Mafia Kings: Roberto: Chapter 60

Iwoke up when we arrived home.

My father was sitting next to me in the back of a town car. A man in a black suit was driving.

When we parked, my father led me gingerly inside.

My mother cried as she hugged me.

I just stood there like a zombie.

Afterwards, my mother took me into my room, undressed me, and put me to bed.

I didn’t come out for two whole days.

On the third day, I walked into my father’s study, still in my pajamas with a blanket wrapped around me.

He looked at me kindly, which was an unusual expression for him. “Are you alright?”

I nodded.

“Do you need anything?” my father asked.

“I want to know something.”

“What?”

“Why did they kidnap me?”

My father sighed deeply… then gestured at the chair opposite him.

I sat down, and he began to talk. To my surprise, he was quite forthcoming.

He asked me if I had ever heard the term ‘triad’ before.

When I told him I had only heard it mentioned in passing, he told me the legend about the monks and the Shaolin temple.

He told me how the triad societies had evolved throughout the centuries. That they had been one of the few places where a man could forge his own destiny.

Self-serving bullshit, though I didn’t know that at the time.

He said that he was the head of one of the most powerful triad groups in Hong Kong – and that a rival in another gang had kidnapped me to try to force my father to hand over territory.

Instead of giving in, my father found out where his enemies had taken me. Now I was safe, and his rival was dead.

“What about Jing?” I asked.

“Your friend?”

I nodded.

“She’s dead.”

I stared at him in horror. “You didn’t – ”

“No, her boyfriend did. He was an employee of my rival. Once she’d served her purpose, they couldn’t have her going to the police, so they killed her and hid her body in a dumpster. The police found her three days before we got to you.”

I sat there in shock.

“You don’t have to worry,” my father said. “No one will ever be able to get to you again. I’ll make sure of that.”

My father kept his promise.

My world, which had been tightly controlled before my kidnapping, became a prison.

I didn’t go back to school. Instead, my father hired people to teach me at home. Tutors for history, English, Chinese literature, biology, math…

I was never allowed out of the house unless one of my father’s triad soldiers accompanied me as a bodyguard.

The only privacy I had was in the relative peace of my bedroom…

Where I hid pieces of rope under my mattress.

I tied them around my wrists and ankles in the dead of night when everyone else had gone to sleep…

And imagined my handsome captor tightening the knots.