“To Dante.”
“To Dante!”
Twenty-Six
Dante
There was one reason I went to jail.
Elena was right when she assumed those friends in high places could get me off with a hefty fine for bail jumping instead of having to pay with incarceration.
But it was too good an opportunity to waste.
Oh, I could have done it another way.
Hired someone or asked a favor.
This required a personal touch though. My touch.
After all, it was my wife he’d abused and turned against herself.
I owed it to all three of us to exact this retribution myself.
It took longer than I wanted it to.
I missed Christmas and New Year’s Eve with my new, beautiful wife and our family. Lying on a thin mattress on a metal bunk bed in a six by eight foot cell as a six-foot five man was uncomfortable as hell. The food was crap, the company was worse. My cellmate was a guy who had his tongue cut out by another inmate for snitching and the group of Aryan neo-Nazis didn’t like my swarthiness the moment they clapped eyes on me.
There were Made Men inside, a small gang of them and others who had joined up with other gangs inside. I told them not to bother with me, I didn’t want to draw attention to myself. Though I pulled three of them aside that day to let them know I’d need them soon.
But none of that mattered.
I kept to myself and no one disturbed me because I was a big guy and I didn’t cause problems.
I just waited.
With decreasing patience.
Because I knew it would all be worth it in the end.
Finally, two weeks after my incarceration, the transport van arrived and four new prisoners entered B block.
One was a Chinese man with tattoos all over his face, only the tip of his nose and chin were inkless, and one was a fairly handsome Black man who was instantly welcomed by people he seemed to know in one of the drug gangs.
The last was a slim, pale skinned brunet man who looked as green as the jumpsuit we had to wear in here.
I tried to see him as Elena had as a girl, if he was handsome or worthy of her in any way.
He was not.
A brutto figio di puttana inside and out.
“Ugly little guy,” the inmate beside me grunted as he took stock of the new arrivals. “He’ll be someone’s bitch boy within the week.”
I didn’t argue even though I knew he wouldn’t live that long.
I had a job in the carpentry shop turning chair legs. It was boring work, mundane, and normally reserved for the unconnected and new inmates to the prison. I could have had something else, but this suited my purposes perfectly.
Christopher started work on his fourth day inside.
He was responsible for loading the truck.
I knew this because I’d slipped the guy in charge of assigning tasks a wad of cash to make this happens.
On the sixth day, I found my opening.
It was almost quitting time and most of the men fucked off to hang around and shoot the shit at the end of their shift.
Only Christopher and a couple of the meeker guys continued at their tasks for fear of angering the higher ups.
When someone asked Christopher a question, I ducked into the loading truck and crouched behind a stack of an unvarnished dining table chairs. There was a metal click as he swung the door open, light flooding the interior for a moment before the door swung shut behind him. He shuffled forward half-blinded by the four-chair tower in his spindly arms.
It would be too easy to kill him.
I wished I could have taken my time.
Skinned him alive or beaten him, let him recover, then beaten him again in a vicious cycle that wouldn’t end until his mind had broken alongside his body.
He’d almost ruined Elena’s life.
He deserved more than a quick death.
But it was all I had to offer so I’d make sure it was a brutal one.
He didn’t notice me stand up in the shadows, looming over him like some boogey man in a children’s story.
Only what happened next was considerably too graphic to be in any children’s book.
I had a chair leg I’d turned that afternoon in my right hand and I used it like a baseball bat against the side of Christopher’s head.
There was a thunk and a crunch as the wood, backed by the entire force of my body, met his skull.
He crumbled, the chairs in his arms toppling over. I caught them before they could cause a clamor against the ground, carefully placing them behind me.
The pathetic excuse for a man groaned on the floor, clutching at his head.
“Hi,” I said to him as I squatted beside his body, at ease because three Made Men were watching the doors while I took my time with this cazzo di merda. “Christopher Sallow, right?”
He groaned louder.
“I thought so.”
I poked him with the bloody wooden leg until he rolled onto his back and then grabbed one of his hands, holding the palm steady so I could impale the screw of the chair leg into his palm.
He screamed.
But with the truck door closed, you would only be able to hear the sound if you stood right outside, as my fellow camorristi did while keeping watch.
I pulled the other chair leg from the sleeve of my jumper and pinned his other hand, too easily because he was made of nothing but bones, before I impaled that too.
His scream devolved into a snot-filled garble.
“What are you doing?” he cried.
“Do you remember Elena Lombardi?” I asked, almost conversationally.
It was strange how I could modulate my voice even when I was filled with so much rage my skin threatened to peel off from the heat of it.
He stilled slightly, panting through his slack mouth.
“I thought so,” I repeated.
I probably only had ten more minutes before the guards would arrive to usher us back to our cells so I pulled out the shiv I’d made out of shard of glass stuck into the end of a melted toothbrush handle.
There was only the dim light of a solitary bulb hanging over head but it was enough to see Christopher’s face, his pale eyes and weak chin.
In the darkness, with revenge in my heart and love in my veins, I let the beast I’d inherited from Noel and honed under tutelage from Tore overtake me.
It was wet work, filthy and loud because Christopher wouldn’t stop blubbering and begging for mercy.
“What mercy?” I said. “What mercy did you show Elena?”
He mumbled words about her liking it at first, but that stopped when I cut off his ear and shoved it into his mouth. Then, he just waxed on and on about how sorry he was, about how it was just a bad time in his life.
“Lies.” I had one wrecked hand between my own, tracing his bones with the knife so they showed through the split skin and dripping blood. “You went back for Giselle and Elena a year and a half ago.”
“Bitch bit my ear,” he roared, niceties over, struggling hard against my grip, but too weak to do anything about it.
I cut off the other ear, notice the mascaraed lobe where Elena had evidently bitten into him.
That was my woman.
My wife.
Fierce pride surged through me alongside the giddiness of retribution.
“She should have the pleasure of killing you, but you also don’t deserve to look at her ever again. So, I’m the lucky bastardo that will send you to straight to hell.”