Broken Kings (House of Cards Series 0)

Tercer Paso: La Amenaza

A/N: I know I keep jumping from calling them Burrio Boys to Barrio Boys. That's my bad, it's supposed to be Barrio Boys. I'm just REALLY bad at remembering that sorry. Where I'm from a Burrio IS a Barrio.

Picture to the side is a suture needle and thread. This is the exact same one I have used to stitch a friend of mine up while doing our survival training, it really is as terrifying as it looks.

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It was early enough in the morning that the horizon was a steely, unwelcoming grey, not yet pregnant with the life and vitality of the rising sun and instead reflecting the fleeing cold of the moon. Reaper was holding down a thrashing and sobbing Maya while Carlitos stitched her up and it took everything Reaper had to not lose his control.

Maya was beaten but nothing too severe. That thought alone made Reaper flush with guilt because she was only beaten into a bloody pulp because Logan had been mad over the actions he had taken. Over the last year, not a single thing had gone right for Logan and his boys and he was starting to realize that there was a mole in his group. He just didn't suspect whom it really was. Sadly enough, Maya being beaten so badly was how the mafia man vented his anger that one of his thugs was a turncoat, she hadn't actually done anything wrong to deserve it. Malcolm's hands shook as his system flooded with adrenaline, priming him for a fight or flight response when he had nothing to channel it out on. Logan was still untouchable and Maya deserved only the gentlest of touches now.

One of her eyes was so bruised and swollen that she couldn't see out of it. Carlitos was actually worried she might lose the eye entirely because of the pressures on it right now, but there was nothing they could do to help her. And they couldn't take her to the hospital because they already knew she was a 'gangbanger' and basically refused to treat her injuries because of that. Maya's jaw was dislocated and had gone back in with a sickening, wet pop sound, three of her fingers were broken and she had jagged cuts all over her body from where Logan had beaten her with a riding crop. Carlitos was crouched over the biggest one in her thigh and he was humming as he stitched to try and give some kind of comfort to the sobbing girl they worked on.

Reaper listened to the tune of the man's voice, recognized the childish lullabye and decided that he too could offer comfort. So while he let Maya grip one of his hands while he pressed down on her shoulders with his forarm, he sang that lullabye to her. It was a ridiculous little ditty about elephants swinging on a spider's web.

"Un elefantes se columpiaba
Sobre la tela de una araña.
Y como vio que resistia
Fue a llamar otro elefante.
Dos elefantes se columpiaba
Sobre la tela de una araña.
Y como vieron que resistia
Fueron a llamar otro elefante.
Tres elefantes...
Cuatro elefantes...
Cinco elefantes..."

As he finished singing, Carlitos tied off the last stitch in Maya's leg. Reaper smiled and gave Maya a kiss on the forehead, wiping away the tears, dried blood and pain fuelled sweat on her brow while the other Barrio Boy moved to the gash on her side. It was going to be a long night, but now that he knew how to at least distract her a little, Reaper kept the singing up. As Maya gasped when the needle poked into her flesh, Malcolm sang her Adrianna's favourite songs. It gave the woman something to focus on beyond the pain, and somehow it gave comfort to Carlitos as well as Reaper, reminding them that although their lives were blood, fire and retribution now, they had once had a brighter purpose and could have a new one again some day. They all just had to survive to make it to that point.

Four hours and sixty-seven stitches later, Maya was passed out from pain, Reaper's voice had gone hoarse and Carlitos looked like he was auditioning to be the Spanish Dexter. Reaper stumbled to the bathroom and returned with fresh water, then stood back and watched something amazing happen. The callous, rough and harsh gangster Carlitos was withdrew and the man he had been and Adrianna had fallen in love with emerged. Even though he was gore covered, tired and grimey, Carlitos merely washed off his hands and then focused on cleaning Maya up. More than just sterilizing the dressed wounds, he washed all the blood, sweat and tears from her face and body, dressing her in the looses pajamas he owned so she wasn't wearing the torn and ruined mess she'd stumbled to them in. Reaper stayed silent, watching the older man be a better man than Malcolm felt he could be right now and it made him hate who he had become just a little.

But as much as Malcolm was beginning to hate his role as Reaper, he still knew it was his task to bear, his passage into manhood as it were. He needed to avenge his sister's murder before he could recover from it and it was long past time that he applied his brain to the problem instead of letting serendipity take care of it for him. There would be no more close calls, false trails or the bitter taste of disappointment in his mouth after this. Turning from the sight of the caretaker Barrio, Reaper grabbed a dog-eared notebook and threw himself into actually planning revenge against the four men who needed to pay.

Being a logically minded man, Reaper approached the task by first laying out what he knew of each man so he could target their weak spots. It took him quite some time to consciously think up each and every piece of information he had gathered over the last two years, but after two more hours of work, Reaper had himself a user's guide to ending the lives of four men who greatly deserved it.

Juntez would be the easiest one to take down. The man was buidling quite the reputation as a fast and loose gambler. Horses, dogs, roosters, cards, roulette... if he could loose money betting on it, Juntez was drawn to it like a moth to flames. Right now his owe markers (how much he owes to various bookies/ other gangsters etc) weren't all that bad, but just looking at the pattern of the man's spending and Reaper knew that in another two years, he could destroy Juntez without ever touching him. THe best part was, knowing that he needed to lay no ground work, Reaper could let Juntez dig his own grave and get back to him later on.

Paco would be harder to deal with, though Malcolm's instincts told him that there would be an opportunity later. THe man was a thug and a pig, barely a step above caveman and was a terrible business man as well. He owned and ran one of the more mafia affiliated clubs in Madrid and made quite a tastey profit off of the drugs and prostitution ran through that club. The cops were still in his pocket but a little fire in the club might dry up his cash flow.....

Nickey had been a more impressive enemey before he started to slip down the drug slide. Used to be that ol' Nick would smoke a dime of weed every once in a while. Over the last year, he'd become a big smoker and could polish off an ounce within three of four days and had started trying a few lines and rocks of coke now too. Again it seemed to Reaper that fate was on his side, taking out a strung out, drugged up corpse to be like that wouldn't take much effort or ingenuity. The only qualms Reaper had, was Nickey's new wife. She was relatively innocent compared to her husband and he didn't want to make her suffer as he made her husband suffer. Knowing that it would take a while to untangle a method of retribution that had no collateral damage, Malcolm reluctantly agreed with his conscience to leave off Nickey for a little bit to see if the man would hang himself or not.

But there would be no holding off for Logan. Reaper's hands shook again as he was gripped with the powerful urge to break that man into flushable pieces with his bare hands. This was the bastard that had picked Adrianna specifically. They knew that taking her would hurt Carlitos, and as such hurt the Barrio Boys. But more than that, Logan and the other mafia men had known that Adrianna was a smart girl, a good girl and they targeted her for it. They'd violated her because Logan got off on that kind of thing.

A loud snap sound jerked Reaper out of his anger and he realized that he had snapped the pen in his grip. Ink was coating his hand, mixing in with the blood seeping out of a small, shrapnel induced wound. He stared down at the black mizing with the red for a moment, mesmerized by the way that the bright scarlet was consumed by the inky black and he shuddered as the fact that the stain on his hand mirrored the stain on his soul was driven home to him. He walked a tightrope above the abyss, but he could fall off of that thin line of justice very easily and become no better than the men around him. Standing from his seat, he walked to Carlitos' sink and washed his hand off, viewing the small cut in his hand. The edges were still stained black but the red once again ran clean. And Malcolm promised himself that one day, he would wash off the stain on his soul and it would no longer be about the red of blood and the black of sin. But not yet.