by Bethany-Kris
Alessio’s eyes blazed. “No.”
“Really? So, you didn’t try to cause a problem with me today because you didn’t want to just come up and say hello? I don’t know, like a normal person might.”
“Cree says a lot of shit.”
“I noticed a lot of it was right, though.”
Alessio’s throat jumped when he swallowed hard. “Possibly. Doesn’t mean all of it is.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t know whether I like you or not,” Alessio muttered.
“Same.”
This time, it was Corrado that found his gaze drifted down from the shaggy hair covering Alessio’s eyes to where his lips rested in what almost seemed like a smirk. Not quite, but almost. Like the guy just had a natural arrogance about him. That was something Corrado found most annoying in others, but with Alessio, it drew him in.
Another problem?
Probably.
It had been Alessio that kissed him earlier, and Corrado wasn’t entirely sure why he felt the strangest urge to see if the man tasted the same now, but he made the move this time. It didn’t seem to come as any kind of shock to Alessio when Corrado’s mouth came down on his, and he backed him into the wall.
Alessio’s fingers found the waistband of his pants, his fingers digging into the hard muscles there as his tongue swept the seam of Corrado’s lips. Just like that first kiss, this still felt like a fight to Corrado ... like neither of them were willing to yield to the other. No softness; no careful exploration. It was just war. Tongues clashing against each other as he realized, yes, Alessio tasted exactly the same.
Like fucking sin.
His teeth caught Alessio’s bottom lip, and then the man’s fingers pressed harder into his skin just because. If anything, it only made Corrado lurch forward, so he didn’t just have Alessio backed against the wall. No, he had his body pinning him there. Just like when the man had him pinned to the fucking mat of the ring earlier. He wanted him to know what that felt like—to be under someone else’s control, and to like it at the same time.
And yes, he could feel just how much Alessio liked it.
Corrado let out a harsh exhale, his lips grazing down Alessio’s jaw as he tipped his head back to the wall. “Fuck, so that’s a yes on the whole picking a fight thing, then?”
“Fuck you, Guzzi.”
He just laughed.
What else could he do?
A noisy buzz echoed throughout the room, sending Corrado and Alessio’s gaze flying upward to find the sound. Above the doorway, a light turned from green to red, making Corrado even more confused than he already was. It was Alessio who seemed to understand what was going on as he cursed under his breath.
“Shit, I gotta go,” Alessio muttered.
“Wait,” Corrado said, refusing to move to let him get past, “what does that mean?”
“It’s starting.”
“What’s starting?”
Alessio wet his lips, his gaze meeting Corrado’s. “Training. I hope you fucking make it through what they’re about to do to you and your brother.”
Ice slipped through Corrado’s blood stream.
What had they signed up for?
“Why that hope?”
Alessio flashed a grin, as small as it was. “Because maybe I want to know what happens next with us.”
Corrado jerked fast away from the wall at those words. Alessio wasted no time slipping out of the room, leaving him alone to his racing heart, and his thoughts. Out in the hallway, he heard footsteps—Alessio leaving, maybe?
And doors shutting.
He stared up at that red light again.
No one—or very few people—were left inside the complex. Why did it sound like all the doors were closing one by one? Hadn’t Alessio said it was all electronic? Someone could control the doors without physically needing to shut them by hand?
The footsteps got louder, though.
And closer.
Definitely not Alessio.
Not anymore.
Corrado looked down to stare out his still opened doorway. Except now, the hallway outside of it wasn’t empty. Black-clothed figures stood there, their faces covered with masks, and their hands steady on the weapons they held.
“It’s time to get started, Corrado,” the one in front of the group said.
He recognized that voice.
Cree.
“Doing what?” Corrado asked.
“You don’t get to ask questions. Make this easy.”
Right.
That probably wasn’t going to work for him. Not when he didn’t know what in the hell was going on, and he didn’t know what might come next. His heart ached from beating so hard, but he was positive there was no way out of here.
Was that what they wanted, though?
For him to fight?
Because he could do that.
“Where’s my brother?” he demanded.
“Walk outside the room, Corrado.”
“No.”
“You do understand that this will happen one way or another.”
“That doesn’t tell me—”
“Easy or hard,” Cree said behind the black mask.
“Tell me where my brother is.”
“Hard it is.”
They came in on him, then.
All of them.
Corrado couldn’t ever remember being taken to the ground so fast or hard before. His bones shook when they put him to the floor, an ache radiating throughout his whole body. He let out a shout, and tried to fight back. It was fucking pointless, though. There were too many, and only one of him.
His gaze darted from one mask-covered face to the other, but they didn’t speak. Five of them, he thought, but maybe six. It was hard to tell when they moved so fast, and he still didn’t know what in the hell was going on. His arms were tied at his back, but hell, he hadn’t even seen the zip ties come out for them to do it.
Someone dragged him up from the floor while someone else leaned in beside him, their eyes being the only thing he could see behind the mask as they said, “Don’t make this worse for yourself, kid. You’re already in, and there’s no way out. Just let it happen.”
