And when it did happen ...
“Where the fuck is my bro—”
Corrado’s question cut off abruptly when the first hit came. The sound of flesh meeting flesh was sickening, and unforgiving. A grunt followed the hit before a second one came, and then another and another. Alessio tipped his head back so all he could see was the white ceiling of the corridor, and then he closed his eyes altogether when the beating continued.
They didn’t want him to ask questions.
He wasn’t allowed.
Orders were given.
He was to follow.
Alessio knew how this worked, but the problem was, he couldn’t tell Corrado that. Maybe back in his room, but even then ... it wouldn’t have helped. This was something all The League’s prospects had to learn on their own, in their time. It was the very purpose of the training—to take a man who was already set in his ways, break him, and then change him into a better version of himself.
Even if that better version was created from violence, darkness, isolation, fear, and pain. Alessio didn’t make the rules here; he only knew how to follow them.
“Stand up,” he heard ordered.
That was the thing that made him open his eyes again, although he didn’t try to peek around the corner to look down the hallway. Part of him knew it wasn’t a good idea. Cree would be pissed off like nothing else if someone interrupted his training team, but especially at the very beginning. He needed to stay out of sight as much as possible.
Coming to this end of the complex to get a couple of minutes with Corrado before the training began was a fucking risk anyway. A stupid one, probably, but he wasn’t going to admit that to himself. Alessio wasn’t very good at denying himself something he wanted, as it was, and he kept being drawn back to Corrado when he shouldn’t want anything to do with him at all.
And it’s only been a day.
Fuck.
The beating down the hall continued on like Alessio wasn’t having a whole fucking moment at the other end, just around the corner. Not that the rest of them could know that he was in the midst of his own goddamn issues.
Alessio had to give credit where it was due, though.
Corrado didn’t beg.
He fought back, by the sounds of it.
He didn’t take shit.
Some cried. That wasn’t unusual, and no one said a thing when it was all said and done. Some puked. Fear had a funny way of making the body do things no one could possibly understand unless it was them in the situation. Others begged and pleaded, realizing their mistake in signing a contract for something they didn’t truly comprehend. It was too late by then, though.
They were in.
There was no out until it was done, or you were dead.
But for now, Corrado wasn’t like the others. Very little was said to him from the team—orders like stand or move or stop asking questions. But nothing deep, nothing that answered the questions he kept demanding be answered about his brother.
Even Alessio didn’t know the answer to that.
Usually, one person was trained at a time because it was so intensive. Maybe Cree was going to try a new way of training the twins because it would happen side by side in time, essentially, but Alessio didn’t think he could stomach it to ask the details.
Part of him just didn’t want to know.
“You’re going to learn,” Alessio heard a muffled voice say down the hall.
“Fuck you.”
Corrado’s words were mumbled now—like he couldn’t speak right, or he had to make a great effort to do it.
That was enough for Alessio.
He knew what came next.
Instead of standing there to listen to it, he slipped down the corridor to go in the opposite direction from the rest of the team. They were taking Corrado to the west side of the complex, deep into the basement where even the people who milled about the building wouldn’t be able to hear the fucking screams.
Alessio went east, to Dare.
He suspected he would find Dare in his office, sitting at his desk and handling the paperwork of the day. People who thought they knew the inner workings of The League thought Dare was untouchable in a lot of ways because he never directly handled the assassins, for the most part. That was usually Cree, and his team of people.
They also assumed Dare was ... the very top.
In a way, he was.
It was the same way people assumed Cree—his choice—was just another assassin with a bit more leg room to move in the organization than usual. They were cautious about keeping Cree’s real hand in controlling part of The League quiet. Instead, a carefully constructed story and persona for Cree was spoon-fed to the prospects and clients of The League where Cree was concerned, making them think he was less of a boss and more like them. They were far more likely to trust him in that case.
Dare, though, also had people like Gian Guzzi who fronted a lot of money for this organization to become something no one could possibly ruin, which meant things never stopped around here. If it wasn’t a new prospect being trained, it was the auctions selling off the assassins to people with deep enough pockets all around the world who might be in need of someone with a particular set of skills. And if wasn’t those things, then they were working.
Instead of finding Dare in his office, Alessio wandered the halls until he came to the control room. Or, that’s what they liked to refer to it as. Inside, standing in front of a wall of screens, Dare used a sleek, thin remote with a touchscreen pad to separate what was actually one giant screen—that looked broken into several different screens—to bring up specific cameras. Just as quickly, he switched to a separate screen on the wall of moving pictures that brought up something else entirely.
A wall of doors, it looked like.
His thumb raced across the touchscreen, and Alessio watched on the screen as the opened doors in the hallway began to close one by one. Then, just as fast, Corrado was brought into view by the team ... close to the tank room, now.
Well, the dark room and the tank room.
They were right across from one another. The walls inside were so thick, one couldn’t even blow them out with dynamite. The floors, a cold cement that constantly seemed to stay wet from one thing or another.
“Did you watch mine, too?” Alessio asked.
His chest ached.
He wasn’t sure why.
Maybe it was the memories racing past his eyes—the idea that a couple of years ago, this had been him. He’d been dragged through those halls, had the shit beat out of him, and was then thrown into hell for a month or more to break him beyond recognition. He’d thought he was ready; he’d watched from afar for other trainings before his time.
He had not been anywhere near ready.
Dare turned slowly, realizing he wasn’t alone as his gaze fell on Alessio in the doorway. “I’m sorry?”
“Did you watch my training, too?”
“I did not.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have ... a good answer for that, Les,” Dare murmured.
“Or you don’t want to sound like a coward.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
“What?”
Dare shrugged, and looked back at the screens. “I said earlier you only thought you could think like Cree does, but I might have been wrong about that.”
It took Alessio a second to understand.
Then, two.