Vows written in blood

RAFAEL "No, please don't kill me." His voice cracked across the empty dock, ragged, desperate. I watched him stumble toward the edge, arms out like he could talk his way back from whatever was coming for him. "Please don't do this." A gunshot tore through the silence. His body jerked, then folded, and the water took him whole. I sat up gasping, chest heaving like I'd been the one who couldn't breathe. Sweat had soaked clean through the sheets under me. Cristiano's face was still burned behind my eyes when the knock came at the door. "Come in." Enzo stepped in. My consigliere, tall, dark haired, the kind of loyal that gets earned over years, not bought in a single conversation. His face told me the news before he opened his mouth. "We have an active location. Cristiano was last spotted there. A body was found." I was already moving before he finished the sentence. My room had never been about comfort. It was proof of something. Floor to ceiling windows I kept curtained against a city that watched me too closely, a bed no one else had ever been allowed to sleep in, black cotton sheets and Italian leather because I decided a long time ago that if I couldn't have peace, I could at least have quality. I got dressed in silence. Black, like always. It was one less decision to make. Downstairs the house held its usual kind of quiet, not peace exactly, more like everything under control. Every step I took down that staircase echoed through a mansion full of people too disciplined to make a sound of their own. The wealth was on the walls. The authority lived in the silence underneath it. Three of my men were waiting at the door when I got there, standing straight, hands loose at their sides the way men stand when they've earned the right to be near me. The door opened. Two Mercedes sat idling in the driveway, black paint catching the gray morning light like something alive. Enzo and I took the first car. My men only got into the second one once I was already seated. That was always the order. The gates rolled open and we pulled onto the road in formation, like we were heading into a war instead of a warehouse. I didn't say anything for the first ten minutes. I didn't need to. Enzo knew better than to fill a silence that wasn't his to fill. Cristiano wasn't just anyone in that dream. He was the other half of something that was supposed to still be whole. We were born four minutes apart, raised behind the same gates, taught the exact same lessons, and somehow we still ended up living in completely different worlds inside one house. We never got to play the way other kids did. Wooden guns turned into real ones before either of us understood what that actually meant, and every game we played ended with someone declared the winner, though neither of us ever really understood why there had to be one. I was built for that world. I used to march around the garden with a toy pistol tucked into my waistband, barking orders at staff twice my age, and it felt like breathing. Winning felt like breathing. Everything our father taught us about power and fear and loyalty settled into me like it had always belonged there. Cristiano learned the same lessons and drowned in them differently. Where I saw a target, he saw a person standing behind it. Where I felt nothing after winning, he wondered what it cost whoever lost. He felt everything, every hard word, every cruelty dressed up as discipline, while I learned that feeling any of it at all was a weakness men like us couldn't afford. They diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder when we were fourteen. He never hurt a soul because of it. People still called him the weak one, the one who drank himself numb when our father died while I buried myself in spreadsheets and debts instead. I never told him I respected that. Facing what he felt instead of burying it took more nerve than anything I ever did. I just brushed it aside, the same way I brushed aside anything that made me uncomfortable. He is the only person on this earth I have ever actually needed. And he's been missing for a year. We fought the night he disappeared. I don't even remember what it was about anymore, something small that felt enormous in the moment, the way things do with family. He stormed out. A month later we filed a report. Since then I've told myself he's probably dead, because the alternative, that he's alive and hasn't come home, is worse. The car slowed as we hit the outskirts of Rotterdam, gravel crunching under the tires outside an old warehouse. A man in a blue collared shirt stood waiting to lead us in. My men went first, hands drifting to the guns at their waists in that slow, practiced way that means they're ready before I've even said a word. Inside, a man stood up to meet me, smirking like we were old friends. "Rafael. What brings you here, please, sit." "There's information on my brother. Or so I was told." "Your brother isn't here." "Don't waste my time." I let my fingers rest against the arm of the chair, calm, patient, the kind of patient that should have scared him more than shouting ever would. He swallowed hard. "I've told you, I don't know anything." "No." A faint smile pulled at my mouth. "You've given me nothing useful. Make this trip worth it, or don't." "I swear I know nothing." "You know exactly where he is. You've just made your choice not to say it." I lifted two fingers, barely a gesture at all. My men understood it before he did. The room went loud, gunfire, his men dropping before they'd even fully drawn their weapons. I stood up, straightened my jacket, and looked down at what was left of his composure. "I asked you for honesty," I said quietly. "You gave me excuses." The color drained out of his face in real time. "Fine, Cristiano was last spotted leaving for Mexico. That's all I know." "Mexico?" "Yes. Mexico." His voice shook on the word like it might save him. "Okay." I smiled, because it cost me nothing to be kind to a dead man. "I meant no harm, of course." I turned to leave. Enzo fell into step beside me before we'd even reached the car. "Where to, boss?" "Home. I need more information, reach out to the company's investigator." We drove off in silence, and somewhere past the warehouse gates, one thought settled into me like a verdict I'd already passed. If Cristiano is really dead, I am going to make sure everyone who touched him dies slower than he did.