When you’d been so close to death time and time again ... everything that came after was nothing compared to it, really. Everything else was just a bonus, he figured.
“What are you doing down here?”
Alessio didn’t turn at the sound of Cree’s voice, but he did look back through the one-way glass to see Corrado being pulled out of the water, almost entirely unconscious, but not quite. Just almost.
“Watching,” Alessio murmured.
“You shouldn’t be down here.”
“I know.”
Cree came to stand next to him and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “He’s going to be difficult ... to break, I mean. His pride holds him back. All of that has to go ... the pride, dignity ... the harder it is to take those things from him, the longer this process goes on.”
Yeah.
He knew that, too.
“What about the other one?” Alessio asked, glancing over his shoulder at the dark room where Chris was having his rotation. “How did that go in the tank?”
“He about broke the fucking top trying to get out, one of the jacket’s arms came undone ... I have never seen someone fight that hard against it, and I have seen some things happen down in these rooms.”
“Adrenaline?”
“Likely,” Cree returned. “His second rotation in the tank starts tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes, or if we get a different result.”
Of course.
Alessio knew how this went.
Break the body; break the mind.
“As for you,” the man said next to him, “you don’t need to be down here reliving your own time in these rooms because you feel something for one of the two currently experiencing theirs. You realize that, don’t you?”
He did.
All Alessio could think to reply was, “But shouldn’t I?”
8.
Corrado
“Stay down.”
Corrado didn’t.
His knees ached, and his legs shook so badly he was sure they were going to give out the second he put all of his weight back onto them, but he still forced his body back up. Back to his feet, he didn’t stand quite as straight as he did the last ten times, not when he couldn’t breathe doing it.
The straighter his spine, the worse the pain became. He trembled from the top of his head to his toes pressing against cold, damp cement. The amount of effort it took to pull his body up from the ground that time was clearly more than he realized.
Would he be able to do it again?
Corrado didn’t know.
Fuck him if he wouldn’t try.
Keeping his hands resting against his knees to give him a bit more support so he didn’t topple over entirely—that was not happening—he took a few quick inhales to try and soothe the pain flaring in his side.
Was that his fucking kidney?
His ribs?
A collapsed lung?
All of the above?
Likely.
“You’re a stubborn fuck, you know that?”
Corrado didn’t reply to the voice in the darkness because that was the thing ... he barely saw a flicker of them in the blackened room before they struck out at him again with those goddamn bamboo rods. Flexible, and painful, the rods didn’t do serious damage to his body. Typically no blood, and nothing that was going to force them to pull him out of these fucking rooms, but they still hurt. They bruised, and they broke.
It didn’t matter.
He’d learned early on during these rotational beatings when he was in the dark room—a far better place than the tank, as far as he was concerned—that they were looking for something from him. And maybe it was his stubbornness or his damn pride, but he refused to give it to them.
Today, they wanted him to stay on the floor.
Just stay down, they kept saying.
Corrado got back up. Every single time they put him to his knees, or on his back, he forced his body back up to his feet. If they wanted him down there on the ground like a dog, then they were going to have to make sure he couldn’t get back up.
Simple as that.
It was stupid.
Part of him knew that.
The beating—their lesson—would end as soon as he continued to follow their directions. As soon as he lost himself in the darkness of the room where he wasn’t sure where the blackness ended and he began, it would end because they broke him.
Corrado didn’t want to be broken.
Not like that.
“Stay down,” the order came again.
This voice was new—it didn’t belong to Cree, or some of the others he’d become accustomed to joining him in the tank or the dark room. Then again, they barely spoke at all so he couldn’t honestly say it was a new person. They very well might have been involved in this phase of his training for the entire time, but tonight was the first time they chose to spoke.
He preferred it when they didn’t speak.
It pissed him off more.
Corrado dragged in a painful breath, one that hurt right down to the marrow in his bones—old blood made his tongue have a rusty flavor that seemed thick; the smell of piss lingered in the room, but he wasn’t even sure if that was from him, or not; the stench of vomit clung to the walls, wherever the fuck they were.
This place was hell.
Dignity?
What was that?
Probably in that bucket in the corner where he was expected to use the bathroom, for fuck’s sake. He still had his fucking pride. The pride was what was going to kill him here. Of that, he was most sure. If he could just give it up, right along with his dignity and everything else they had ripped away from him in these goddamn rooms, then this would end.
Corrado knew it.
He’d figured out the trick.
Pride was a bitch, though. The one thing he wouldn’t give up to anyone for anything. Ever. He didn’t know if that was the Guzzi in him—although, he wouldn’t blame his twin a bit if Chris had already given up and given in to this process—or if it was simply the way his brain was wired.
It was pride that made him drag in one more quick breath, settle into the pain of what was going to come next when he made the move, and then he focused all his efforts into making his muscles do what he needed and wanted them to do. Which was stand—entirely straight again, not bent at the knees to give him support and rest from the ache radiating throughout his entire body.
No, straight.
All the way up again.
In the darkness, one’s eyes might eventually become accustomed to it. Not so much so that they would be able to see everything like they could in the daytime, but just enough that where it only seemed like black space before, now there were shadows.
Corrado watched one of the shadows move. It came fast, the strike hard. Right against his chest was where it landed, the second coming right after to crack him against his knees. That one probably hurt the worst.
If he never saw bamboo again, it would be a great day for him. He’d decided. Not that he had time to think on that for too long.
He was on the floor again, blinking up at darkness and choking on the laughter that crawled its way out of his throat. The sound of his own distress and sardonic amusement echoed in the space, reverberating back to his spot on the cold, damp floor to taunt him.
Except he liked that sound.
It was better than the hell he usually found here.
“Stay down,” he was told again.