Right.
Okay.
Damn.
“W-what happens now?” Corrado asked as he was pulled from the room.
“It’s gonna hurt before it gets better.”
Who said that?
He didn’t even know.
7.
Alessio
Hidden in the shadows of the hallway, Alessio watched from a safe distance as Corrado was pulled from his room by the team. The team being a small group of men and women hand-picked by Cree to help him train whoever had signed the contract. They were never easy about it—they didn’t go in easy, either.
All or nothing.
Corrado’s shout echoed down the corridor, his voice thick with panic and uncertainty. Not fear, though. Not yet. That would come soon enough, Alessio knew. The fear would come when he was either locked in total darkness, rounds of beatings marking the passing hours he spent in isolation to fuck his mind entirely up, or when they put him in the tank.
Fuck.
That fucking tank.
Alessio felt the pressure building in his chest simply remembering his own time in that cold, dark water. It never got any better in the tank, or the darkness. Long stretches of time where your mind was too awake—fear saturating your entire body because you never knew what was going to happen next.
And when it did happen ...
“Where the fuck is my bro—”
Corrado’s question cut off abruptly when the first hit came. The sound of flesh meeting flesh was sickening, and unforgiving. A grunt followed the hit before a second one came, and then another and another. Alessio tipped his head back so all he could see was the white ceiling of the corridor, and then he closed his eyes altogether when the beating continued.
They didn’t want him to ask questions.
He wasn�
��t allowed.
Orders were given.
He was to follow.
Alessio knew how this worked, but the problem was, he couldn’t tell Corrado that. Maybe back in his room, but even then ... it wouldn’t have helped. This was something all The League’s prospects had to learn on their own, in their time. It was the very purpose of the training—to take a man who was already set in his ways, break him, and then change him into a better version of himself.
Even if that better version was created from violence, darkness, isolation, fear, and pain. Alessio didn’t make the rules here; he only knew how to follow them.
“Stand up,” he heard ordered.
That was the thing that made him open his eyes again, although he didn’t try to peek around the corner to look down the hallway. Part of him knew it wasn’t a good idea. Cree would be pissed off like nothing else if someone interrupted his training team, but especially at the very beginning. He needed to stay out of sight as much as possible.
Coming to this end of the complex to get a couple of minutes with Corrado before the training began was a fucking risk anyway. A stupid one, probably, but he wasn’t going to admit that to himself. Alessio wasn’t very good at denying himself something he wanted, as it was, and he kept being drawn back to Corrado when he shouldn’t want anything to do with him at all.
And it’s only been a day.
Fuck.
The beating down the hall continued on like Alessio wasn’t having a whole fucking moment at the other end, just around the corner. Not that the rest of them could know that he was in the midst of his own goddamn issues.
Alessio had to give credit where it was due, though.
Corrado didn’t beg.
He fought back, by the sounds of it.
He didn’t take shit.
Some cried. That wasn’t unusual, and no one said a thing when it was all said and done. Some puked. Fear had a funny way of making the body do things no one could possibly understand unless it was them in the situation. Others begged and pleaded, realizing their mistake in signing a contract for something they didn’t truly comprehend. It was too late by then, though.
They were in.
There was no out until it was done, or you were dead.
But for now, Corrado wasn’t like the others. Very little was said to him from the team—orders like stand or move or stop asking questions. But nothing deep, nothing that answered the questions he kept demanding be answered about his brother.
Even Alessio didn’t know the answer to that.
Usually, one person was trained at a time because it was so intensive. Maybe Cree was going to try a new way of training the twins because it would happen side by side in time, essentially, but Alessio didn’t think he could stomach it to ask the details.
Part of him just didn’t want to know.
“You’re going to learn,” Alessio heard a muffled voice say down the hall.
“Fuck you.”
Corrado’s words were mumbled now—like he couldn’t speak right, or he had to make a great effort to do it.
That was enough for Alessio.
He knew what came next.
Instead of standing there to listen to it, he slipped down the corridor to go in the opposite direction from the rest of the team. They were taking Corrado to the west side of the complex, deep into the basement where even the people who milled about the building wouldn’t be able to hear the fucking screams.
Alessio went east, to Dare.
He suspected he would find Dare in his office, sitting at his desk and handling the paperwork of the day. People who thought they knew the inner workings of The League thought Dare was untouchable in a lot of ways because he never directly handled the assassins, for the most part. That was usually Cree, and his team of people.
They also assumed Dare was ... the very top.
In a way, he was.
It was the same way people assumed Cree—his choice—was just another assassin with a bit more leg room to move in the organization than usual. They were cautious about keeping Cree’s real hand in controlling part of The League quiet. Instead, a carefully constructed story and persona for Cree was spoon-fed to the prospects and clients of The League where Cree was concerned, making them think he was less of a boss and more like them. They were far more likely to trust him in that case.
