If there are no witnesses, there is no crime.
Title: If there are no witnesses there is no crime. (5/?)
Pairing: Wayne Rooney / Cristiano Ronaldo
Other characters appearing/mentioned in this chapter: Miguel Torres, Fernando Hierro, Pedro Leon, Sergio Ramos, Fernando Torres
Rating: R (for mentions of violence & minor character death)
WordCount: 3060
For karneol_vision. ... And I'm really really sorry it took me this long, I really am.
A/N: ... yeah, as I said, I'm incredibly sorry it took me this long to finish this. ... Partly because I spent too much time on researching minor details which are mentioned in like... one sentence, but anyway. Here it is.
Part I. II Part II. II Part III. II Part IV.
The room was silent, the only light came from a single lamp swinging high above them and yet Cristiano felt as if he was to suffocate and drown in this room any minute. He knew Wayne was somewhere in his back and at the moment he wasn’t sure what filled him with more dread, the knowledge of Wayne being somewhere in his back, without any doubts watching his every step so very closely or the sight of the man sitting on a chair in front of him, blindfolded and silenced by a gag, but his chest visibly raising and falling anxiously quick.
His gun was pointing at the man’s heart and he knew there was no chance he’d miss, not from this short distance, still his hands were trembling uncontrollably since several minutes now.
“He’s a traitor, Cris, no more and no less. It doesn’t matter what you thought of him before or if you’ve shared anything, he’s made his decision and so you have to respond to it. There’s no other option than to kill him now, by doing anything else you’d risk him killing us all at the next chance he’ll get. …”
‘There’s no other option.’
Strangely, this was a sentence Cristiano had heard from Wayne’s lips quite frequently during the last year, all the time since the young Englishman had picked Cristiano up in Manchester and eventually brought him to Madrid. He couldn’t believe that it had been a year already. And yet, this one sentence seemed to cling to that year. Wayne had offered him a choice and Cristiano had made his decision. Since then, there never were no other options, there never was.
But today differed from two months ago when Cristiano had killed his first man fulfilling a job he had given them. This time Cristiano was not aiming his trigger at a stranger he’d never met before, this time he knew for a change why the man in front of him was here and why he had been sentenced to death by him. Cristiano was not really bound to Calixto, yet he had seen the other man more than once during his visits at the office together with Wayne. He had seen him argue over something with Miguel, he had seen him laughing with Hierro, he had even seen him smile at him in a cautious way and with curious eyes. He knew the color of Calixto’s favorite car, the way the steps of his right foot always made a louder sound on the ground than the ones with his left foot did and the smell of his favorite brand of cigarettes.
And now he was to kill him by his own hands.
“Cris. … Waiting any longer is of no use, really. He knows he’s going to die, he took that risk on the day he decided on betraying us all, the day he decided on putting all of our lives at risk for the sake of his own freedom. He knows he’s going to die and so do you. … It’s time to get over with it. Now.”
But even though Cristiano was listening intentionally, even though Wayne’s words made perfect sense to him, had made perfect sense since Wayne had calmly explained the matter to him this morning, he just couldn’t get himself to pull the trigger. Instead he found himself staring at the man and seeing nothing, seeing the old man’s corpse after he had executed him by a sharp blow to the head two months ago. For a terrible moment he even found himself thrown back into the dark location of a small street with brick walls and metal staircases surrounding him and the endless seeming sound of the shot which struck his father down, but that lasted only a fleeting second, other memories quickly coming up to overshadow this long-lost and most-loathed one.
It was a matter of split seconds, three the most, yet it felt like a million years, inwardly.
Cristiano's fingers were on the trigger, shaking there, but not enough to set the bullet free by incident. His eyes were wide open as he stared, directly into the other man's face, the parts of it that were not veiled still conveying the man’s emotions terribly precise, probably mirroring the shock and utter horror Cristiano was sure of being displayed in his own eyes as well.
His whole body was shaking now, the air he inhaled causing a sharp stinging in his lungs.
Three seconds. He did hesitate for three seconds the most.
And suddenly, there was the piercing sound of a shot and Calixto sunk over ,falling to the floor. Dead.
