Bandages and Salt (PJO X BSD AU)

Chapter sixteen

I watched as Kouyou's car disappeared down the street, melting into traffic, while waiting for my own. When he finally arrived, the driver hopped out of the car as fast as normal, however there was the stink of panic surrounding him. It only got stronger the closer that I got to the man. I got in the car and wait for him to sit down in the driver's seat again and buckle up before asking the obvious question:

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

I didn't need a distracted driver taking me home. While dying from a car crash sounds nice in theory, the actuality is quiet painful if I remember correctly, and obviously not as fatal as one would think.

The driver froze on the spot, but began to stutter annoyingly once he started to regain his senses.

"Spit it out," I growled.

"The boss has given me orders to bring you back to headquarters, and to tell you to report to the basement."

"...Ah, I see."

The 'basement' is where we keep prisoners to interrogate and torture them down there. It's the real reason that the Port Mafia building had so many stars that you have to go up to in order to reach the lobby. There's at least two layers of soundproofing between the basement ceiling and lobby floor so that no outsiders can hear the screams.

He probably thinks that I'm about to be tortured by one of our inquisitors... Too bad, the bastards already done his mental scarring for the week. As the boss once said, 'you don't always have to engrave a lesson into someone's skin for them to remember it.'

"Let's go then."

—-

I walked down the basement stairs slowly, too slow in fact, but it hurt too much to move the way that I'm used to. There was a cold looking man standing at the bottom of the stairs, impatiently waiting on me to finally make it to him. His face looked like someone had carved it out of the side of a glacier with the amount of the warmth that it held. A trait fitting of a torturer I suppose.

I could tell that he didn't want to waste his time on such a pointless endeavor as teaching me how to torture and interrogate people.

Good thing I'm a fast learner.

The man jerked his head, beckoning me to follow him as he strode down the dimly lit hall, deeper into the endless darkness. There was no point in avoiding the inevitable, so I did as told and followed the man.

We went down a set of stone stairs, down into the older part of the building, stopping outside of a cell door a few doors down from the entrance. The interrogator turned and looked at me, looking me in the eye for the first time since I got here.

"I don't care who you are, or why the boss himself assigned me to do this, but I'm supposed to teach you how to extract information, so either learn through practice like this, or being practiced on," the man growled. I thought about a snarky reply I could give the man, but fought back the urge.

Torture is a useful skill after all.

"Right."

He nodded, pleased with my easy compliance. "I want to see what you know first, so they'll be your test subjects for today," he said, pointing through the one way glass in the door. There were five men in there, each of them either roaming the small room or sitting down and staring at nothing.

"Here." He handed me a small dagger not much shorter than the one Annabeth has.

I took it, experimentally twirling the blade in my hands. It felt... nice. It wasn't Riptide, but it was a feeling that I didn't hate. The interrogator had a weird look in his eyes when he looked at me doing this, it was as if he was reappraising my worth.