I go in first.
The room is dark. Curtains drawn. Two beds. One man in each. The one closest to the door is the tall one, light hair, Delvecchio's description. He's sleeping on his back with a handgun on the nightstand six inches from his right hand. The other is the shorter one, dark hair, glasses folded on the pillow next to his head.
The tall one's eyes open when the light from the hallway crosses his face. He sees me and his hand shoots toward the nightstand. Claudio's suppressed round takes the hand out of the equation. The sound is a soft pop followed by the man's scream, which Claudio stops with a second round to the chest.
The short one is up. He's fast. He rolls off the bed and goes for the floor, for the bag under the bed, and I'm across the room in two strides and my boot is on his wrist and my knife is at his throat.
"The bartender," I say. "The man you took last night from the restaurant. Who gave the order?"
"Royce. Verification protocol. We were told to..."
"Shut up." I press the blade into his skin until a line of red appears. "The bartender wasn't part of your protocol. He was a civilian. He had nothing to do with the placement."
"He was a contact point. Royce said to use contact points to locate the..."
"His name was Javi. He was twenty-six. He walked her home every night because he wanted to. He had a mother and a sister. He didn't know anything about any of this."
The man's eyes are wide. He's looking at my face and he's seeing what Delvecchio saw and what Paul Marino saw and what every man sees when I'm holding a blade to his throat in the dark. The understanding that reasoning has ended and the next few seconds are the last few seconds.
"The girl you were going to extract," I say. "Her name is Graziella Ferrara. She's home right now, meeting her father for the first time in sixteen years. She's wearing my shirt and holding his hand, and she just learned she was trafficked for five years anddrugged for eleven. The bartender you killed was the only friend she had. The only person in her entire manufactured life who chose to be there."
I lean closer. "I need you to understand what you took from her before I take everything from you."
He understands. I can see it in his face. The full, useless comprehension of a man at the end.
The knife slices away pieces of his flesh until they hang in long strips, the sound of his screaming muffled by the fact that I took his tongue just before starting work on his face. He’s gurgling, choking on his blood as it slides down his throat, coughing, trying to get it out as I keep slicing, trying to get his face off in one piece.
He doesn’t deserve pity, he doesn’t deserve anything except dying a faceless, nameless man.
After I’m done, I tug until the last of the skin pulls free and he’s left wide-eyed, sputtering and looking like a road rash. Smiling, I grab his tongue from the floor and shove it deep into his throat, watching as his eyes water and he chokes, his air supply cut off.
It doesn’t take long before he falls on his face in his blood.
“Damn Carmelo, that was savage.” Matteo says.
“Only what’s deserved.” The truth is, I’d have been more creative if I had the time, but I don’t. We need to move fast, so I did the best I could. I take his face and wrap it around the lamp shade, the light warping as it seeps through the skin.
Claudio handles the cleanup. Matteo clones the phones, pulls the communications, downloads every message between these men and Royce. The data goes to Alexandra through a secure channel. She'll add it to the placement network file she's been building.
Leone stands by the door and watches us work and doesn't say anything because Leone has already said everything he needs to say.
Clean. Both of them. Done.
We're out in twenty minutes. The room is wiped. The bodies are wrapped. Danila's disposal contact in Philadelphia will handle the rest. The gray sedan with Delaware plates gets driven to a chop shop on the south side that Delvecchio connected me to three weeks ago.
In the SUV on the way back, Leone drives and Claudio rides shotgun and Matteo is on his laptop in the back seat, already parsing the cloned communications.
"Royce knows the Marinos are gone," Matteo says. "But he doesn't know who did it. The verification team was supposed to report back this morning with a visual confirmation andextraction plan. When they don't report, Royce will flag it. He'll send another team or escalate to the network's operations layer."
"How long?" Leone asks.
"Seventy-two hours, minimum. The network moves carefully. They won't send another team without assessing why the first one went dark."
"Seventy-two hours," I say.
"At minimum.”
"So we have time to figure it out."