throbs; it may be broken. Atlas’s phone is still on the counter. Either he doesn’t have it set up, or his ugly, broken face is too distorted for the facial recognition to detect. Like an animal got him. I press his finger against the sensor instead, get it unlocked.

Elijah answers the call, suspicious of the number.

“Ren?” he asks, startled when he recognizes my voice. “Ren, where are you? What the fuck is going on, why can’t I get a hold of anybody—”

I toss the cigarette into the pool of warning: highly flammable liquid, and I shut the door behind me with a decisive snap, leave Atlas to his six minutes.

“Ren, hello? What happened? ”

I glance back at the house, the gauzy smoke already trickling from the windows, and the red glow flickering in the windows.

“…I don’t remember.”