Trophy 8

The Sioux-Feld air strip was an investor’s dream turned into a nightmare. Meant to take worthless swampland and turn it into a private airfield for the rich and privileged, the construction had proven a boondoggle. When finished, existing airports had been upgraded to the point that Sioux-Feld was irrelevant.

Moreover, realities of air travel had set in that made Sioux-Feld a pain to land at or take off in. Like the chill you got when you passed a haunted house, approaching or departing planes were beset with heavy turbulence. The swamp constantly tested the levees that’d been used to drain and dry the triangular runways, resulting in them and the drab hangars and the never-completed terminal being constantly dank and rusty.

After a few months of operation, long enough for the city fathers to declare Sioux-Feld the success they’d promised the citizenry as they campaigned on a weighty tax break, the Sioux-Feld was shut down except for emergency landings.

Miles from the city, it served as a counterpoint to Belladonna Belucci’s spread. It had been bought for pennies on the dollar, unlike the thirty million that had gone into “Bella Royale” (or that would’ve gone into it, if Vincenzo Belucci paid fair market price for labor and materials). And there was no luxury in the scant, barren collection of buildings, with any possible ostentation being worked away by time, rain, and sun. It was like the chamber of a gun—the gun into which the Punisher was loaded.

And now he had a second bullet to aim against his enemies. Whatever knowledge Bella had locked away in her sex-crazed little head.

And a third. The fact of her absence, the insult to Vincenzo Belucci that was her kidnapping.

All were ingredients in a feast of destruction Frank was preparing for himself. All he had to do was get the proportions right and cook at the right temperature.

***

Bella awoke quickly. As soon as consciousness stole into her, she felt the cool air on her half-dressed body and the colder metal wrapped around her waist, chilling her through her thin corset, and the effect was like having a bucket of ice water thrown in her face.

She felt groggy, with a dull ache on her upper arm where—she reflexively touched the bruised handprint—Frank had grabbed her.

Then the condition of her own body dramatically plunged in importance. She could see where she was and relief took over. No Vincenzo. He hadn’t found out about her affairs. This all wasn’t some elaborate prank before he really got down to avenging himself on her. No, this wasn’t Vincenzo’s style at all.

She was on a cot—an oasis of wool covers in a dull expanse of cold, barren, concrete flooring. The curved walls she recognized: this was one of those Quonset huts. And that’s all it was.

Because the only other thing she could see, on all that gray floor and in all the ribbed aluminum sides, was a D-ring set into the floor. Attached to it was a chain. Fifteen-feet of heavy chain came out of the floor and went to her, wrapping around her waist, where an actual padlock held it on her.

The chain was on tight, taking full advantage of her slender waist. She couldn’t draw it down her full hips. She couldn’t pull it over her proud breasts. And there was no breaking the padlock, though she half-heartedly tried bashing it against the frame of the cot she was in.

Bella swung off the bed and found her heels on the floor next to the bed. She put them on only to protect herself from the cold floor. Then she walked around.

There was a bucket on the other side of her bed. There was a water cooler recessed in the shadows of the nearby wall. Bella could walk to it and arrive there with another foot of slack. On top of the water cooler was a metal cup—for actually transporting the water from the tap to her mouth, she decided—and on top of the metal cup were two Aspirin.

She put the Aspirin in her mouth and dry-swallowed them. Bella instantly regretted it. That seemed like it would be her only stimulation in a while. She should’ve savored it more.

And now, like the Aspirin she’d taken had provoked reprisal, she felt her head really start to pound. Terror, woven into every thought she might have. What if the man who’d taken her just meant to leave her here, day after day, week after week, until she died of starvation?

What if he came in with an axe and a saw and a scalpel?

What if, now that he had her, he decided to rape her? She wouldn’t even be a sex slave—more a sex doll, that he could have his way with whenever the urge struck him.

Where was he anyway? Next door? A quarter-mile away? Half a mile? Was he in another city, another state? Would she even see him again?

Maybe he’d grabbed her up for some organization, a fraternity of rapists, who would stop by this place like it was a Motel 8 to empty her bucket, refill the water cooler, come inside her, and then leave her for her next attacker to worry about.

