40
Tell me you've seen it
I was close to shooting, dazzled by the lights, if it hadn't been for recognizing the face on the other side of the glass and then the license plate.
But what the hell?! It was one of my cars, riddled with bullet holes, the windows shattered, and Aleksa behind the wheel.
He braked hard, stopping just a meter from hitting me.
I ran without hesitation to open the door and check on my man, who was paler than Casper's ass, bleeding from various holes, with a cloudy look in his eyes. I counted two bullet holes, besides a wound on his hand.
I opened the door and looked at him horrified.
"What happened to you?!"
"Tell me you've seen the video... and that I've thrown them off," he muttered on the edge of unconsciousness. I looked around, no one seemed to be following him.
"Nobody's following you. What video are you talking about?"
"The bastard on WhatsApp."
"Are you delirious? Or is this a damn joke of yours when this situation is not fucking funny at all?" Aleksa usually called the WhatsApp bastard the black guy with the big dick who had his moment of glory.
"No," he panted. "I called you and you didn’t answer."
"I left my phone at home. Did Nikita tell you where I was?" He shook his head.
"Your watch’s tracker. Since you didn't answer, I activated the tracking in case something had happened to you."
"It’s you they’ve done something to, look at yourself, you look like a fucking sieve. I'm going to take you to get seen and treated. Let me help you out. Who did this? Cheng? Huang?" His scream of pain as I pulled his body upward was chilling. Then, I saw the amount of blood soaking his half-torn shirt. "Fuck! I'm going to kill whoever did this."
"Get the phone, the video. Talk to Piero, ask him what I asked him to do, he'll tell you..." I decided to grab it before arguing further with him. I leaned Aleksa against the car body and put the phone in my back pocket.
"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.