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“I highly doubt that, but maybe you must tell yourself that so you can sleep at night.”
“I sleep just fine, for the most part,” he said with a shrug before he continued. “You should go easy on Mando. He’s a good man with a good heart.”
I couldn’t help but scoff at that. He was seriously trying to tell me that Armando was a good man. This man worked as my guard to steal my baby once he or she was born. There was nothing good about him; what light might be within him was so far buried that it would never see the light of day.
“You don’t find it hilarious that you are trying to tell me Armando is one of the good guys? You both are holding me hostage so your boss can steal my baby. Where exactly is good in that?”
He stopped what he was doing and turned to face me. The seriousness was mixed with the hurt on his face, and I didn’t understand why it was there. These men were supposed to be cold-hearted killers, so why would my words matter to either of them?
“You know he hates this; so do I. He hates knowing that these women are going to be killed. He hates that you are going to be killed. And I know you must know how this plays out for you despite what Dominic said.”
Oh, I did know. I knew there was no way Dominic would let me walk out of here alive. I would have known too much and become a liability to him. I needed to get out of here before I was too big to run correctly.
“I’m not an idiot.”
“No, you’re not. You’re different compared to the other girls. You actually remind me a lot of Alexis. I suspect that is why Mando cares about you.”
“Alexis?” This was the first time I heard that name. She must have been one of the other girls or something.
“His ex-girlfriend. They had dated for roughly five years, about four years ago. She was the first real girlfriend he’d ever had. He had been thinking about proposing to her. Fuck, he was madly in love with Alexis.” I could hear the slight hurt in his voice, and I knew Armando wasn’t the only one who had cared for Alexis.
“What happened? She couldn’t handle life anymore?”
“She didn’t have a problem with this life. I shouldn’t say that; she had issues, but not with Mando and what he does. She saw him for the man he truly was and not the image he had to give off to blend in with everyone. Alexis came from nothing. She grew up in foster care, in a bad neighborhood, and she didn’t stand a chance. She was grabbed at sixteen by a human trafficking ring, where she stayed until Mando found her at twenty-three. He got her out of the life, got her healthy, protected her, and killed anyone who tried to drag her back into that life.”
“Why would he do that? She couldn’t have been the first prostitute he had seen. Or even the first victim. What made her so different?”
“I don’t know,” he answered with a slight shrug. “You’re right. She wasn’t the first victim or the first sex slave. We grew up around them, and we learned to block it all out and shut our emotions off. For some reason, he couldn’t do that with Alexis. Even after she was healthy enough to be alone, he didn’t want her to be. He fell in love, and she loved him. At first, he was worried about her having a hero complex, but her emotions were genuine. They were together for five years until one night four years ago.”
“What happened four years ago?” I asked curiously.
“She killed herself,” Gabriele said, looking into my eyes to see my reaction.
“Wait, what?”
This was not where I thought this story was going. I thought Alexis would have gotten sick of the life and left. I wasn’t expecting her to kill herself.
“Mando was out looking at engagement rings. I was with him and we were brainstorming different ways for him to propose to her. We got back to his place, and he found her in the bathtub. She had slit both of her wrists. At first, we thought there was foul play, but she had written a suicide note. Mando could tell that she wrote it of her own free will. He thought she was better and healed from what had happened to her. He knew she would always have issues, but he thought they had a handle on them. The police did an investigation, and it revealed that she was five weeks pregnant. The coroner said she wouldn’t have known, but that didn’t make the blow any easier on Mando.”
This was unreal. I wanted to call bullshit, but the story was too tragic. I had no doubt that either Armando and Gabriele could come up with a horrific story to tell to try and get me to play nice and sympathize with my jailers. But this…this was something else. There was too much detail. Too much vulnerability within the story. It had to be true because no one would come up with all these pain points.
Most people only pick one or two and go with that; they don’t throw everything into the pot and hope it’s believable. Even within Gabriele’s voice, I could hear his pain. Alexis had meant something to him, which was natural, with him and Armando being best friends since childhood. Both would naturally care for whatever girl the other was dating. The thing was, Armando went through all that just to turn around and hold women hostage, to steal their babies.
As tragic as that story was, it didn’t justify his actions. It didn’t help me understand how a man could do something like this. Both of them had seen tragedy. They both had seen the pain and destruction Dominic was causing, and yet neither one had the balls to step up and do what was right.
“I’m sorry he went through that…what you both went through, but that doesn’t justify what you are doing here now. It makes it worse because you both know from personal experience the pain these women were going through, and you continued to allow it to happen. You continued to be part of the problem and not the solution. Now you believe you have an excuse for wanting to see the world burn.”
“Sometimes, to instill change in a world, you must get your hands dirty. You have to do things you would normally never do to save more people down the road.”
“The ends justify the means,” I stated with understanding.
“Exactly.”
“You do know that’s bullshit, right? It’s just a fancy excuse that assholes use to validate their decisions. Who cares if we blow up an entire city, killing all women and children; we were looking to kill as many men as possible within a terrorist cell. I hacked into a missile and crashed it into a village in China. I was just doing it to show the security flaws within the system. The end never justifies the means; it’s just bloody. And what exactly is your end here? What could possibly be worth all the women you both have killed?
“All the women you have buried and covered up, what happened to them? All the babies you handed over to complete strangers, or do you believe they all went to good loving homes and not a pedophile just waiting for them to become the right age? You could possibly tell me there is no end that will justify the means. It’s just a bullshit excuse you tell yourself at night.”
He could lie to whomever he wanted to. He could lie to himself until he was blue in the face, but he wasn’t going to lie to me. He wasn’t going to try and play the victim or make it appear like he and Armando were the good guys in this situation. Because in this situation, if you weren’t helping to free the women, you were one of the bad guys whether you pulled the trigger or not. They knew what was going on and continued to help and allow it to happen so the desired end, whatever it was, could be achieved.