His limbs all pliant, all out of sudden, a dark dampness spreading over his back with an unbelievable pace.
More out of reflex than out of everything else - still too shocked to really tell his body what to do - Cristiano turned around - and caught a short glimpse of Wayne before the Englishman turned his back on him, the gun in Wayne’s hand quickly being released and then disappearing between the thick fabric of his cloath.
"... Wayne?" Cristiano's voice sounded shaky in his own ears, dried out, somehow, as if his body was still trying to recollect his knowledge of how to move. He didn’t even realize how he had sunk to his knees, only meters away from where Calixto’s body laid, the blood stain spreading on the white fabric of his button down.
"Wayne! ... Wayne, I'm sorry, I ... Wayne ...," Cristiano's outcry was set to a dead end when Wayne eventually turned around to him again, his eyes nothing but cool steel, equally cold and empty.
"You couldn't."
Two words, two words only, yet they weighted heavy on Cristiano's trembling shoulders, pushed his head down as it struck him.
Wayne didn't even need to say more, Cristiano knew, anyway. This. This was the bitter taste of failure. He had failed. Eventually - and judging by the look in Wayne's eyes probably for the last time.
But instead of the punishment Cristiano had anxiously feared, he only felt how Wayne pulled him up by his shoulders, blue eyes burning into Cristiano’s like frosting and unyielding ice.
“It was you who killed him, your gun, your bullet and your hands. You killed him. … . No matter who’ll ask you, you’ll tell them that you killed him, do you understand me? … He gave you this task on purpose and so he mustn’t know that it was me who did it. Is this understood?”
All Cristiano could do was nod in response, his lids fighting hard to blink the tears in his eyes away. If he was not to know the truth about what happened then he for sure was not to cry in front of Wayne. Not now.
#
“Shh … Cris … Cris …”
Cristiano woke up with a startle. It took him a few seconds to realize that he had been dreaming again and that - in reality - he was still on the train to Seville they had boarded earlier. Wayne’s hand, gently cupping his cheek, helped him along, but the horror of the nightmare, the fact that it was so much more than just an unrealistic nightmare, that it was a memory still so haunting and dark that he just couldn’t shake it off, had to re-experience it in his dreams again and again, still worked on him.
“You’ve been dreaming again…,” Wayne whispered and it was more of a statement than of a question. “The old memories again, huh? You were making these sounds in your sleep, you even talked a little. … You haven’t dreamed about that one in a long time, have you?”
Cristiano only nodded slightly, biting his lip to finally get rid of the feeling of Wayne’s merciless stare on him when all that was filling Wayne’s gaze now was only empathy.
“It’s just … with the situation in Madrid and him … it’s all coming back now and I just can’t believe how he can really think it’s me who…”
“Shh. Not here … I know what’s on your mind …,”Wayne interrupted him smoothly and lowly, though, shaking his head lightly. “But do you see this boy over there?”
Cristiano knew better than to turn his head around into the direction Wayne was nodding at, he didn’t need to throw a glance in this direction, anyway. He instantly knew who Wayne was referring to. Their wagon had been completely vast of any people when they had entered the train at Atocha and they had only been joined by an old man who had seemed to fall asleep immediately after having taken a seat quite a few rows away from them. On the very last second before the train set out to leave the station, though, the boy had hopped in, his hair tousled and somewhat out of breath, carrying a large bag with him and slumping into a seat opposing them, yet three rows down the aisle away. The boy had short brown hair and a not exceptionally remarkable face giving away that he had to be some years younger than Wayne or Cristiano. Cristiano had stopped paying attention to the boy when he had slipped some earplugs into his ears and sunk down in his seat comfortably, interrupting his slumber only every now and then to alter his position slightly or to reach for a new piece of paper which seemed to be some part of a game. And then Cristiano himself had drifted off to sleep.
Now it seemed as if Wayne - contrary to Cristiano - had found something suspicious in the boy’s pattern of behavior.
