CHAPTER 85: THE PLAN.

There was a bit of silence between them, and of course there was, because this whole situation now was more complicated, more worse than he thought it would be.

"Hana, your emotions in this world mean nothing, do you know that, right?" Joseph said as he looked at her. "The world is a cruel place, and with it comes more cruelty. Let it be teenager or not, everybody chooses their own path and they can kill you, that is the reality."

Joseph was right about it, and to be true, Hana herself too knew it very much, that she is fucked with all of this. He chose this world, and he needed to act on it, because everything had changed. People are more cruel, the world is more cruel, and moreover people are desperate to make it big, and that is the key thing.

Everybody’s dream is to make it big... and there’s always a path that is faster, tax evasion, stealing, robbery, the small stuff, but then comes the step up, the organized crimes. It’s no longer about breaking into a jewellery store, robbing an old lady’s house, or stealing cars. No, it turns into moving huge amounts of drugs, killing people, bribing them, blackmailing them, and using it all for your own advantage and once someone chooses that path, their life is already written.

As Joseph said, it only leads to one end, death. A death that comes quick, with a bullet, a knife, or maybe through a life sentence, a firing squad, or a lethal injection, given with a smile.

But there’s another kind of death too... the death inside. Piece by piece, you lose everything you cared about. Friends turn into business, love turns into numbers, and the nights you spend awake thinking of enemies and deals steal the days away until you don’t even know who you are anymore. Power grows like poison, it feeds on fear and the higher you climb, the lonelier it gets, the fewer people you can trust, and the louder the footsteps of those who will one day come for you.

Some believe money will buy safety, respect but what it really buys is a prison of mirrors, each one showing the faces you stepped on to rise.You either live with that weight until it crushes you, or you walk away and spend the rest of your life paying for your sins which is just another kind of death, slower, but honest.

But for teenagers, it’s different. Of course, it is different, because it gives them a thrill, like they think they are in the movies, like they are gangsters doing drive-bys, upping the gun on ordinary people in broad daylight, dealing fucking laced drugs in alleyways. This is a fucking petty things... not even 1 percent of the real underworld, where deals worth millions, if not billions...

And the last but most important fact about all of this is that... somebody leads these teenagers.

Somebody is clever enough to gather little kids and use them on their own, giving them this false reality that they are someone, have power, have respect... they demand respect, that they are somebody earning thousands per month, shooting at random people, engaging in high-speed chases with the police.

And that is what Hana also needed to understand, that those teenagers are choosing it. They aren’t manipulated... no, they manipulated themselves, thinking that their big dreams are destined to happen if they choose that life, that they’re going to be men. But no... they are going to be dead bodies when they fuck with the wrong person... exactly what happened to Hana’s childhood friends.

Hana, as a child, lived in the Palm area. It was not the poorest area, but people struggled to keep up their life, to give their children the bare minimum and Hana was doing everything to help her mother and father. At only the age of fifteen, she was already working illegally 40 hours a week, skipping school... she eventually dropped out to be able to help them. She worked as a waitress, then a cleaner, then a washer, she was doing everything to help her family, and maybe broke out for that desperation of life.

How crazy it is to think about, she was the same age as Joseph... and while he was doing everything to get away from his family, Hana was doing anything to help hers, to keep it up, to make it big... and there was something that could have done it.

In the neighborhood, there were her friends, 15 to 17 years old, boys and girls.They were good friends, and all of their goal was to become big people, influential ones, rich ones and one of the boys, Trian, had an idea... or more like accidentally heard about an opportunity, a truck loaded with 150 kilos of weed, and the price of it back then was worth 1.5 million dollars. The only thing to do was to... steal it, which seemed actually easy to do so, because Trian was at the right place at the right moment, he overheard that the truck would be left alone in a parking lot and would be picked up by other people when the payment was made... so they had time to steal from it.

So the plan was simple, not steal the whole thing, but some of it, and then sell it on the street, gram by gram, it would be a lot harder to back track it to them. What a great idea at the age of fifteen.

Surprisingly, Hana immediately said yes, as did the other friends and that night, the six of them gathered, went over the plan once again, and went out to steal it... and when they arrived at the spot... it seemed too easy, too simple.

There was only the truck in the whole parking spot, and nothing else, no guard, no watcher, nobody around. Easy money, they thought... so they went and cut open the back door, and there it was, the box of televisions that, when they opened it, was full of 1 kg blocks of weed.

Jackpot, they truly hit it. The only thing left to do was just run away with it... but that would have been too easy.

Even thinking about it was outrageous that they had just left a truck full of weed there without proper guards... yeah but the thing is there were guards in the nearby store and when they noticed them stealing, with masks on their heads, all chaos erupted.

They didn’t even notice the guards coming, because they were happy, smiling, giggling, taking the drugs from the truck and putting them in bags already seeing the amount of money they could make with it... but then... the shots suddenly erupted.

A fully automatic submachine gun started shooting toward them, and... they immediately got none other than the mastermind of this whole plan.

Yeah, Trian was the first to fall on his knees and died immediately as the bullet went into the back of his head and came out in the front. The scene was terrifying for teenagers, especially Hana, who stood next to him... to see his blood spurt out, to see it flowing onto the ground. She was shocked and froze in that moment, just looking down at him, his eyes wide open and the blood, his skull open... and then, for some reason, maybe her gut instinct or who knows why, she realized she needed to run. Yeah the shock went away, adrenaline surged, and she started to turn as the others too... but they had no fucking chance to escape... only Hana... who at that moment was a miracle.

But the others were all shot... in the back, in the foot, in the head.... and as Hana was running she felt, she heard the bullets, wheezing past her some of it hit the ground next to her as she just ran and ran... with 5 kilos of weed in her backpack, she didn’t even look back. She just ran and ran, without stopping, but she exactly knew what happened to them, her friends... they had all died.

She escaped, she made it. She had money on her back... but at what cost... a cost that the next day just became worse.

It was the era when the mafia thrived, when the underworld was the ruling power in the nation, when there were no laws, no police to stop them, nothing... nobody could do anything against them... they were the rulers. And if you fucked with them... something terrible happened to you.

That something was that all five of Hana’s friends were found hanging from a bridge, upside down, as a message... because they were believed to be in a street gang, and the message was supposed to go toward the leader of it... but no, they were just stupid kids, thinking they could become rich if they stole from the mafia... but they made history.

They were the first teenagers who were publicly hanged in the city, the first ones ever seen in the news... showing that the mafia truly did not give a fuck about anything... and of course, it was the breaking point for Hana.