“Luigi wanted me to check to make certain you were here,” she announced without preamble, watching him closely. Studying his face. Something was very wrong. His face was a mask, and his eyes didn’t warm when they rested on her. “He’s calling the hotel right now to make certain you were there.”
Casimir turned away from her, turned his back. Paced. Didn’t turn on the lights. “I was there. There are images of me walking through the hotel, checking everywhere a couple of hours before I met with the head of security. The recordings will pass inspection. I’m very good at what I do.”
His voice was clipped. Abrupt. An undertone of anger and something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She moved toward him. He swung around and held up his hand as if he had eyes in the back of his head.
“Stay there.”
She halted instantly. “What is it, what’s wrong?” She had known all along something was wrong. She’d felt it. He hadn’t come to her the way he would have. The knots in her stomach tightened to the point of pain.
Casimir didn’t answer her. His mask didn’t slip, not even for a moment. The knots in her stomach got tighter. “Luigi knows Arturo is dead. He said his body was found in cuffs, hanging from the ceiling by chains and he died in a fire.” She kept her voice strictly neutral.
“Hell, yeah, he died in a fire,” Casimir said.
His rage shook the room. She felt the floor shifting. The walls breathing in and out trying to contain the pressure.
She wrapped her arms around her middle. She knew Arturo had to die. “He used to hold me when Luigi would get angry with me because I wasn’t fast enough or silent enough when I trained. He would sneak me chocolate bars and…”
“Don’t.” He snarled the command. Stepped close.
For the first time she saw the killer in him. She saw him. The man that was part of Casimir, maybe even the largest part. The man she’d so studiously avoided seeing when she homed in on the gentle soul he kept hidden from the world.
“Casimir, I can’t help but remember his kindness to me when I was a child.” She opened her mouth to continue, to tell him she understood that Arturo had to die, that he deserved it, but she couldn’t help that small arrow of grief for the man she’d thought he was.
“Don’t you even think about that fucker,” Casimir snapped. He stared down at her, his face an unreadable mask, his eyes as piercing as they could possibly be even with the dark contacts – alive with something close to hatred. “That man played you. Don’t you dare grieve for him. They had a little routine, your uncle and Arturo.”
Her hand rose defensively to her throat. His voice betrayed him. The fire in him was roaring. Angry. No, it was raging. And it ran deep. “I don’t understand, Casimir.”
“They set up a little school there in that building and they brought unwilling women and trained them. Arturo was the one who tore the skin off a woman with his whips. He caned her. He gave her so much pain she would do anything to make it stop. While they hurt her, tortured and humiliated her, they manipulated her body so she eventually couldn’t get off without pain.”
Her throat closed. Her lungs seized. She couldn’t breathe.
“Arturo, that man you want to grieve for, trained those women by hanging them from the ceiling or tying them to a wooden bench or cross or whatever the hell he wanted in the moment. He beat a woman until she was cooperative and would do whatever he said, whatever any man they gave her to ordered. Your uncle had to have been the good guy, the one who came in and soothed her, cared for her, gave her those little intimate moments that gave her hope that someone actually cared. Then he used her. Abused her. Sold her time to very ugly, perverted men who hurt her over and over. Then Luigi would come back and soothe her all over again. They just reversed the roles with you, Giacinta. Luigi was the assassin. He trained you – was the disciplinarian – while Arturo assumed the role of the man who gave you those little touches to make you think he cared.”
“Stop. Stop it, Casimir. I was a child. I lost my parents, my family, everything. You’re taking everything.”
He glared down at her, implacable. “You never had it in the first place. It was an illusion they created for you, not something real. Arturo was as sick as they come. I hung that sick fuck in the bloody chains and the pool of blood where he’d killed Carlotta. They took her there. They tortured her for days, while I sat in a fucking car a few hundred yards away and let it happen.” He spat the words at her.