“I’m almost sure that he’s overhearing us. Or, he would if he had the chance to. We’ve just left Marabique and that means we’re almost there, and I haven’t seen him touch his Ipod once. Not once. This either speaks for his taste in music … or, more likely, he’s not even listening to music, at all. … And these Sudokus he keeps on solving? Ridiculous. There’s a batch on his bag, marking him student of the Universidad de Sevilla. English Literature should be one of his subjects, judging from the books in his bag. And an English Literature student spends all of his time with solving Sudokus made for children? I highly doubt that, to be honest … No, he’s definitely spending too much attention on us, secretly …”
Wayne hadn’t spoken that loud, but not as quietly as Cristiano had expected him to do either. Therefore he furrowed his brows and threw a confused glance over at his partner, knowing that Wayne would never do such a reckless thing normally, but before he got the chance to say anything in return, he suddenly realized movement in the corner of his eye. Silently cursing the fact that all of his weapons were temporarily out of reach (one couldn’t travel with a gun hidden in one’s pockets, not even on a train ride like this), Cristiano spun around - only in time to see how the boy slipped into one of the two empty seats in front of him, a mocking grin playing over his lips.
“The Foo Fighters. With a total of six albums you better believe me that I can listen to them starting off in Madrid and now being here and not having to touch my Ipod to change anything about it, once. … And I do also have a slight form of dyscalculia. Trust me, Elementary School level is just perfectly fine for a mindless train ride like this…”
Cristiano snarled, the threat of the unknown but not unknowing seeping out of the boy’s presence, causing the boy to raise his hands, still grinning.
“Easy … We wouldn’t want to wake old grandpa over there and risk him disturbing our privacy, would we?”
“It depends, you know. If I have to wake old grandpa up in favor of getting a bullet into your head before you get a knife into mine, I’d probably take that risk…,” Wayne’s voice was ice-cold and dead serious; the more it confused Cristiano to see how the boy bared his teeth in a toneless laughter.
“Right. And after sitting in a wagon with you for all these hours, I do abruptly decide on attempting to murder you right here and now. Trust me, that’s not the way I get down to business, I’m not one of these pathetic actors when it comes down to it. … Besides …,” the boy continued, perfectly calm, visibly making himself comfortable in his new seat. “I’ve been told to watch out for your partner’s temper and your silence. So either they’ve shown me the wrong pictures or you switched roles along the way…”
“So you were overhearing us …,” Cristiano shot back, ignoring the boy’s comment. By now it was clear that he knew them better than they could have liked and even though Cristiano suspected the boy to be part of the Sevillian’s pack, as it was the only reasonable explanation he could come up with, he remained cautious. As did Wayne at his side.
“’Overhearing’ is such a harsh term, don’t you think? … I wouldn’t put it that way … My task was to keep an eye on you for as long as I could and make sure you get to Sevilla safely and unharmed. I was also assigned to respect your privacy as much as possible without letting you out of sight, so that’s what I did. … My name is Pedro, by the way, even though I suppose you already know that. Though it doesn’t seem as if Sergio’s told you about me going to accompany you on the journey. Nor do I think you’ve heard my name before, at all. I was told that the last time you worked for Sergio has been a while, therefore-…”
“With. We worked with Sergio, not for…,” Wayne corrected him in an indifferent and dangerously low tone, causing the boy to shrug and once again raise his hand.
“With, for, under, against … oh so fluent expressions in the business these days, are they not? I might be forgiven to have chosen the wrong one…”
For the first time since a few minutes, Cristiano witnessed something like a smile cracking over Wayne’s face.
“Usually I’d be on your side with this, but not when it comes to Don Ramos or whatever it is that he’s calling himself at the moment…”
Pedro burst out laughing at the comment, having Cristiano wondering about him once again. Usually, the boys and men who worked for Sergio were filled with proud and awe before him, a sentiment which usually was notable in their every word and action. Maybe that was the reason hardly anyone of them had ever gotten along well with Wayne, who had never put just an ounce of effort into concealing his disliking of the Sevillian leader. Just the opposite, more than once it had been due to Cristiano’s people skills alone that he had prevented a fall-out between Wayne and Sergio’s boys.
Pedro seemed to feel different about the matter, though, as the grin on his face told Cristiano. He didn’t seem to be as blind and unconditional in his loyalty than some of the other boys and men Cristiano had met before were - something he wasn’t sure how to feel about. Because the loyalty distinguishing the Sevillian pack was one of the character traits that made them so easy to work with, Cristiano had experienced.
