I clicked on the world icon that looked like it would be the internet but was really a private link to my department's intranet. As soon as I logged in, I went to my file section, and I had five shiny new files waiting for me with the names I gave them.
I went to Duce’s first. Since he had already told me some, I knew I could skip a bit. I clicked it open and jumped right in. I saw his real name was Carter Davison, was twenty-nine years old, Vice President and Co-founder of the Moon Raiders. Has a sister, Emma Davison, twenty-five years old. His mother died after she gave birth to Emma, and that was when his father’s mental health declined. It looked like the mother was keeping the father afloat, as when I looked into her record, she had two medical instances that looked like it was abuse.
The rest was a much more clinical version of what Duce told me. His father was a drunk and would take the money he earned and spend almost all of it at the local bar and on lottery tickets. What was really telling was that not a single neighbor had ever made a report about his father or the kids. His school record was dismal, but that was to be expected.
The next part was exactly as he said. His father sold him and his sister to slave traders for a gambling debt. Then a month went by, and they escaped with Remington Castro, aka Rabid. The three of them have stuck together since then.
I clicked on Rabid’s file, curious as to how his story started. Remington Castro, thirty-one years old, founder of the Moon Raiders. He also had an unstable marker on his file, which kinda made me laugh. There was nothing that I had seen from him that I would label unstable, in fact, I would say he was a control freak.
It looked like he was raised in a small but loving wolf pack in the deep south of Virginia. It's a pack that kept to themselves and would spend half their time in wolf form and half in human form. This made their wolves slightly more powerful than others since they were so in-tune with them, but it also made them desirable.
When Rabid was around six, a large group of traders raided their pack. They killed the adults, skinning them for their magical fur, and enslaved the children. It said that they made the children watch what they did to their parents, which broke many of the children.
I was gripping my phone so hard, pissed for those children that had to see such horrors at such a young age. I felt my skin ripple as my anger flooded, but I kept reading.
From then on, it looked like they kept all the children, selling them off to whoever was the highest bidder, all except for Rabid. The day they skinned his parents, his wolf went crazy and killed one of the traders, and he stayed as a wolf for one whole year.
It was hard for me not to root for that little boy, his wolf taking over to reap vengeance for his parents the only way it knew how. I wanted to find these men and kill them myself, but I kept reading.
Apparently, he did not shift back into a boy until year two, but he became their whipping boy. They kept him caged and would abuse him whenever they felt like it. I could imagine fuckers like that abusing him in the worst ways since they thought he had no value, since they thought he was broken and of no use for them other than to kick around.
We got to the part where Duce and his sister arrived, and, even on paper, in the most clinical way you could say it, those two woke something up in Rabid. When Duce told me about him fighting to stay with his sister, how he cried, kicked, and begged, I bet that set Rabid off. Taking him back to the time when he felt the same way and no one did anything.
In the file, it skips all that and says that when the three of them escaped, they had opened up all the cages with the other kids and set the place on fire with the traders in it. Only one of them made it out to tell the cops his story. His account said that a voracious beast came into the main room and tore up the traders one by one. That no amount of tranquilizers or gunshots had taken him down, that he barely got out.
It is noted that, a few days later, that same trader was found dead, ripped to shreds in the woods with small bloody footprints leaving the scene. I sat back, looking out the window as satisfaction filled me. He got them. He got them all for what they did, and his wolf made sure it was in the most bloody and painful way possible.
I moved on to Bricks’ file. Sad to see that it was precisely what he said, but the details were so much worse. His file read, Bricks aka Jacob Bushmill, thirty years old, Enforcer for the MC Moon Raiders.
He grew up in a very religious home where his parents believed in a wolf god that was the start of werewolves and needed to be worshiped constantly. They also lived in a small pack, one that sounded more like a cult than anything.
One day, his mother got wolfsbane poisoning and died. His father seemed to take this as a sign that his god wasn't pleased with him, asking everyone if they knew what kind of offering he should make to gain back his favor.
It looks like he came up with an answer of his own because, one day, he tied Bricks up, took him to some sacred rock they worship around, and tried to slit his throat. Since he was a werewolf, it didn't kill him, and when his father walked away, he ran away to the streets.
He was a street kid for a couple of years before he met up with Rabid and Duce and joined up with them. He had a few medical records that explained that what his father had done to his vocal cords had damaged them permanently. He could still talk, but it was so soft and low that they advised learning sign language.
I felt a single tear roll down my cheek as I thought of my own mother. She wasn't the best, far from it. She was toxic, mean, and I was an overall chore for her, but she never tried to kill me. She may have wished I was never born, but she didn't end my life. Just more left me alone because I was no longer useful, and she no longer cared.
I swiped at the tear and continued. I still had two more to go, and with how this was all going, I really didn't have any hope for a good story for any of them.
I hesitated over Dino’s, thinking about who he was, but I needed to know. I clicked and opened the file. Dino aka Antonio Rodriguez, twenty-nine years old, Treasurer for the Moon Raiders.
My eyes widened when I saw his real last name. Surely, he couldn't be part of the Rodriguez clan that just got slaughtered. I tried to recall that file from that job, and I remember it saying that the main family was all human, but they had supernaturals working for them. They were known for how much of a tight-knit family they were… could he be?
I looked down and read as fast as I could. It looked like he was, in fact, part of the Rodriguez drug cartel clan on his mother’s side and was one of the lower-tiered families, and this was where it took a dark turn.
It looked like the head family, made up of the boss, his wife and children, had decided early on that they needed the strength of the supernatural community, only they couldn't trust them.Familia lo es todo.Family is everything was their motto, and they found themselves a solution.
The boss had ordered all of his sisters and brothers to marry someone from the supernatural communities and to breed with them to make the workers that they needed. Soon, each family became its own sub-family, all working for the boss.
Dino was a part of the werewolf side, and they were usually tasked with a lot of the grunt work. I guess he didn't like that, and, at the age of ten, he started his own underground casino with his two brothers and two sisters.
They were making a lot of money, and the boss got wind of it somehow. It was said he was furious, feeling like it was the deepest betrayal to steal from their own family, and so he decided to steal their lives in return.
He massacred the whole family but kept the youngest girl, Adalena. It was said he knew that he was going to need to replenish the werewolf house, and he kept her as his insurance. Somehow, Dino got away and crossed the border into the United States.
It looked like he bounced from city to city, using different names in each until he settled with the Moon Raiders. It was said that he tried to cheat Duce in a game of cards, and when Duce caught him, he roped him into being in charge of the Moon Raiders books and never left.
