Caught in his Darkness

~ Chapter 29 ~

"They killed my brother. They tortured him. They burned him alive. In front of my eyes."

"What?" I was perplexed.

"It happend when I turned 20, on our way to my birthday party. My dad's most dangerous enemey attacked. His aim was to finish both me and my brother." He went quiet, and lit up another cigarette.

It was hard for him to speak about this, why else would he smoke cigarette after cigarette. Never have I seen him smoking this much.

"The guests, including my parents, were all in the main hall in the mansion. My brother and I would drive there by car since we went out earlier that day. On our way back home, not even 100 meters away from the gates, they attacked us." His eyes rested on me, as if he was trying to process what he just said.

"The first bullet hit me, right here," he showed me his lower arm. It had a scar, a scar with a cruel story behind it.

"Massimo...," I mumbeled, taking his hand in my hands caressing it slowly.

He sighed as he continued, "the second bullet hit me here in my shoulder. The third bullet should have passed through my head but it didn't. It didn't," he repeated again.

"My brother took the bullet for me. He was only four years older than me but far more experienced with the maffia world than I was. At that time."

He took slow breaks in between, but it seemed as if he was recalling every single moment again.

"The bullet had hit him in his upper arm. I lost consciousness and passed out. But the screams of my brother were... were insane." His knuckles turned white from rage.

"I don't know what they have done to him when I passed out. But..." he gulped as he continued, "when I regained consciousness, his screams were all that I could focus on, even though I was being tortured myself."

He looked me in the eyes, and for the first time in my life, I saw something in his eyes that looked like tears. Massimo, the strong maffia don has a soft spot. He is able to cry.

He shook his head and regained his composure as if he knew that I saw the tears. "They tortured us for hours and I did not feel a tiny bit of it. My body had gone numb, I couldn't say anything. My brother on the other hand... he was screaming, he was begging them to stop torturing me. Me."

"Massimo... I..." - "In the end they put gasoline on him, and... the son of a bastard lit his lighter, burning my brother to death."

There was a brief pause, in which I didn't know what to say. I wanted to say so much that it just shut me down.

"My dad came with his men but it was already too late for my brother. His burns were too deep and he died there. The image of his burned body stayed with me, and it will until I die."

"Massimo, I'm so sorry...," I managed to utter. I was close to crying, in fact the tears were already coming. How on earth could someone be this cruel to burn someone? How?

"When I recovered, my dad send me away to England to live there under another name. I went to university, but I was never how I used to be. I kept hearing this voice that came right after I woke up in the hospital."

I gulped, he too did hear the voice.

"It told me that I had to kill the bastard. It told me that I was a coward, a coward that wasn't able to protect my brother," with that he slammed the wall in one go, he did it so quick that I wasn't able to prevent him from doing it.

"Massimo!" I shrieked. "Stop! Don't do that, you're hurting yourself, please!"

He stopped but his stare made me shut my mouth.