Wayne seemed to notice the boy’s different behavior, too, as he was shooting him a glance that was just as loaded with mocking as it was with curiosity.
“For real though, who are you, anyway? And you said you were assigned to look after us, what for? You seem to know who we are and what we do to make our living … and now tell me we come across as easy targets to you. Besides, what is there to protect us from, anyway? Pickpockets? Thimble-riggers?”
Suddenly, and for the first time since the boy had introduced himself, his confident smile faded and left him with an earnest look, the shadow of worry hazing over his eyes.
“Well, now we’re getting closer as to what Sergio wants you to do … needs your help with,” he corrected himself quickly with a slightly apologetic glance over to Wayne, “… as you know - at least I assume you do - our formation is the strongest one down here in Andalusia. Seville is ours and completely under control, something we’re rather proud of … But since quite a while … well, we’re forced to deal with difficulties. Self-induced, somehow, and therefore the situation was under control as well - Sergio thought. … Anyway, as the next stop is ours and I bet Sergio may want to talk to you about this job in private, I’ll leave you with that. I was just sent to Madrid to make sure that you don’t end up at the wrong places with the wrong people and that’s what I did. As easy as that. …”
Cristiano took the news in with silent and disguised surprise. Indeed, Sergio was known for empowering not only half of an army of men, but also for his clever reign over an entire city’s underground. Hearing of difficulties like that, so severe that Sergio had sent for them to solve the problem - another group striving for power, as Cristiano pictured it - somehow reminded him of the alleged traitor back in Madrid. An uncontrollable shiver worked its way down his spine.
“Self-induced, you say? Now why is that …?” Wayne asked, addressing Pedro again who was walking down the aisle already, grabbing his back and making sure that all of his belongings were securely stuffed inside. At Wayne’s question he turned around to them again, an expression on his face as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to laugh or remain serious about it.
“Oh, well, you know … You know Sergio, what do you expect? … It seems like his luck and ability of proper judgment have left him since Fernando’s dea- … anyway, they left him. And now it seems he’s been fucking with the wrong man for all the wrong reasons …”
Pairing: Wayne Rooney / Cristiano Ronaldo
Other characters appearing/mentioned in this chapter: Miguel Torres, Fernando Hierro, Pedro Leon, Sergio Ramos, Fernando Torres
Rating: R (for mentions of violence & minor character death)
WordCount: 3060
For karneol_vision. ... And I'm really really sorry it took me this long, I really am.
A/N: ... yeah, as I said, I'm incredibly sorry it took me this long to finish this. ... Partly because I spent too much time on researching minor details which are mentioned in like... one sentence, but anyway. Here it is.
Part I. II Part II. II Part III. II Part IV.
The room was silent, the only light came from a single lamp swinging high above them and yet Cristiano felt as if he was to suffocate and drown in this room any minute. He knew Wayne was somewhere in his back and at the moment he wasn’t sure what filled him with more dread, the knowledge of Wayne being somewhere in his back, without any doubts watching his every step so very closely or the sight of the man sitting on a chair in front of him, blindfolded and silenced by a gag, but his chest visibly raising and falling anxiously quick.
His gun was pointing at the man’s heart and he knew there was no chance he’d miss, not from this short distance, still his hands were trembling uncontrollably since several minutes now.
“He’s a traitor, Cris, no more and no less. It doesn’t matter what you thought of him before or if you’ve shared anything, he’s made his decision and so you have to respond to it. There’s no other option than to kill him now, by doing anything else you’d risk him killing us all at the next chance he’ll get. …”
‘There’s no other option.’
Strangely, this was a sentence Cristiano had heard from Wayne’s lips quite frequently during the last year, all the time since the young Englishman had picked Cristiano up in Manchester and eventually brought him to Madrid. He couldn’t believe that it had been a year already. And yet, this one sentence seemed to cling to that year. Wayne had offered him a choice and Cristiano had made his decision. Since then, there never were no other options, there never was.
