Chapo watched it all in silence.
That was the worst part.
He didn’t rush me. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t savor it openly. He simply observed, eyes dark and intent, like a scientist watching a reaction reach its boiling point.
Finally, he spoke.
“Grief,” he said thoughtfully, as if tasting the word. “It strips a man down to his bones. You can tell who someone really is once you take everything else away.”
I lifted my head slowly.
My face was wet. My chest heaved. My vision tunneled until all I could see was him.
“If you think this breaks me,” I rasped, voice shredded, “you don’t understand what you’ve done.”
Chapo smiled.
“Oh,” he replied softly. “I understand perfectly.”
He stepped closer, boots crunching through dried blood on the floor.
“This,” he said, gesturing lazily toward Amy’s ruined body, “is only the beginning.”
And I knew—without doubt—that whatever walked out of this basement, if I walked out at all, would not be the man who had entered it.
Al-Chapo rose from the stool with unhurried grace, as though nothing in this room demanded urgency—not the blood soaking the floor, not the corpse bound upright in a chair, not the broken man chained to a pole in front of him.
He approached slowly, leather soles whispering against concrete. His hands were clasped behind his back, posture relaxed, almost courtly.
He stopped inches from me, close enough that I could smell tobacco and something faintly sweet beneath it—expensive cologne, utterly out of place in a basement of death.
He studied my face the way a butcher studies meat. Not with hunger. With calculation.
“I see potential in you, son,” he said softly, almost kindly. His voice had dropped, intimate now, meant only for me. “Raw. Unpolished. But strong. Strength like yours is rare. Wasted, usually, by men who think loyalty is owed to flags and promises.”
He circled me once, slow and deliberate, like a predator deciding where to bite.
“I will train you,” he continued. “Strip away what is weak. Forge you into something legendary.” He gestured vaguely at the room—the guards, the weapons, the machinery of terror humming just beyond the walls. “All of this can be yours one day. My empire does not die with me. It evolves.”
He stopped in front of me again, eyes locking onto mine.
“The next most wanted man in America,” he said with a faint smile. “It has a certain poetry, no?”
I laughed.
It came out wrong—hoarse, broken, halfway to a sob. Blood dripped from my split lip, spattering onto the floor between us.
“You think,” I rasped, “I’d ever serve you?”
He leaned closer.
“Technically,” he murmured, “I did not kill your sister.”
The words hit harder than any punch.
“Your colleague did,” he went on calmly. “She made a choice. She chose her grandmother over Amy.” His eyes flicked briefly toward my sister’s body, then back to me. “Choices have consequences. That is a truth you understand very well.”
Something inside me snapped.
