1 Prologue

"Close your eyes, and forget everything. Everything you heard and will hear my darling boy. I love you. I love you so so much."

            Those were the last words I heard from my mother, before she was taken. My father was never a good man, but he was a good father. It's a shame that all of his misdoings and secrets would be his undoing. It all happened so fast. Our small little flat, barely able to accommodate us: me, my sister, my mother and my father. It had one bedroom and one bathroom. A tiny corner for a kitchen, but it was enough. We were happy. Were. They came barging into our home, demanding for my father to return what was rightfully theirs. Masked men that I have never seen nor heard before. Their voices were gruff and unruly. Upon realizing my father could not return what belonged to them, upon his debts, they made us pay. "A debt must ALWAYS be paid Mr. De La Fuego." Funny how a few words with a menacing emotion behind them made me afraid, made me fear. My father pleaded for more time, but they refused. They grabbed my sister by her hair, sniffed her body, and licked their lips. They switched their attention to me and asked, "What about the boy?"

"Kill him," the leader suggested.

            My mother grabbed me by the arm and dragged me away, while my father tackled one of the men as he approached me. "RUN!" he screamed. My mother took me to the bed room and removed one of the floorboards. She commanded me to close my eyes. She told me to hide. She told me she was sorry and that she loved me.

            I did as I was told, but it didn't stop the noises. I heard it all. The screaming, the crying, the pain, everything. I curled into myself and cried. This had to be a terrible, terrible dream.

            The officers that arrived couldn't even stomach the scene. The report described it as a nightmare. The perpetrators, those monsters, seemed to have a grand old time. They were unconscious from the drugs and alcohol by the time help arrived. My father was murdered in cold blood. 27 stab wounds, 16 lacerations, countless bruises. My mother, was beaten as well and used as was my sister. They suffocated my mother, they choked her, but that wasn't what killed her. It was the shock. The shock of seeing her family destroyed in front of her and as mother and a wife powerless to stop it. They admitted my sister to a psychiatric ward, but she still remembered everything, she still felt everything. She took her own life within two days.

I, I died that day too, in a way. I was never the same again. In a way, you can say the me that I am now was born that day, that I was born from crime. Which is why I'm here today.  Which is why I made an oath, to destroy every last one of them.