But today differed from two months ago when Cristiano had killed his first man fulfilling a job he had given them. This time Cristiano was not aiming his trigger at a stranger he’d never met before, this time he knew for a change why the man in front of him was here and why he had been sentenced to death by him. Cristiano was not really bound to Calixto, yet he had seen the other man more than once during his visits at the office together with Wayne. He had seen him argue over something with Miguel, he had seen him laughing with Hierro, he had even seen him smile at him in a cautious way and with curious eyes. He knew the color of Calixto’s favorite car, the way the steps of his right foot always made a louder sound on the ground than the ones with his left foot did and the smell of his favorite brand of cigarettes.
And now he was to kill him by his own hands.
“Cris. … Waiting any longer is of no use, really. He knows he’s going to die, he took that risk on the day he decided on betraying us all, the day he decided on putting all of our lives at risk for the sake of his own freedom. He knows he’s going to die and so do you. … It’s time to get over with it. Now.”
But even though Cristiano was listening intentionally, even though Wayne’s words made perfect sense to him, had made perfect sense since Wayne had calmly explained the matter to him this morning, he just couldn’t get himself to pull the trigger. Instead he found himself staring at the man and seeing nothing, seeing the old man’s corpse after he had executed him by a sharp blow to the head two months ago. For a terrible moment he even found himself thrown back into the dark location of a small street with brick walls and metal staircases surrounding him and the endless seeming sound of the shot which struck his father down, but that lasted only a fleeting second, other memories quickly coming up to overshadow this long-lost and most-loathed one.
It was a matter of split seconds, three the most, yet it felt like a million years, inwardly.
Cristiano's fingers were on the trigger, shaking there, but not enough to set the bullet free by incident. His eyes were wide open as he stared, directly into the other man's face, the parts of it that were not veiled still conveying the man’s emotions terribly precise, probably mirroring the shock and utter horror Cristiano was sure of being displayed in his own eyes as well.
His whole body was shaking now, the air he inhaled causing a sharp stinging in his lungs.
Three seconds. He did hesitate for three seconds the most.
And suddenly, there was the piercing sound of a shot and Calixto sunk over ,falling to the floor. Dead.
His limbs all pliant, all out of sudden, a dark dampness spreading over his back with an unbelievable pace.
More out of reflex than out of everything else - still too shocked to really tell his body what to do - Cristiano turned around - and caught a short glimpse of Wayne before the Englishman turned his back on him, the gun in Wayne’s hand quickly being released and then disappearing between the thick fabric of his cloath.
"... Wayne?" Cristiano's voice sounded shaky in his own ears, dried out, somehow, as if his body was still trying to recollect his knowledge of how to move. He didn’t even realize how he had sunk to his knees, only meters away from where Calixto’s body laid, the blood stain spreading on the white fabric of his button down.
"Wayne! ... Wayne, I'm sorry, I ... Wayne ...," Cristiano's outcry was set to a dead end when Wayne eventually turned around to him again, his eyes nothing but cool steel, equally cold and empty.
"You couldn't."
Two words, two words only, yet they weighted heavy on Cristiano's trembling shoulders, pushed his head down as it struck him.
Wayne didn't even need to say more, Cristiano knew, anyway. This. This was the bitter taste of failure. He had failed. Eventually - and judging by the look in Wayne's eyes probably for the last time.
But instead of the punishment Cristiano had anxiously feared, he only felt how Wayne pulled him up by his shoulders, blue eyes burning into Cristiano’s like frosting and unyielding ice.
“It was you who killed him, your gun, your bullet and your hands. You killed him. … . No matter who’ll ask you, you’ll tell them that you killed him, do you understand me? … He gave you this task on purpose and so he mustn’t know that it was me who did it. Is this understood?”
All Cristiano could do was nod in response, his lids fighting hard to blink the tears in his eyes away. If he was not to know the truth about what happened then he for sure was not to cry in front of Wayne. Not now.
#
“Shh … Cris … Cris …”
Cristiano woke up with a startle. It took him a few seconds to realize that he had been dreaming again and that - in reality - he was still on the train to Seville they had boarded earlier. Wayne’s hand, gently cupping his cheek, helped him along, but the horror of the nightmare, the fact that it was so much more than just an unrealistic nightmare, that it was a memory still so haunting and dark that he just couldn’t shake it off, had to re-experience it in his dreams again and again, still worked on him.
