Fire Bound (Sea Haven Sisters)(74)

What the hell happened? What had started the fire? Clearly it had started inside. Swearing again, he sent a text to Arturo. Call me now. An order. Where was the son of a bitch? What game was he playing? He should have disposed of the widow’s body, picked up a woman for the two of them to play with and already be in the building. There was no car there. Unless…



Had he seen a vehicle? Parked down from the building under the trees? In the shadows? He rubbed at the frown lines in his forehead. Had there been a car? He slowed down and pulled over to park, trying to think. If he went back to look, would the fire department get there and catch him there? He didn’t want questions. Arturo never parked that far away from the building, but maybe he had.



Swearing, he turned around and started back up the drive.



Casimir stood outside the inferno, feeding the flames, wishing, for the first time in his life, he could hear the screams of his mark. Arturo deserved death a hundred times over. He despised men like Arturo, men who enjoyed the pain of others. Men born, not shaped, into monsters.

What does that make you? The wind whispered the question in his ear. What did it make him? He wanted Arturo to suffer. He needed him to suffer. To do this terrible thing, allow it to be personal when his code was so rigid, unbending, when he swore to live by that code and yet he still didn’t move.



The building was old and wooden with a flat roof. It had obviously been a small warehouse or storage building, but had been renovated more than once. The place had one bathroom, and the rest of the space, maybe a thousand square feet, had been divided into three rooms. The small reception area where Arturo and Luigi could watch television and take a respite from their work as well as a small bedroom where the women they brought there could sleep – when they were allowed sleep. The main room was the “classroom.”



Casimir thought in those terms. He’d seen similar classrooms before. Dungeons that held every type of contraption for bondage as well as the necessities for inflicting pain. He remembered every one of those items.



The skylight cracked and shattered as heat rose and there was nowhere for it to go. Instantly the oxygen pouring in fed the flames, so it wasn’t as necessary for him to exert himself to keep the fire going. Still, he wanted the blaze hot, burning everything to the ground, destroying Arturo and Luigi’s playground. Taking it all. Taking each room. The bedroom had fuel – the beds, mattresses and cheap dressers. Paper strewn around. Luigi and Arturo weren’t neat and they didn’t give the women much time to be neat and tidy either. Mostly though, it was the soundproofing they had padded the walls and ceiling with in order to keep the screams of the women from being heard that provided the best fuel. And that was pure irony.

The blackened windows began to crack. Spiderweb. The outside walls turned a color much like paper when a flame burned from the other side. They blackened slowly in an alligator-skin pattern and then here and there a flame broke through. Flames leapt out of the skylight, indicating inside the fire was towering, completely engulfing each room.



He kept feeding the flames, burning the building hot and wild, making certain that Arturo died by fire, not by smoke inhalation. He wished he could hear the man suffer each lick of flame, hear him scream for mercy the way his numerous victims had.

Shaking his head, he lifted his face to the sky as the outside walls continued to blacken and more windows shattered. Flames licked along the sills hungrily and danced toward the night. His chest hurt as he made his way back toward his rented vehicle. The car sat under the trees, deep in the shadows. He slipped inside and continued to watch the conflagration. He had to control the flames so there was no chance of them spreading. Fortunately the building was a distance from other buildings, but he didn’t want to take chances. He had enough sins on his soul with what he’d just done.



He couldn’t go back to Lissa this way. Not like this. He sat there, trying to feel remorse, but he just couldn’t drum up any. Was it too late for him? Had he crossed a line he couldn’t come back from? It didn’t make sense that he’d finally found her and now, he’d let a mark get to him. He’d dealt with pedophiles, monsters involved in human trafficking rings, killers, a dozen other types of criminals and never once had he lost it, but this time – this was just the last straw. He’d had his fill.

Twin lights pierced the night, and he swung his gaze from the burning building to the back entrance road. It was mostly overgrown, but Luigi tended to use it. Fewer people would see his vehicle on that road than on the main one. He was a little surprised to see the man, since Luigi knew Arturo had killed Cosmos’s wife.