One

Prologue

“Do you want me to hurt you?”

 “Yes........”

“Do you want me to own you tonight?” She said nothing.

“Are you drunk?”

 “No.......”

“You are breaking the rules. I am going to have to punish you for that.” He slid the glass of wine from her side of the table, gathering her full attention.

“Do you want me to make love to you?”

“Yes..........” She squirmed on her stool, next to him but she ended up framing her thighs fully when her dress moved higher.

Immediately he touched her there and she almost protested but her hands stopped mid-way, remembering how much she ached to have him inside of her. As his hands continued deeper, she let out a breathless moan, pinching her legs together and locking him in.

“You’ll have to let my hand go, I haven’t gotten to the best part yet”

She covered her face, now embarrassed but eventually obeyed. He stopped and withdrew.

He thought for a moment and then decided to lead her somewhere.

“Come with me,” he said. “The night has just begun. Slowly he guided her through some corridor until finally stopping in front of a door, a red door.

“Take a deep breath.” He said. He ushered her in and immediately locked the door behind him. Her heart shot out when he switched on the lights revealing a carefully spread bed, with curtains hanging loosely over it.

“I will need to restrain you, doctor” he instructed carefully as he approached the desk with......equipment. “I will also need you to dress appropriately. Do you understand?”

“Yes.........” she managed.

He took off his shirt and she swallowed just looking at his perfect body. She was already imagining how this night was going to play out.

‘Oh please, if this is some kind of a dream, let me see it through till the end, am going to be brave’

She picked out one of the lingerie and from the corner of her eyes, she could see him spreading a rope on the bed. There went her bravado. 

*****

The breath of a woman laying in bed against her lover, in the dawn of night, had ways of stroking his bare chest, slowly and softly. The way her own hands would have done. He was staring at her beauty in a way that gave her warmth in all the wrong places. She knew his eyes were staring at her lips and his hands had gone over the boundaries of the sheets again. She fought back the urge to scream but now she was losing herself to the sensation.

“I still don’t know your name” she breathed quietly. “My name is not important. I am a nobody” he said.

She pulled away from him an inch, barely managing to maintain a distance between his lips and hers. “ A nobody doesn’t own buildings across the country or private planes,” she told him. “I know you’re rich. I don’t know what you do, that’s your business, but I care about you and I want to feel safe with you, not like this.”

“How do you want me to make you feel safe?”

“I want.....to....get to know you better. I want us to go on a normal date, not being blindfolded by men I don’t even know and driven three hours just to meet you, wherever this is”

“I know and am sorry for that. But it’s necessary for now,” he said, “I promise it’ll all be better soon. We shall go on a normal date” he promised. He kissed her, possessively. She seemed relieved and hopeful.

“And I don’t like this room” she confessed. “You don’t like the color red?”

“No, not really. I think it’s because it makes me want to make love to you more” she whispered against his lips quietly. He had managed to distract her from knowing what lay behind the walls. An endless stretch of trees as far as the eye could see. It was a cloudless night outside. the stars were shining bright like a thousand suns and the moon was held still, waiting in malevolent silence. There was a gentle wind caressing through every space. It would roll the leaves on the ground into heaps, then finally subside into distant echoes of the mountains afar.

Through the quiet and innocent moonlight that faintly touched the ground, a few shadows crept in. their movements seemed rehearsed, as if cautious about what lay ahead. A little bit more light exposed guns, rifles, and submachine guns, pointing in the direction in which they

advanced. Eight men were creeping through the cover of trees, following the visible lights of a large facility up ahead. This was not just any facility. It was a large camp containing possibly the largest number of illegal activities ever. The eight men were sent on a mission, to capture the man who had orchestrated brutal attacks on the most notorious gangs in the city.

This man was wanted dead or alive. To most people, he was a myth, a legend known only as El Moruno. Out here, In these woods, he was their greatest threat, that and because he controlled a criminal empire.

Sneaking inside the camp was a death wish but these men had been refined by training and missions of greater danger. Suddenly one of the men halted, realizing how precisely the lighting in the camp had been set up to leave several blindspots. This was a setup. This place was supposed to be heavily guarded. Almost immediately, the lights went off, blinding the men momentarily, before they could reset their vision to fit the lesser light. They scampered for the safety of the trees but there was a gunshot, followed by an eruption of gunfire from the gloom in front of them. Bullets were flying everywhere, shredding five of the men into ghoulish chunks of meat. The firing seized and the most perceptive of the men took a moment, breathing. He stole a quick look at his two accomplices who had also survived the attack.

Their only deliverance was to escape, to run for the hills in the opposite direction. In a moment, one of them leaped into the open and the other two followed suit. Now they could hear dogs barking. They were being hunted like wild animals and by now they had dumped their guns.

One of them tripped, fell, and dislocated his leg. His two accomplices attempted in a rush to pick him up and drag him along but the enemies were nearing their spot. At the sound of another gunshot in the air, one of the two aiding men let go and decided to save his skin. As he propelled into the gloom, a forearm shot from nowhere and flipped him to the ground.

A gang emerged from either side, accompanied by bright beams of white light, surrounding the three men. A silhouette stepped in front of the beam of light and slowly walked to the defenseless men carrying a Remington 870 shotgun.

The whole scene became wrapped in silence. the hound dogs stopped barking. Every movement was hushed except for the silhouette with a gun, moving, appearing like the grim Reaper in the beam of light.

“They say man’s greatest weakness is fear,” the silhouette began in a calm tone. “In the face of it, bravery is an illusion. Fear is like a void, a hollow, devouring the mind and you can do anything to get away from it because you can feel it, wrenching your soul into emptiness” he said. He raised the barrel of his shotgun and pointed it directly into the forehead of one of the three nameless men, “Bravery is an illusion and you are going to die for it. Unless you tell me the name of the scum that sent you.”

“We are dead men anyway, so just go ahead and pull the trigger” one of them wept.

“ Do you want to die for a lost cause? Just give me a name and I’ll let you Iive. You can go back and tell the one that sent you that El Moruno is a myth. The mafia Lord does not exist.”

The man thought for a moment, trembling. There was a gun pointed at his face. What other choice did he have?

“They call him Mr. Chaplain. That’s all we know” he confessed. “Chaplain.....” he thought out loud, “No, it doesn’t ring a bell.”

“ He.... owned the....um arsenal that was stolen in Medellin. He owned it, I swear” he stuttered.

“I believe you,” he said, staring at the man directly. “I’m going to let you go. I am a man of my word.” He gave a slight hand gesture in the air and a second silhouette Came into the light, following his command. “But I want you to send a message to this Chaplain scum.” The second silhouette pulled out a machete from his coat and sliced the hand clean off the nameless man. That was the message. As his screaming emptied into the night sky, the howling of the hound dogs merged and dispersed into the spectacle.

The silhouette with the shotgun was Maximus Hassien, brother of the notorious mafia lord Don isagise Hassien. Their blood bond was poisonous. Maximus was the more rational of the two. He was always cleaning up his brother’s mess. Like this one. The eight nameless men were sent by the unknown Mr. Chaplain who had bad blood with the myth of El Moruno, the mafia boss.