“You’ve been dreaming again…,” Wayne whispered and it was more of a statement than of a question. “The old memories again, huh? You were making these sounds in your sleep, you even talked a little. … You haven’t dreamed about that one in a long time, have you?”
Cristiano only nodded slightly, biting his lip to finally get rid of the feeling of Wayne’s merciless stare on him when all that was filling Wayne’s gaze now was only empathy.
“It’s just … with the situation in Madrid and him … it’s all coming back now and I just can’t believe how he can really think it’s me who…”
“Shh. Not here … I know what’s on your mind …,”Wayne interrupted him smoothly and lowly, though, shaking his head lightly. “But do you see this boy over there?”
Cristiano knew better than to turn his head around into the direction Wayne was nodding at, he didn’t need to throw a glance in this direction, anyway. He instantly knew who Wayne was referring to. Their wagon had been completely vast of any people when they had entered the train at Atocha and they had only been joined by an old man who had seemed to fall asleep immediately after having taken a seat quite a few rows away from them. On the very last second before the train set out to leave the station, though, the boy had hopped in, his hair tousled and somewhat out of breath, carrying a large bag with him and slumping into a seat opposing them, yet three rows down the aisle away. The boy had short brown hair and a not exceptionally remarkable face giving away that he had to be some years younger than Wayne or Cristiano. Cristiano had stopped paying attention to the boy when he had slipped some earplugs into his ears and sunk down in his seat comfortably, interrupting his slumber only every now and then to alter his position slightly or to reach for a new piece of paper which seemed to be some part of a game. And then Cristiano himself had drifted off to sleep.
Now it seemed as if Wayne - contrary to Cristiano - had found something suspicious in the boy’s pattern of behavior.
“I’m almost sure that he’s overhearing us. Or, he would if he had the chance to. We’ve just left Marabique and that means we’re almost there, and I haven’t seen him touch his Ipod once. Not once. This either speaks for his taste in music … or, more likely, he’s not even listening to music, at all. … And these Sudokus he keeps on solving? Ridiculous. There’s a batch on his bag, marking him student of the Universidad de Sevilla. English Literature should be one of his subjects, judging from the books in his bag. And an English Literature student spends all of his time with solving Sudokus made for children? I highly doubt that, to be honest … No, he’s definitely spending too much attention on us, secretly …”
Wayne hadn’t spoken that loud, but not as quietly as Cristiano had expected him to do either. Therefore he furrowed his brows and threw a confused glance over at his partner, knowing that Wayne would never do such a reckless thing normally, but before he got the chance to say anything in return, he suddenly realized movement in the corner of his eye. Silently cursing the fact that all of his weapons were temporarily out of reach (one couldn’t travel with a gun hidden in one’s pockets, not even on a train ride like this), Cristiano spun around - only in time to see how the boy slipped into one of the two empty seats in front of him, a mocking grin playing over his lips.
“The Foo Fighters. With a total of six albums you better believe me that I can listen to them starting off in Madrid and now being here and not having to touch my Ipod to change anything about it, once. … And I do also have a slight form of dyscalculia. Trust me, Elementary School level is just perfectly fine for a mindless train ride like this…”
Cristiano snarled, the threat of the unknown but not unknowing seeping out of the boy’s presence, causing the boy to raise his hands, still grinning.
“Easy … We wouldn’t want to wake old grandpa over there and risk him disturbing our privacy, would we?”
“It depends, you know. If I have to wake old grandpa up in favor of getting a bullet into your head before you get a knife into mine, I’d probably take that risk…,” Wayne’s voice was ice-cold and dead serious; the more it confused Cristiano to see how the boy bared his teeth in a toneless laughter.
“Right. And after sitting in a wagon with you for all these hours, I do abruptly decide on attempting to murder you right here and now. Trust me, that’s not the way I get down to business, I’m not one of these pathetic actors when it comes down to it. … Besides …,” the boy continued, perfectly calm, visibly making himself comfortable in his new seat. “I’ve been told to watch out for your partner’s temper and your silence. So either they’ve shown me the wrong pictures or you switched roles along the way…”
“So you were overhearing us …,” Cristiano shot back, ignoring the boy’s comment. By now it was clear that he knew them better than they could have liked and even though Cristiano suspected the boy to be part of the Sevillian’s pack, as it was the only reasonable explanation he could come up with, he remained cautious. As did Wayne at his side.
