Wicked Mafia Prince (A Dangerous Royals Romance, #2)(12)

Aleksio and I go in together, weapons drawn. The place smells of rot, mold, and dung. I turn on my flashlight. Papers all around. Warped husks of furniture with the stuffing pulled out. There are even a few small trees growing through the floorboards, straining up toward the holes in the ceiling.

And then I see the cage that takes up half of the main room. The bars are heavy and thick, running from floor to ceiling. Inside is a sleeping pad, a broken toilet, and a sink.

A cell for a lone prisoner.

The door hangs open. The area around the latch is blackened, as if it were torched open.

“Blyad!” I walk right in, right through the cobwebs. I don’t care. “Blyad!”

We search the place. There are dusty books everywhere—philosophy of the ancients, mostly. Some evolution, anthropology. Spiral-bound notebooks with the pages stuck together.

“Fuck,” Aleksio says, reading one. “Some numbers and then, ‘This is how much he’ll rattle the cage even while the bars are electrified. Subject shakes bars until unconscious even when I smile, giving the appearance of enjoyment.’ What the f*ck? Subject?” He throws the notebook. “Fuck you!”

I pick up a chair and smash it into the iron stove again and again, until I’m holding only bits. Our brother. Kept in a cage. “I am going to peel Pinder’s skin from his f*cking face while he watches!”

Kiro was here. Kept in a cage. He could see out the windows to the outdoors. Like a taunt.

It’s Tito who finds the bloodstain on the floor near the cage. What happened? Is this Kiro’s blood? Pinder’s? And what of the torch marks on the door to the cage?

Yuri tosses me one of the philosophy books. There are little marks in the margins all the way through. I check another. They all have marks, horizontal lines and here and there, exclamation marks. “Did he read books to him? Marking his reactions?” Yuri asks. “Teaching him?”

Aleksio gives us a stormy look. He is feeling less optimistic suddenly.

Carlo pulls up a map on his phone. “There’s a little town down along the river, population 880. Whatever happened out here, it would’ve been news. People talk. There’s a little diner.”

Aleksio surveys the books and notebooks. “These could provide some insight, maybe.” He has Carlo’s team gather them up.

It’s nearly dinnertime when Aleksio and Yuri and Tito and I arrive at the diner. We take a booth and order burgers. The waitress is young. Her name tag says Britta. Her first job, perhaps.

Aleksio smiles in the charming way that he has. “You been around here long?” he asks when she delivers our meals.

Britta smiles. “All my life.”

“We were up northwest of here and came on this abandoned cabin that had a big cage in it,” he says. “What’s up with that?”

“Oh,” she says. She knows it.

“And the door had been torched open, it looked like,” Tito adds.

“Oh, man, it was this whole crazy thing. You didn’t hear about it?”

“We’re from Chicago,” Aleksio says.

“It was crazy,” she says. “This guy was keeping an insane prisoner in his cabin. For like a year, and nobody knew. It was like something on one of those crime shows. He wasn’t from around here. Neither of them were.”

Aleksio maintains his charming attitude, makes a face that mirrors hers. “What happened?”

“Nobody really knows fully. You would hear hunters talking about sounds and things from there, but this professor, he told people he had dogs out there. Nobody imagined he was holding a person. He’d come into town for supplies. He ate here once or twice, but it was before my time.” She looks around, grabs a ketchup from one table and puts it on another, then comes back, barely missing a beat. “And one day, they think, he got too close to the cage, and his prisoner strangled him to death. Then the poor guy managed to call out and alert some hunters. It was right after bow season opener. He was lucky in his timing—any other time of year and he’d be locked there for good.”

My pulse thunders in my ears. I’m thankful Aleksio is here to keep her spinning the tale. He nods. “They heard him?”

“Yeah. The hunters called the cops. Nobody knew this prisoner he’d been keeping was crazy at first. He carried on regular conversations, and he seemed totally sane. He’d gotten the body of the professor out of sight, dragging it along the edge of the cage to the wall, so they couldn’t see he’d strangled this guy right through the bars, not that anybody would blame him. They were giving him food and stuff.”

Yuri catches my eye. I grit my teeth as she continues. “…then the cops arrived and they found the body right off. I don’t know what happened—a lot of it is sealed in records, but I heard from a friend of a friend that this caged man seemed completely normal while they blowtorched him out of there. They get him out and start questioning him, but at some point he starts freaking out. He’s just tossing the cops around like rag dolls, trying to get out of that cabin. He kicks through the closed door—I kid you not, he didn’t even use the knob—he’s just out of there like the freakin’ Kool-Aid guy. Again, would you blame him?”

“I would not,” I growl.

“Me neither,” she says. “But you don’t beat the shit out of the cops who just saved you. So he’s running through the woods, and there was this manhunt because they didn’t know what he was going to do. I don’t know why he had to attack the officers. Yeah, you’re locked up, you want to get out, but the cops are getting you out, right? But of course, he was insane.”