The asshole controlling the switch turned it off again. The prick was the sort who loved torture. I hadn’t seen him before but it was evident that he enjoyed watching and administering it.
Like he got off on it.
I hadn’t seen but I assumed it was Giovanni who told him to switch it off.
A moment of nothingness passed. I wasn’t sure if I’d fainted from the pain or if the time had truly passed.
Honestly it did feel like I’d slipped into some kind of unconscious state.
My eyes were open, then I closed them and when I opened them again, Giovanni was standing before me in that all-knowing presence and authority he had.
It seemed to happen in a split second. Like he’d just appeared.
What an evil son of a bitch he was indeed.
He really was that.
He stood before me with a deck of cards.
Instantly I recalled the recruitment session. I was supposed to find the three red queens.
The four men who’d gone before me fell prey to his game of death and met their fate. Part of me knew then that I was dealing with a real bastard. A real nasty bastard, sick. As sick as some of the men I’d come across in my career.
You had to border on some level of true psychotic sickness to be like that, truly psychotic and evil. It was missing in the general human. Others, like this guy, had it naturally.
“Xander Cage. What am I truly going to do with you?” Giovanni asked. “What am I really going to do with you?”
He started shuffling the cards but like how I did it, with that flair for the dramatic. The wow factor that drew people in.
It was all about timing. If you shuffled them fast enough they’d create their own momentum and motion. Like a circle within a circle. He did it and the cards were moving around in a sharp circle.
Show off.
Fucking show off, showing me he was through and through the Vegas king with his cards.
He laughed when he saw me looking.
“Think you’re the only one with tricks, Ace?” He stopped shuffling the cards around and they filtered back into a stack in his hand. He kept back a few though in one hand. Stepping forward, he held up an ace of hearts and hovered it over my face. “That’s you. Ace of hearts. You stole my daughter’s heart.”
He next picked the ace of spades.
“You alerted me yesterday to the presence of the leader of the Spades. You could only know about people like that if you were somebody special. Very special. Not just an ex-marine. That would be too low level. Well below the paygrade.” He held out the king next and shoved it into my face. “That is me. I am the fucking king and I allowed you to come into my circle, infiltrate and screw with me.”
Screw with him?
Fuck, it wasn’t him who was screwed. It was me. I was the one who was screwed here. I was screwed from that first fucking night when I accepted this mission. Right from then I was a dead man signing himself away to shit.
I continued to look at him. He held up the last card.
The queen of hearts.
“Jia…” He breathed. “My little girl. You turned her against me. You… just the presence of you turned her against me. There were so many warnings I gave you and you failed to heed them. I told you she belonged to Armand and you still persisted. I told you to stay away from her and you still persisted. I told her I’d kill you if you continued your secret affair and that didn’t stop you either. Now she hates me. She doesn’t have to say it. I could see it in her eyes. She hates me. But she is my weakness and as you quite rightly alerted me, I have to protect her. So Xander Cage, talk. Who commissioned you to steal from me?”
I pulled in a sharp breath and blew it out.
Fucking bastard. He thought I was just going to talk because he’d been torturing me.
No.
Not at all. I wished Ethan could see me now. Granted the man would get me out, but I figured the sight of me would put him in his place for questioning my duties.
When he commissioned me for this mission he told me that Claire would do it.
Claire would do this too. She wouldn’t say anything and would rather die than cave.
I wasn’t about to make anybody ashamed of me.
“A clown,” I replied, at least my words were coherent.
He laughed. “A clown. That’s original. A better answer than the last guy who was in your shoes gave. A clown. When I was a boy in Italy, my father was the revered Vermont Marchesi. Still is. Even at eighty five years old. He passed the torch to my older brother. Know why?” He looked to me with expectancy.
“Why?” I only answered to humor him.
“He knew I was destined for greater things, bigger things than overseeing the business. And realistically what the hell could be bigger than that? The Marchesis are one of the biggest families in Italia. Renowned all over, the name commands respect. The name is La Cosa Nostra itself. Few can claim it but we do because we know how to handle ourselves. We know not to strike a man down more than necessary because then he won’t be able to talk.”
He babbled on. I would have loved to smart mouth him and tell him I didn’t give a shit about his family or his tradition, or his lessons. I didn’t care about any of it. I supposed though, that he was about to get to the point of his story. Giovanni didn’t talk shit. Not like this. Not unless there was a point to it.
“That is why I’m not giving you the torture I dealt earlier, son. Let me impart some wisdom to you and maybe you’ll talk.” He stopped and stared at me. Those sharp eyes of his seemed sharper. “The Ra don’t just act in a sporadic fashion. Something has to alert them to the presence of something they may want. Someone. Someone who knows a thing or two of value. That’s just the run of the mill Ra. The Spades are a whole other story. The worse faction of The Ra led by the notorious bastard Balthazar Kane. Someone spoke to him personally. As in they have his number and called him up for a chat. If you know about him, Xander Cage, you know that’s no mere thing to do. The man is a ghost.”
I was listening. Fucking listening because he had my damn attention for the truth in his words.
Giovanni set the card pack down on the ground below us and pulled the joker out. “People mistake him. But guess what - he’s the most powerful piece.” He chuckled. “That motherfucker has everybody fooled. Guess why? Nobody knows who he is. Nobody fucking knows who he is and he can infiltrate anybody, manipulate anybody. Fucking fool the shit out of you to get what he wants. That’s the fucking joker. It’s not you, Ace. Nope. You have more skin than that. The joker in this game is someone who managed to fool all of us and I don’t know who it is. I suspect though that he worked his way somehow, enough to drag a guy like you into the game. Those are my thoughts and I’m never wrong, Xander Cage. So, tell me. Who sent you to steal those prints.”
Fucking asshole.
He could talk shit all he wanted he wasn’t getting anything out of me, not a damn fucking thing.
If there’s one thing I always knew, it was to know who to trust and what to say and when. Now would not be one of those times when I talked.
“A clown,” I repeated and he shook his head.
He snarled but then his face resumed some normalcy and he put his finger to his temple and tapped signaling he was thinking. “Ex-Marine… I always thought it didn’t fit that you wanted to work for me. Let me guess… let me guess. You know what suits you and the whole situation? Some sort of agent. That’s what I think. You’re some sort of agent and I don’t mean a fed.”
Well I had to hand it to him. I could see where Jia got her sense of awareness from, she’d guessed the same.
They were wrong though.
I was on this mission acting indeed like an agent, but I wasn’t one though. Not officially.
There was only one person who’d summed me up the right way and it was my biggest enemy.
Balthazar Kane.
“I am… a thief,” I answered and Giovanni nodded.
“Yes. I agree, Ace
of hearts. You are a thief. A skilled one because I don’t know how you figured out where I put those prints. Not even my knights know about my chamber. Not even them and no one I showed that chamber to would have told you about it. I’m skilled at my job too. I didn’t become the king for my cooking skills. There’s more than one way to make a thief talk.”
As if on cue, a bolt of electricity jolted through me. It was sharper than the last bout and more powerful. The voltage must have been higher.
It knocked me out instantly.
To Be Continued …
Tease of Spades: Game of Love Series Page 16