“’Overhearing’ is such a harsh term, don’t you think? … I wouldn’t put it that way … My task was to keep an eye on you for as long as I could and make sure you get to Sevilla safely and unharmed. I was also assigned to respect your privacy as much as possible without letting you out of sight, so that’s what I did. … My name is Pedro, by the way, even though I suppose you already know that. Though it doesn’t seem as if Sergio’s told you about me going to accompany you on the journey. Nor do I think you’ve heard my name before, at all. I was told that the last time you worked for Sergio has been a while, therefore-…”
“With. We worked with Sergio, not for…,” Wayne corrected him in an indifferent and dangerously low tone, causing the boy to shrug and once again raise his hand.
“With, for, under, against … oh so fluent expressions in the business these days, are they not? I might be forgiven to have chosen the wrong one…”
For the first time since a few minutes, Cristiano witnessed something like a smile cracking over Wayne’s face.
“Usually I’d be on your side with this, but not when it comes to Don Ramos or whatever it is that he’s calling himself at the moment…”
Pedro burst out laughing at the comment, having Cristiano wondering about him once again. Usually, the boys and men who worked for Sergio were filled with proud and awe before him, a sentiment which usually was notable in their every word and action. Maybe that was the reason hardly anyone of them had ever gotten along well with Wayne, who had never put just an ounce of effort into concealing his disliking of the Sevillian leader. Just the opposite, more than once it had been due to Cristiano’s people skills alone that he had prevented a fall-out between Wayne and Sergio’s boys.
Pedro seemed to feel different about the matter, though, as the grin on his face told Cristiano. He didn’t seem to be as blind and unconditional in his loyalty than some of the other boys and men Cristiano had met before were - something he wasn’t sure how to feel about. Because the loyalty distinguishing the Sevillian pack was one of the character traits that made them so easy to work with, Cristiano had experienced.
Wayne seemed to notice the boy’s different behavior, too, as he was shooting him a glance that was just as loaded with mocking as it was with curiosity.
“For real though, who are you, anyway? And you said you were assigned to look after us, what for? You seem to know who we are and what we do to make our living … and now tell me we come across as easy targets to you. Besides, what is there to protect us from, anyway? Pickpockets? Thimble-riggers?”
Suddenly, and for the first time since the boy had introduced himself, his confident smile faded and left him with an earnest look, the shadow of worry hazing over his eyes.
“Well, now we’re getting closer as to what Sergio wants you to do … needs your help with,” he corrected himself quickly with a slightly apologetic glance over to Wayne, “… as you know - at least I assume you do - our formation is the strongest one down here in Andalusia. Seville is ours and completely under control, something we’re rather proud of … But since quite a while … well, we’re forced to deal with difficulties. Self-induced, somehow, and therefore the situation was under control as well - Sergio thought. … Anyway, as the next stop is ours and I bet Sergio may want to talk to you about this job in private, I’ll leave you with that. I was just sent to Madrid to make sure that you don’t end up at the wrong places with the wrong people and that’s what I did. As easy as that. …”
Cristiano took the news in with silent and disguised surprise. Indeed, Sergio was known for empowering not only half of an army of men, but also for his clever reign over an entire city’s underground. Hearing of difficulties like that, so severe that Sergio had sent for them to solve the problem - another group striving for power, as Cristiano pictured it - somehow reminded him of the alleged traitor back in Madrid. An uncontrollable shiver worked its way down his spine.
“Self-induced, you say? Now why is that …?” Wayne asked, addressing Pedro again who was walking down the aisle already, grabbing his back and making sure that all of his belongings were securely stuffed inside. At Wayne’s question he turned around to them again, an expression on his face as if he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to laugh or remain serious about it.
“Oh, well, you know … You know Sergio, what do you expect? … It seems like his luck and ability of proper judgment have left him since Fernando’s dea- … anyway, they left him. And now it seems he’s been fucking with the wrong man for all the wrong reasons …”