Chapter Forty-Four
Xander
Time…
What time was it?
What time is it?
For a man who didn’t have long to live I probably shouldn’t be so obsessed with the time. What did it matter really?
It wasn’t as if I could do anything. I was here, useless as shit.
Useless to everybody, including myself.
In my final moments I just wanted to think of her…
Jia…
Jia Marchesi, age twenty six, artist. Daughter of Giovanni Marchesi the Vegas Mafia King.
She was the innocent in the mix.
I was told that when I was given the mission brief.
Usually when we talked about innocents like that, it meant we weren’t to involve them. As agents we weren’t supposed to allow harm to come to them and most of all, we were supposed to be careful with them.
Be careful not to get them caught in the crossfire. Be careful of them getting close because the people we were targeting could sway them.
I broke every rule in the book with my innocent. I didn’t just involve her, I got involved with her.
I got involved with her and it made me reckless.
It didn’t matter now. I’d be selfish now and I could think of her for however long I had left.
I lifted my head and opened my eyes. There was a clock on the wall. I think Giovanni put it there to add to the torture.
I was attached to two metal pillars. Cuffed to them like I was in some risqué sex club, fuck, maybe that’s what it was, some kind of torture chamber.
Giovanni wasn’t the kind of man to like the risqué. But torture? Yes.
This apparatus I was attached to was definitely for torture. Torture to death kind of torture. Nothing more than that, nothing less.
The clock on the wall said it was three o’clock.
I just wasn’t sure if it was three o’clock in the same day, three in the morning, or three p.m. the next day.
If it was any of the latter, it meant I wasn’t thinking of her at a time when I knew she’d be thinking of me.
Jia.
She was going to Italy with Armand. She’d board a plane and fly off with him, out of the country. Far away from me. Far, so very far away from me.
I wanted to think of her at a time when I thought she’d be thinking about me. Boarding that plane. And looking out the window as it took off. That was what I imagined.
I imagined she’d cry and Armand wouldn’t comfort her.
He’d leave her to cry for me. He’d hate her for it.
I hope she didn’t cry because maybe he’d beat her for it. Or other things.
I wouldn’t be there to save her.
If it was three pm the same day—Monday—then it hadn’t happened yet.
If it was still Monday then that meant Giovanni would have been torturing me since last night when he captured me and I probably would have passed out a few times from the torture.
If it was still Monday then it would have been earlier that Jia came by and came through for me. She didn’t talk. She didn’t tell her father who I really was and that I came to steal from him. She knew practically everything about my presence here. Everything. Yet, she held her silence for me, just as she promised she would.
My girl came through for me and showed I could trust her, even when she watched me being tortured for the information and knew the torture meant death.
If it was still Monday then that’s what happened earlier today.
Giovanni came to me several times after, to try and get me to talk.
Asking me the same questions over and over again.
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
Who did I work for?
Who sent me?
I gave the same answer. I told him a fucking clown sent me. Granted he wasn’t to know that in my rookie days of being a secret agent I thought of Ethan as a clown, because of the bizarre shit he used to ask us to do.
Fuck, I thought he was clowning around when he made Claire captain of our team and not me.
I thought it was a joke until he pointed out that my girl had more balls than me. Turned out he was right. I’d stopped thinking of him as the clown then.
But he’d become the clown again for the purposes of today, if it was still today, because I wasn’t dropping names.
I’d left Wes with two requests on what he should do if I failed in my grand plan to steal the blueprints. I asked him to tell Ethan what happened and then to tell Jia I loved her. That’s what I asked him to do.
Whether or not it was still Monday, he would have known by now that I’d failed. Enough time had passed since Giovanni captured me to alert Wes to my failure.
I was supposed to message him when I got out of the secret chamber.
That never happened.
Wes would have known to take the next steps if he didn’t hear from me.
It was so difficult to know what to do sometimes.
Sometimes when you thought you were doing the right thing. It turned out to be the wrong fucking thing to do.
In my case it always seemed like I was wrong whatever I did.
I thought by getting the prints myself I was going to be one step ahead of everybody. Not just Balthazar and his Spades, but everybody.
I thought it would give me an edge, something to work with and it would protect everyone else who was part of the mission.
Instead, I blew the mission out of the water and here I was. Captured.
Who knew what could be happening now?
Both Giovanni and The Chameleon knew of my presence, and they were so very far from stupid. Giovanni guessed right that I was an agent. He also knew I had to be of the special variety to disturb the nest.
I was pretty sure that global threat I was so worried about would come to pass.
Maybe…
There was always a maybe, but in this case I didn’t know.
The situation was pretty bad.
The minute my mind started clearing up, a jolt of electricity ran through me and Giovanni’s face came into my view.
Holy fuck!
I screamed. It was so fucking painful. So damn painful. Like a thousand knives piercing through my body. That was what it felt like.
Knives, swords, blades.
Pain beyond belief. Pain beyond measure.
They turned up the voltage again and administered another wave that made me heave like I was going to vomit. I was pretty sure I would have if I’d eaten. But there was nothing to come up.
Fucking hell.
How was I still alive?
Giovanni came right up into my face and snarled.
I’d foolishly thought he’d left me but he hadn’t. Neither had the prick who was giving me the electric shocks. He was still very much here.
My ass was still being tortured. It hadn’t fucking stopped.
Giovanni held up a hand and the electricity zapped away as it was switched off.
“Xander Cage, I’m growing tired of this. As you know I’m a very busy man. Very busy. I don’t have time for shit like this,” he taunted.
Fucking asshole. I didn’t give a flying fuck about his schedule.
“Tell me what I want to know and this will be over. I’ll kill you and you’ll be dead. No more pain, son. Why would you prolong the torture? I never figured you for a man who liked pain. Come on tell me who sent you? Who sent you to steal my prints?”
The one fucking kick I got out of this was watching him squirm every time I gave an answer. It gave me strength to find my voice.