Page 116 of Forsaking All Others

The Chinese with lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, where you sliced a man to pieces the same way one might curl ribbon for Christmas presents.

The Nordics with the barbaric blood eagle, slicing open the back to reach the ribs so you could twist them and splay them back and open like skeletal wings.

Bamboo splinter, light and noise over stimulation, waterboarding, fingernail removal, boiling, burning, branding . . . so many methods and all with a rhyme and reason for using them.

I’d employed them all over the course of my forty-two years.

“Variety,” one of my trainers had told me, an Indian man with a penchant for the same keris daggers I favored today, “is the spice of life, and death, after all.”

Nothing seemed good enough for the man hanging like a leg of aging prosciutto from the cellar in my basement.

Not only because he’d endangered my wife.

But because I knew the motherfucker.

Joey Erizzo, boss of the North End crew who looked after our drug distribution through the entire Midwest. He’d been a nothing drug-peddling teen when Dario found him overdosing in an alleyway on his way to a dinner and picked him up. Since then, Joey had been as loyal as a feral dog given a roof over his head, hungry for approval and success.

He’d moved up fast, but Dario liked him.

Lando did too.

Ambition was good in the Ferretti family so long as it didn’t get you killed.

And here Joey was on his last night on this earth, about to die for that excess of greed.

The bastardo played fucking cards with my wife when she visited North River Casino. He’d sat at my table and broken bread with my family.

He was Family.

I had stepped in for Dario the night Joey was sworn into the brotherhood, cut-open palm smeared on the leather cover of an old Italian Bible. Blood on his face from the spray of the last kill he’d been ordered to make to qualify as a made man.

Now, he slumped over on his knees, head bowed, arms held up by the chains attached to his wrists and the pulley system on the ceiling. He was still conscious, breath a wet rattle in his lungs.

I’d started by beating him with my fists until my hands were swollen and my wounded arm hurt like a son of a bitch and then accepted brass knuckles from Ciro before I went at him again. I broke his ribs. One by one.

The crack of bone under each hit like a gong, like something ceremonial.

When that wasn’t enough, I moved to the torch.

The firelight illuminated Joey’s caved-in, weeping face.

“Please, Dario, please,” he begged.

He had no idea he was begging the wrong man’s name, and I wasn’t going to correct him.

The only time begging worked was when Fiammetta had her naked body pressed to mine.

“Who are you working for?” I asked without feeling as I brought the torch down to his cheek and traced the line of his jaw with fire.

The pop and sizzle of burning flesh underscored Joey’s desperate groans and whimpers.

“Please!” he shouted as I reached his ear and scorched the lobe to ash.

“You want to tell me, Joey,” I soothed, removing the flame from his flesh to look him in the eyes, even though one was swollen shut. “Tell me what could possibly be worth this pain.”

His lower lip trembled, the lower left half of his face a bubbled, cratered, and blackened mess. When he didn’t answer fast enough, I slapped him across the burn and listened to his almost soundless scream.

“Who the fuck sent you to kill me?” I demanded.