Page 35 of Capuleto

"Calm down, man, I was just suggesting a possibility." I huffed in anger. "If it's not your wife, I'd say someone got hold of part of that batch, maybe it's the same person who corrupted the formula and is now dealing on the Dark Web. Until a few hours ago, it was selling for fifty bucks a pill, after the kid's death, a hundred."

"How?!" I brought my hands to my face and rubbed my beard. "This is a fucking nightmare. It's like troubles are growing, damn it!"

"It is, especially with the flood of lawsuits that are going to fall on you again." Dante was right, even though we weren't the ones marketing it, the pharmaceutical company's name was on every box, they were going to go for our throats. "What was the name of the journalist you made a deal with a few weeks ago to calm down the lions he himself provoked?"

"Jonás Sánchez. Why? You want me to call him to spread the new news and send us straight to the gallows?" Dante clicked his tongue.

"I don't think you need to warn him. I just wanted to confirm his identity because it sounded familiar. Look at the full name of the kid. It's right there underneath."

I read every damn letter carefully.

"He has the same name. Is this some kind of sick joke?"

"No, it's life, which is a bitch and likes to laugh at us in a macabre way. It looks like it's his son."

Now the ground really did open up under my feet.

"Fuck!"

"Exactly, we're screwed. That guy is the worst plague in the universe, and your wife's drug just unleashed it. You better start calling the lawyer."

I swept everything off the table and threw it to the ground. It felt like I had stepped in shit the size of Gibraltar. Couldn't anything good happen to me?

"Vaffanculo[2]!" I roared, standing up to grab one of the glasses from the bar cabinet and smashing it against the floor.

My Italian blood always boiled when events beyond my comprehension occurred. What were the odds that the son of Mentium's biggest detractor would play the new Russian roulette and end up dying?

I cursed everything curse-worthy.

The flares of my nostrils swelled. I had to find another damn culprit when the war was about to break loose. Could I have more fronts open?

I needed someone to take care of the Mentium situation.

Immediately, I thought of Aleksa. My man was still convalescent, but I couldn't trust just anyone with the case.

I remember the first time he showed up at our house. I was studying at the university and he was spending his first weekend with us.

The cartel that sold us drugs had given him as a gift to my father the week he came to visit the coca cultivation fields. Aleksa was one-month shy of turning eighteen. My father noticed him when the cartel saw one of the workers stealing merchandise, snapped his fingers, and a very young Aleksa aimed the shotgun and blew the man’s brains out without a tremor, from a considerable distance. He praised the boy's precision, and the cartel gifted him as if he were a box of cigars. No one asked if he wanted it because Aleksa was just another number in the organization.

The dark-eyed boy did not protest. He had learned from birth that the cartel was never contradicted.

He packed all his belongings in a small bundle and flew to Spain without opening his mouth throughout the journey.

My father said he didn’t even get up from his seat to go to the bathroom; it was his first time on a plane and he flew first class.

As soon as my mother saw him and received the necessary explanations, Aleksa became part of our innermost circle and was treated, almost, as another son due to his youth.

He was very polite, reserved, and never asked for anything that was not given to him. That endeared him to my mother, who insisted that he be given a good education so that the boy could progress.

Aleksa slowly flourished; he was not accustomed to being treated as my mother treated him, who even gave him his own room. His eyes shone whenever he looked at her, and he was imbued with her particular energy and that sharp humor that characterized her.

When my mother passed away, Aleksa sank almost as much as we did. We had never seen him cry, and it's not that we saw him then, but he spent a week waking up with red eyes and praying in front of her favorite chair when no one saw him.

That week was when I understood that I would not find a man more loyal to my family than him. For that boy raised in the jungle, we were much more than his bosses.

It was I who asked my father to put him in charge of my men.

Someone who mourns your mother as if she were his own would do anything to protect what came from her womb and filled his heart.

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