“I will not allow my boy to be traumatized by these animals. Not while I still draw breath.” I said, my voice stripped of inflection, final in a way that left no room for interpretation
Petros nodded immediately. “Already in motion, boss.”
He checked his watch—a nervous tic he’d carried since the old days in Athens, back when we were younger and mistakes were paid for in funerals. “I’ll update you every fifteen minutes. More often if we get eyes on him.”
He turned toward the door.
“Petros.”
He stopped, one hand resting against the frame.
“When you find the ones responsible,” I continued calmly, the kind of calm that frightened seasoned killers, “bring me their names. Quietly. No spectacle. No declaration. I don’t want a war broadcast across the state.”
He waited.
“But they will learn,” I finished, “that touching my blood comes with a price no family in this state can afford.”
Petros inclined his head once—sharp, absolute—and disappeared down the hall.
The door clicked shut behind him.
Petros was my underboss, my most loyal soldier. Once, even when enemies broke his body and left him incapacitated, he had refused to betray me.
I leaned back in the chair, the leather creaking softly under my weight, and stared out at the ocean beyond the glass.
The Pacific rolled endlessly below the cliffs, waves crashing and retreating with ancient indifference. It didn’t care about empires or sons or blood debts. It had swallowed worse men than me and would do so again without pause.
My thoughts drifted—unbidden, unwanted—to Maria.
Her death hadn’t broken me the way people assumed.
Grief like that doesn’t shatter you all at once. It hollows you out slowly, leaves you standing while everything inside collapses.
Five years in El Chapo’s prison had carved pieces out of my soul.
Every morning there began the same way.
The electrified cane across the soles of my feet—full charge—until my vision went white and my teeth cracked from clenching.
Twenty lashes after that, the whip singing through the air, biting deep until skin stopped feeling like it belonged to me.
I learned quickly that screaming was a waste of breath. Silence was cheaper. Silence kept you sane longer.
They stripped me of everything in that place—sleep, dignity, time, language.
They erased the man I had been in Al-Chapo’s camp.
Not with one act. Not with one beating.
But slowly—methodically—day after day, until memory itself became unreliable.
Al-Chapo didn’t just run a prison. He ran a laboratory. A place where men were stripped down to instinct and pain, then reshaped into weapons or corpses.
He tried to mold me into him—into his shadow, his successor, his reflection.
At first, I resisted openly. That earned me weeks of punishment that blurred together into one endless scream my body still remembers.
Pain there wasn’t an event.
