I had been lying in a pile of trash for days, forgotten, discarded. It wasn’t a search party or a family member who found me. No, it was a beggar man scavenging around for food, that led them to me. The smell was too strong to ignore.
A patrol officer heard the beggar scream for help and came to check it out. He wasn’t expecting to find a body, let alone one as wrecked as mine.
“Holy shit!” the officer muttered, pulling out his radio with shaky hands. “I need backup. Now.”
The place was swarming with cops in minutes. They couldn’t identify me right away. I was brutally killed and torture that my face was too damaged, and like the others, my hands were missing. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing.
“Another one,” one of the detectives muttered, looking down at my lifeless almost naked body. “These guys are getting bold.”
Martinez, my dad of course, didn’t hear about any of this immediately. He was too busy plotting revenge, getting ready to send his men out for a bloodbath. I wasn’t important to him. I was just a shadow in the background of his empire, easy to overlook.
By the time Rafael got the call about my body, Martinez had already set his men loose on the streets. They were gearing up for retaliation, clueless that they had already lost one of their own.
Rafael approached Martinez cautiously, phone still in his hand. “Boss, you need to hear this.”
Dad didn’t even look up. “What?”
“There’s been another body found,” Rafael said, his voice quieter than usual. “A girl, at the market. It’s bad, boss. Real bad.”
He frowned. “One of ours?”
“We’re not sure,” Rafael admitted. “Body’s... too messed up to tell. But the cops think it’s connected to the others.”
For a moment, my dad said nothing, just thinking. Another body. Another victim in this war. But something about this didn’t sit right. The timing was off. The location—it didn’t fit the pattern.
“Send someone to watch the cops,” he ordered, standing from his desk. “I want to know everything they find out. If it’s those bastards, I need to know who the girl was and why she was targeted.”
Rafael nodded, but dad could sense the unease in his eyes. He had worked with Rafael long enough to know when something felt off. This wasn’t just another random hit. There was more to this than either of them could see.