“I’m warning you!” the man growled, trying to sound fierce, but only managing to seem more pathetic.
“I tell ya what. I’ll give you a choice there. You can decide which one we start on first. Maybe you’ll tell us what we want to know before we carve her up too badly and start on the next one. Aye?”
There was silence again. The man glared at him but said nothing.
“No preference then? How ‘bout we flip a coin? Heads the daughter. Tails the wife. Fitting, because we’ll use those ends as a starting point for whichever one we start on.”
When the man didn’t respond, Fergus pulled a quarter from his pocket and tossed it up into the air, catching it with his other hand and slapping it onto the back of the other.
“Heads it is then,” he said, motioning for Niall to bring the daughter forward.
She struggled as she was positioned in front of her father and pushed backward across a table, face up. He secured her wrists and ankles to the table legs while Niall held her in place. She tried to scream, but the gag mostly muffled the sound. The man began to yank forward, trying to get free of his bindings, but only succeeding in tightening them further.
“Heat the knife,” Fergus told Niall once the girl was secured.
Fergus found the whole thing distasteful, torturing a girl who couldn’t be more than her early twenties. Niall and Ronan had snatched her from a local bar where she was working as wait staff. Her mother had been gathered up from a shop near their home. He really didn’t want to hurt either one of them. Cutting up women wasn’t something he enjoyed, but he’d do what he had to in order to get answers. The man sat looking at Niall, who was busy heating the point of a large hunting knife. He continued to say nothing.
“Give her a bigger smile,” Fergus told Niall.
Niall didn’t hesitate. Like his brothers, he found hurting women bad form, but sometimes, it was all you could do. He pulled away her gag and prepared to do as he was told. She screamed as she felt the heat of the knife grow closer to her skin.
“Wait! Don’t!” the man suddenly yelled.
Niall paused and looked at Fergus, who nodded and waved his hand in a gesture to tell him to stand down, for now.
“You’d best talk fast, mate. He won’t stop a second time,” Fergus told him.
“Sidney Austrelia,” he replied.
Fergus glared at him, unamused. “Is that supposed to be funny? We’re about to carve up your daughter like a live-action version of the Black Dahlia and you’re giving me bullshit names?”
“No, I swear. That’s his name. Sidney Austrelia. You can check it out. Look him up on your phone. He’s the CFO of GunderTech Corporation. He’s the top of the food chain. I swear it.”
Fergus nodded toward Olcan, waiting as his younger brother pulled out his phone and clicked the keys. After only a few seconds, he looked up and nodded his head in the affirmative. Fergus turned back to their captive.
“Tell us what you know about him, and don’t leave anything out.”
“First, let my family go.”
“Not happening, but I’ll give you my word. You tell us what we need to know and they’ll get home without a scratch.”
The man paused, no doubt taking time to consider this. He was no fool, and he knew he wasn’t walking out, but telling them what they wanted to know was his family’s only hope. He took a deep breath and nodded, quickly rattling off everything he could think of that might be of use to them regarding Austrelia, who was not only the CFO of GunderTech, but the head of a crime family no one even knew existed. It was unheard of that such an organization existed on their turf without them having a single clue—at least, until now.
When he was done, he asked again for his family to be let go. Fergus nodded, and Niall used the knife to cut the ties from the table while Olcan put the gag back into the girl’s mouth. They lead her back to where Ronan still held her mother.
“You’ll let them go home now?” the man asked.
“In a moment. First, I want you to tell them what you did. I want you to tell them how we found you.”
“No. Don’t. Let them remember me—”
“No,” Fergus barked, cutting him off. “You tell them right here, right now, or they don’t go home.”
The man looked defeated. Tears rolled down his face as he began to speak.
“Jane, Angela, I love you. Please know that. I’ve had a demon, a side of me you don’t know, for some time. There have been other women—”
“Women?” Fergus roared.
“Girls. Other girls. Young girls,” the man said, tears now falling down his face. Fergus had no sympathy.