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“Hank and the boys have Alessia in Book’s basement,” I said. “I’m going to go have a bit of fun with her.”

Even though Fia hadn’t taken me up on my offer, I was still considering skinning her alive. It had been a long time since I’d flexed those muscles, and it was a skill like any other; it required constant practice.

A thin smile like a red wound bloomed on my brother’s bruised face. “By all means, lead the way. I can rest when I’m dead.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Booker muttered, but he got up to show us the way downstairs without hesitation.

I didn’t usually work on women, but it wasn’t a hard boundary of mine.

With the life I’d led, I knew better than most that women were capable of just as many atrocities as men, and they were often better at it.

Still, I didn’t relish taking Alessia di Monti apart, but needs must.

Happily, she was easy to break.

By the sixth fingernail, she was weeping.

“Jesus Christ, please,” she moaned as the pink-painted thumbnail I’d taken from her left hand landed with a delicate plink in the metal medical basin.

I didn’t have my own tools, but Booker’s array was almost enough to put mine to shame.

“Tell me why you turned against Fia,” I pressed again.

“They’ll kill me,” she sobbed. “I can’t.”

“Oh, sweet girl,” I cooed in the voice I used for everyone but Fia, the dead, cold weight of it like a gun pressed to Alessia’s temple. “Don’t you understand, if you don’t tell me, I will kill you too. Across days. Even weeks. Part of the art of murder, you know, is understanding how to keep someone alive. I wouldn’t want you to die too soon, you see.”

“Fuck,” she cried, thrashing in her chair so her sweat-wet hair plastered itself to her damp face. “Fuck!”

“You worked yourself into a corner,” I told her. “You know there’s no escape but death from here. It’s just a decision on how you want to die. I suggested to my Fia that skinning you alive might be fun.”

“Fuck!” she screamed. “All I wanted was some fucking power and independence of my own. Fucking impossible in this life.”

“In the Mafia,” I confirmed.

Suddenly her body flopped forward, strings cut, stringy blond hair curtaining her face. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Is that why you slept your way to the top with Cesare? Trying to get some power? Is that why you lied and manipulated Fiammetta? To get close to the princess of the Outfit?” I suggested in a low, soothing stream.

She nodded. “I really like Fia, though. It’s just . . . I’d made promises—deals—I couldn’t back away from.”

“With who?” Dario snapped from where he leaned against the wall, having refused to take a chair even though his ear was bleeding sluggishly and he looked green.

I studied Alessia as she said nothing, my mind whirring.

“Was it Lando?” I asked, suddenly dropping into a crouch in front of her, my keris blade in my hand and the tip hovering over Alessia’s splayed and shackled hand, right over the raw skin where I’d peeled away her nail on her left ring finger. The metal dipped into the flesh, and she shuddered with a low, cowlike moan. “You couldn’t get to Dario, so you went to the old boss. Slept your way to the has-been.”

Her eyes flashed as her chin shot up, and her teeth were covered in her blood as she bared them at me. “He isn’t a has-been.”

“Oh dear,” I said mockingly. “Did you fall in love with him? Did he tell you he would make you better than a princess? A queen. His queen?”

My heart was pounding, not because I really thought it was shocking Lando would turn against us, but because it suddenly seemed so obvious.

Maybe too obvious?

“Ever since you took over from them, you’ve just run the Outfit into the ground,” she sneered at us both, working the bare moisture in her mouth into a ball to hock up at me.

It dropped wetly to the floor before making contact.