Bella could taste fear in her own saliva. Sour, acrid. She ran to the edge of her freedom, then made an orbit around the D-ring that anchored her in place, pulling at it from every angle. She ran back to the D-ring and hit it with the metal cup. The ping of metal on metal sounded pathetically small with a mocking little echo bouncing back to her from out of the vastness of the Quonset hut.

Sweat dotted her forehead. Bella whimpered and sounded to herself like a sick dog that she would have put down if she came across it when there wasn’t a chain wrapped around her body like an anaconda!

Weirdly, it was the appearance of Frank Castle that calmed her. The gaze of a man to who she could appeal to instinctively made her wonder if she looked her best, which cut through the spiral of fear and anxiety that’d been consuming her to think rationally instead.

If this man was going to rape her, torture her, kill her, there was nothing she could do about it. But he’d seemed to go to considerable trouble to take her alive, unharmed, and now to install her in an isolated location where he could interact with her at leisure.

That, at the very least, wasn’t the act of a serial killer. It was more like the Mafia. Not any family she’d ever heard of, true, but at the end of the day, a businessman. He wanted something. Perhaps only to hold her to ransom. A ransom that might’ve been paid while she was unconscious; he could already be coming to free her.

Or he might be here to dispose of her because Vincenzo had refused to pay.

Either way, Bella had options. She had leverage. Because whatever else this man was—he wasn’t a homo.

She stood up, hands on her chained hips, facing the approaching stranger like she was wearing actual clothes instead of lingerie. She spoke in a loud, abrasive voice straight from her Jersey housewife mother.

“Boy, you must be one stupid motherfucker. I mean a genuine birth defect coglione. I know I’m a rich bitch, but I’m not the kind of rich bitch you kidnap. I’m the kind you cross the street before I see you, because if I don’t like the way you look, you cease to exist. Shit! Dumb fucking stronzo, you know Vincenzo Belucci? How about Adolfo Scaglione? My husband, porca troia! And my fucking father!”

“I know who you are. I know who your family is. I’m going to kill them all. You’re going to help me do it or you’re going to spend the next eternity chained to that floor.”

Frank never stopped moving as he said it, never slowed down or sped up. His rhythmic footsteps sounded on the floor like a punctuation mark on each word, the noise echoing off the cloistered walls and hammering at Bella’s ears.

He swam in and out of shadows—the only light came from naked 100-watt bulbs far above. The light they cast formed one oasis after another in a desert of darkness. The closer he got, the more Bella could see of him, but the more he disappeared from view.

And each time, Bella worried he would reappear behind her, jumping at her like a horror movie boogeyman. It was impossible, but all of this seemed impossible, coming on the heels of the life she had lived. People didn’t do this to her. This was not a thing that happened.

When her voice came out next, it was low, breathless: “Who the fuck are you?”

He stepped into the pool of light neighboring hers. He was carrying a thermos. A nylon cord tied a spoon to it. He had a handsome face—perversely handsome, considering the last time she’d seen it, he’d been in some kind of berserker rage, pummeling her two lovers into unconsciousness. And yet now, calm, he appeared chiseled out of flesh and bone to approximate the profile of a king on some ancient coin.

His physique was similarly classical: broad-shouldered, narrow-hipped, tall, and superbly muscled. If she’d seen him in a loincloth, in a suit of armor, a knight or a Roman general or a primordial hunter, she would’ve accepted it unquestioningly.

Bella wondered, faintly, about the size of his cock. She did this for most men she met, but under the circumstances, she would’ve thought it was a closed subject. No—she found her eyes wandering to his groin, more curious about what his fly contained than about what was in the thermos he was toting.

“Frank Castle,” he introduced himself.

Bella recognized the name. So would anyone who’d had even fleeting contact with the Mob. The butcher, the self-proclaimed judge and jury and executioner, responsible for dozens of deaths, millions in property damage. In his wake, he left entire crime families reeling, shattered, easy prey for subsequent police investigation, if there was even anything left to investigate. The man was a legend. Or, rather, a scary story to be told around the campfire—if you were a criminal.

And now he was in the same small circle of light that she was in.