compliment. But now, it sounds dangerously close to an insult. “Remember who you are talking to, Giraldo.”
“Of course, of course,” he apologizes as he turns into a basement garage. The door whirrs open. “I did not mean it as an insult, I assure you. All I mean to say is, in his mind, in all the older men’s minds, the chessboard never changes. They are content to simply rearrange the pieces. Do you get my meaning?”
“Yes,” I tell him, allowing that there’s some truth to that. “Father certainly does favor the status quo.”
But even as the words leave my mouth, I feel a pang of guilt. Or maybe not guilt, exactly, but something bitter. It was not right of me to say that: to say anything negative about Father to these Bostonians. And maybe it’s because of this not-quite-guilt, but it seems to me rearranging the pieces is better than breaking the whole chessboard like some of the men would like to do.
“Anyways,” Giraldo finishes with a wave of the hand, “we are here.”
I climb from the car. Giraldo leads me to the end of the parking lot and touches a button on a graffiti-covered wall. The wall cranks and hums and then a portion of it slides away, revealing a long, dimly lit hallway.
“Do not worry,” Giraldo says when he sees me frowning. “Only a fool would hit Angelo De Maggio and expect to get away with it.”
I look at him soberly. “Father has been known to tear the fingernails off his worst rivals, one at a time, and slowly. Has anybody ever told you that?” It’s a lie—Father hasn’t done anything even close to that in decades, as far as I’m aware—but it feels in the moment like a necessary lie.
It gets a quiver out of Giraldo, at least. “Do not talk like that around the older men, Angelo. They do not understand the difference between a joke and a threat. But please, come.”
We walk down the hallway. I can’t help but be aware of how isolated I am down here. If Giraldo wanted to kill me now, he could. His reassurance is certainly true; Father would destroy the Bostonians for the crime. All his niceness and diplomacy would vanish if they harmed his son.
But that wouldn’t save my life.
I put some steel in my expression and stand up tall. Giraldo opens a door at the end of the hallway. Immediately, I hear moans, whimpers, and the wet slapping of flesh on flesh.
He leads me into what is clearly a BDSM club. The interior is strewn with women with chains around their necks, men in leather masks. Everybody is moaning and giggling and screaming in pain and pleasure alike. A temple of hedonism, filled with congregants falling all over themselves to worship the human body—or defile it.
It’s steel and leather and skin as far as the eye can see, all suffused in a dim red glow from the hidden recessed lighting.
I notice a woman with a dog mask on, being led on a chain, and for one bizarre second, I think it’s Dani. I feel this deep fury inside of me. I want to grab the man leading the chain and wrap it around his throat and pull until metal cuts flesh.
But then I snap out of it. Of course it’s not Dani.
“Why are we here?” I ask.
Giraldo smirks at me. “I thought you would appreciate a place like this. I heard you were quite the donnaiolo.”
“You’ve heard wrong,” I snarl. I’m not sure why this makes me so angry.
Behind him, two men with fat tattooed bellies are fucking a woman who is moaning loudly, screaming for more. There is something grotesque and sub-human about the sound of their coupling. The sight of it disgusts me, too. Suddenly, I get a flash of me and Dani grinding against one another. If another man dared lay a finger on her… I swallow back the tide of rage rising inside my chest at the thought.
I need to calm the fuck down. Composure, I can hear in my head, as though my father were whispering to me. Control. Calm.
Giraldo pats me lightly on the shoulder. “Through here, Angelo. Please. This is not what we are here to see.”
He leads me into a small office. There’s a desk and a safe and a wooden crate in the corner and not much else.
“This,” he says, walking over to the shoddily-made crate, “is what we are here to see.”