Page 45 of Professional Liar
Seventeen
Pierce
I swamin and out of consciousness. Everything came in bursts between the jostle of the car and then the strangers dragging me into a house. I recognized the place, even if my drunk brain couldn’t pick it apart.
Adrenaline started to pour into me, cutting some of the haze from the whiskey. My stomach rolled and angled my head to throw up on the sidewalk. When they stood me up, I could barely keep my legs under me, but I made it. They led me inside and shoved me to my knees on a ten-thousand-dollar rug. My hands were tied tight enough to cast tingles up my arm. I laughed against my will. Only an Italian bastard would execute a man on a one of a kind Persian rug.
The Italian I met the other night, the condescending one. His name rolled in my head like dice in a cup. Adam…no…something weirder…a-something.
“Welcome to my home, Mr. St. James.”In my head I heard, welcome to my home, Mr. Bond.
I gave him a salute from my place kneeling on the floor. My fingers were bleeding. A warm trail of blood dripped down the side of my forehead. I could taste it in my mouth. Right now, after what I went through with Kat, this seemed like some ironic physical manifestation of the same pain. Maybe I was passed out at Murphy’s dreaming this. It seemed more fun, so I’d go with that.
“Do you know why I brought you to my home?” he asked, hands clasped in front of him, his Armani suit as immaculate as his gleaming shoes.
“Because you’re an asshole?” I supplied the first thought trailing through my head.
Something hit the side of my face, slicing pain up into my eye socket. I squeezed it closed, worried my eyeball might pop out from the force of the pain in my cheekbone.
“Do you want to try that again, Pierson?”
I kept my eye closed. “Seeing as your probably about to kill me, you should call me Pierce. No one but my father really calls me Pierson.”
Something the man wanted to be a smile curled up at the corner of his mouth. I didn’t tell him he wasn’t there yet. His villain smile needed work. “They told me you were a talker and that you were a funny bastard. I’m glad I get to see for myself.”
I teetered from the pain, trying to relieve some of the ache as the numbing qualities of the booze began to lessen.
“Can we get on with this? If you’re going to keep talking at me, I’m going to need a drink to get me through it.”
“I think you’ve had enough for now, Pierce.”
He gestured behind me, and the guy I assumed hit me in the head lifted me up and dragged me into another room. This time, he dropped me on hard stone, and I kept the groan inside. A door closed, and some shuffling to my right alerted me to others.
“Rodrigo?” I asked, eyeing the kid tied on his knees next to me. Then my drunk brain clicked with my sober one, and I remembered seeing him before. “Wait, you’re the Cambio kid. Is Bianca here?”
“No, she’s fine. They caught me as I was headed to see her, thank God.”
“I don’t think God has anything to do with this place,” came a deep gravelly slightly accented voice from the shadows.
Another man, his hands tied behind him, his feet tied in front, sat in the corner. Lucien scooted closer to Pierce. He must have only been brought here, too, if he hadn’t noticed the other one.
He looked harmless enough. Early thirties maybe, his hair brushed the blood stained collar of his shirt. His mouth and face were caked with bruises and wounds. “Who are you?”
“Prospero Biondello.”
Clarity cracked through me like the breaking of the sunrise over a mountain ridge. “Fuck, that bastard is making a power play. Thinking he can take out the opposition. Since Litio isn’t here, I assume he’s on this asshole’s side?”
Prospero inclined his head.
“How long have you been here?”
“A day maybe?”
“No one alerted us you were missing…” Or maybe Kat hadn’t told me.
He shook head slowly and dropped it back against the wall. “No, they wouldn’t know. I was at my cabin alone when his men came for me.”
“Why were you alone? Don’t you have family, a guard?”
