"Did you get revenge?"
He shakes his head, watching me closely.
"Are you going to?"
"It's all I ever think about."
"If you know who did it, what are you waiting for?"
"There are other pieces of the game," he answers cryptically. "And I'm waiting for everything to fall into place."
"I see." I know that I'm pushing all his buttons with this conversation, but I need to understand the inside of his mind.
"Apart from the human trafficking, what other businesses was your mother involved in?"
"Most were legal," I say. "Real estate, stocks, and a shipping business that she inherited."
"What about the illegal ones?"
"She never spoke about any of it in front of us."
"But you knew what was going on."
"I knew she had connections with the underworld," I say. "I eavesdropped on some of her conversations. She was planning more abductions. She was working on scaling it."
"So this is something she started doing recently?"
"As far as I know, yes."
"What was she going to do with the kids?"
There's a growing pit in my stomach. I'm glad I stuck to mostly orange juice even though there's a whole feast between us.
"Apart from selling them to wealthy pedophiles, there was also talk about working with this biotech company," I say. "She was going to sell some of the children to that company to be used for experimentation as human guinea pigs."
"Do you remember the name of this biotech company?"
I shake my head.
I don't remember seeing their name, but I remember the day I first found out about them.
"But you remember something else."
I swallow. "They sent a sample to our house once. My mother was away on a business trip, so I opened the package. It was of a skincare line."
"A skincare line?" he repeats, looking confused.
"Only it wasn't just any skincare line," I say. "It was something that was meant to be sold in the black market to elite clients. Only the ingredients were listed on these bottles. They were made using placenta and stem cells from newborn babies. I knew it was popular in the market because a few days later, our entire walk-in fridge was filled with these serum bottles."
His jaw hardens. A part of me wonders why he's so bothered by this. This is how crime families make their wealth. They're not afraid to do what others consider unethical or immoral.
"You must also sell things on the dark web."
He nods. "Yes."
"What do you sell?"
"The usual," he says. "Designer drugs and weapons."
