Page 103 of Capuleto

"I've got it. Can you walk?" Aleksa looked me in the eyes, tried to nod, then fainted from blood loss, who knows how long he had been driving like that. "Aleksa!" I shouted, receiving no response.

I carried him in my arms. He was heavier than usual due to the faint, although not as heavy as my conscience because he had been badly injured.

He had a bullet hole in his shoulder, another in his side, and his left hand was bandaged with a piece of blood-soaked shirt.

As soon as I emerged in the hall, I bellowed for him to be attended to.

An orderly, several nurses, and a doctor came to take him onto a stretcher.

I was panting from the effort, with my brain pressing against my skull and my pulse in disarray.

They wouldn't let me go with him; they took him to the operating room and asked me to wait in the waiting room.

I took the opportunity to take out the phone and watch the video.

I kept my eyes glued to the screen, not quite understanding what I was seeing a garden, a house I didn't recognize, a balcony; a tattooed hand that made me hold my breath, a change of scene, and when the focus returned, the world stopped.

"No!" my brain screamed, unable to admit that what it was receiving through my pupils was real. But damn it, it looked real! It seemed like I was watching my best friend reincarnated. He talked like him, dressed like him, moved like him, and he was exactly like Yuri Korolev.

The phone protested, barely holding on with five percent battery left when the video ended.

I remembered my man's words: "Call Piero and have him tell you."

Even at the risk that it might be the last call I could make, I hit the call button. I didn’t even let him speak when he answered.

"You have two minutes to tell me what Aleksa had you do today. I’m running out of battery and he’s in the hospital, so make it quick."

It took him a few moments to organize everything to give me the most efficient summary possible. Aleksa had mistrusted Nikita and asked Piero to follow her. He did so to a hotel where my wife met with a man in a room, and it wasn’t the first time. Piero took photos, though the guy was shielded by a hood, cap, and sunglasses; so his face was not visible. Aleksa arrived shortly after and waited for the man to leave to follow him and discover his identity, while Piero, who had a fling with one of the receptionists and owed her a favor, managed to find out that it was the second time Nikita had booked a room for less than an hour.

A knot formed in my chest, another in my stomach, and a last one in my throat. "It can't be! It can't be!" I denied. My soul screamed while Piero kept talking.

Three percent battery. My brain disconnected and reconnected when my man mentioned that Aleksa didn’t want to stand by idly and followed that bastard to find out his identity. He wanted to offer me the face of the man my wife was secretly seeing so that I could see for myself who it was and act accordingly.

One didn’t need to be very smart to fill in the gaps between the video and Piero's conversation, but it did take a complete fool to have been deceived for so long by two of the most important people in my life.

It had all been a smokescreen, a trap I fell into headfirst. My family had been right all along; I should never have trusted the Korolevs.

Neither Yuri was dead nor did Nikita love me. They laughed in my damn face, all they intended from the start was to end me and mine. I had failed, and when you fail in the ‘Ndrangheta, the only way out is suicide. But before that, I had to set things right, no matter that I was already dead inside.

It was time to go back home.

41

Lead or silver?

Ilay down on one of the garden's hammocks with a glass in hand.

One thing became clear to me from the conversation I had with Andrey, after he had dealt with El Gordo and Huang himself, was that even after subjecting them to various tortures, they remained steadfast.

They had nothing to do with it.

It was then that I decided that my right-hand man deserved to know the truth.

"Promise me you won't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you."

"Do you know me so little as to doubt that I would give my life before revealing a single secret of yours?"

I was convinced that was the case, but talking to anyone about Yuri made me feel vulnerable, a feeling I had rarely experienced.