Dare, though, also had people like Gian Guzzi who fronted a lot of money for this organization to become something no one could possibly ruin, which meant things never stopped around here. If it wasn’t a new prospect being trained, it was the auctions selling off the assassins to people with deep enough pockets all around the world who might be in need of someone with a particular set of skills. And if wasn’t those things, then they were working.
Instead of finding Dare in his office, Alessio wandered the halls until he came to the control room. Or, that’s what they liked to refer to it as. Inside, standing in front of a wall of screens, Dare used a sleek, thin remote with a touchscreen pad to separate what was actually one giant screen—that looked broken into several different screens—to bring up specific cameras. Just as quickly, he switched to a separate screen on the wall of moving pictures that brought up something else entirely.
A wall of doors, it looked like.
His thumb raced across the touchscreen, and Alessio watched on the screen as the opened doors in the hallway began to close one by one. Then, just as fast, Corrado was brought into view by the team ... close to the tank room, now.
Well, the dark room and the tank room.
They were right across from one another. The walls inside were so thick, one couldn’t even blow them out with dynamite. The floors, a cold cement that constantly seemed to stay wet from one thing or another.
“Did you watch mine, too?” Alessio asked.
His chest ached.
He wasn’t sure why.
Maybe it was the memories racing past his eyes—the idea that a couple of years ago, this had been him. He’d been dragged through those halls, had the shit beat out of him, and was then thrown into hell for a month or more to break him beyond recognition. He’d thought he was ready; he’d watched from afar for other trainings before his time.
He had not been anywhere near ready.
Dare turned slowly, realizing he wasn’t alone as his gaze fell on Alessio in the doorway. “I’m sorry?”
“Did you watch my training, too?”
“I did not.”
“Why?”
“I don’t have ... a good answer for that, Les,” Dare murmured.
“Or you don’t want to sound like a coward.”
“Maybe I was wrong.”
“What?”
Dare shrugged, and looked back at the screens. “I said earlier you only thought you could think like Cree does, but I might have been wrong about that.”
It took Alessio a second to understand.
Then, two.
“Because you couldn’t watch me go through the first phase, right?” he asked.
Dare let out a heavy exhale. “If you asked for it to stop even once ... and they all ask ... I would have dragged you out of there myself. Because I was weak—love does that to you, Alessio, and I want you to remember that. It makes you weak. And so, when something is for the greater good when it comes to someone you love, even if it means hurting them, you have to take a step back and let it happen. Or in my case, be forced to do it.”
“What does that mean?”
Across the room, Dare waved the remote at the screens, saying, “Cree had the team go in on you for phase one, then he locked me in the office and wouldn’t let me out for that first night. It ... was not a good moment for me.”
Alessio frowned. “What?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Cree wasn’t in on my—”
“Not for phase one. He was too close to it, too.”
Alessio hadn’t known that, mostly because the team had been very careful not to speak to him during the firs
t phase of his training. Other than a barked word here to there to give him an order, which he knew better than to defy them.
It only made shit worse.
“Did you ask for it to stop?” Dare asked.
Alessio watched the screens, another hallway ... the rooms were coming faster now. Soon, Corrado wouldn’t know what daylight was for a long fucking time.
“Not until the third round in the tank room,” Alessio said, scratching at the side of his arm because that memory made him anxious as fuck, and he knew better than to show it. That’s what training had taught him—he didn’t deal with any of that in the same way anymore. Fear, panic ... it was all secondary to everything else, now. “I couldn’t find the pocket to breathe, the water kept coming in my mouth, and—”
Dare made a dark noise.
“Sorry,” Alessio muttered.
“It’s what you wanted, no?”
“It was.”
Ten feet away, he watched Dare nod at the screens.
“And it’s what they want, too, Les. You’ll have to remember that for the next little while.”
“Where is the other one—Chris?”
“In his room, fine. That’s why we put them on opposite ends of the complex for living quarters. If we put them in the same corridor, it was likely one would panic and do something outlandish when the other was removed from their room. A risk Cree didn’t want to take, of course. It’ll be only once Corrado is situated—we knew he would be the more difficult one at first—that we’ll begin phase one for the other twin. Rotational trips between the rooms for them, of course. Instead of long spreads in each like we typically do. The one, he’s going to need a break in-between the tank.”
“Christopher, you mean.”
“Scared of water, yeah.”
“But even if he asks for it to stop—”
“We can’t stop it once it begins, that isn’t how training works.”
“What if he reacts really badly to the tank?” Alessio asked.
Dare chuckled dryly. “The best way to deal with a fear is head-on.”
“Except it’s more than a fear. Everybody is scared of things like the dark when it’s been too long, or of the unknown for something like the tank. But that might not be the same.”
“Then, he will break sooner than his twin because of it, won’t he? A healthy mind processes things like anxiety and fear, or pain and discomfort in a completely different way than a broken one does, Les. And so, we need them broken before we can begin to rebuild. You know this.”
