: THEY MOCKED THE GODFATHERS SON OR “FROM MOCKED TO GOD”.

CHAPTER TWO

The industrial stretch of the city looked exactly like the kind of place a man with nowhere to go would ended up.

It had broken streetlights, shuttered warehouses with padlocks thick as fists and roads wide enough for trucks that had not come through in years. 

The whole area was quiet as Ethan walked through it with his duffel bag over one shoulder and the ring warm against his palm. 

His ribs screamed at him with every step, yet he forced himself to keep moving. He did not know what he was looking for, all he knew was the pull in his chest dragging him here and the distant hum of a city that had never once noticed him.

Then he heard her.

A woman's voice, sharp and frightened, cutting through the silence from somewhere ahead. Then a crash followed by laughter and male voices.

Ethan stopped.

Fifty meters ahead he could see a black luxury car surrounded by four men surrounded it. One of them opened the driver's door and dragged a woman by the arm while she fought him with everything she had. Her heels scraped against the asphalt and her free hand went for his face but he caught her wrist and twisted it making her to cry out loud.

Ethan’s first instinct was to go and save her but his ribs was still broken and he was in pains. 

'Walk away.’ He said to himself. ‘You have broken ribs and an empty stomach. You can’t fight off the four of them.' He concluded but the ring pulsed hard against his palm, drawing him to her anyway. 

He dropped his duffel bag and walked toward them.

"Hey." He said and all four men turned.

The woman stopped struggling and stared at him. Her dress was torn at the shoulder and there was a cut above her eyebrow. Even while standing in the middle of a dark industrial road with blood on her face, she still somehow carried herself like someone powerful.

"Get away from her," Ethan said.

The closest man looked him up and down, taking in the split lip and the duffel bag twenty meters back. Ethan was still holding his left side where the ribs were. 

He slowly smiled at the man next to him. "You lost?" he said.

"Last chance," Ethan said. "Let her go and walk away."

The man laughed and looked at his friends while Ethan used the half second of distraction to close the distance. His elbow connected with the man's jaw before he could stop laughing. 

The man went sideways and landed on the car door. The second one came at him fast from the left but Ethan caught the momentum and used it, sending him into the fence hard enough to rattle the chain link from one end to the other.

"Run," Ethan said to the woman without looking away from the remaining two. "Get in the car and drive away. Now."

She did not move immediately. She looked at him for a long time and something he couldn’t read flashed across her features.

"Now," he said and she ran.

The third and fourth men reached him at the same time the first two were already getting back up. Their fist connected with both side of Ethan's jaw and his body gave way. The kidney surgery, blood donations and beating from Derek less than three hours ago all took toil on him at once.

He got two more hits before he landed on the ground.

He heard the car start, accelerate hard and disappear before he finally blacked out. 'Good. She got out. That is the only thing that matters.'

The ring started to burn.

Heat moved from his hand up through his arm and spread across his chest like something waking up from a very long sleep. The pain in his ribs did not disappear. It moved and pulled back to some far corner of him like it was happening to a different person in a different room until all that remained was a strange, electric clarity.

'Get up.'

He got up without fully understanding how

His legs should not have been working. His body felt too weak and shouldn’t respond the way it did, but the ring was pulsing steadily now, one beat after another, feeding him something he had no name for. 

His feet found the road and he started moving.

He walked for forty minutes, stopped once to rest against a wall and the ring pulsed harder until he started moving again. By the time the Cole family gate appeared ahead of him he was already out of strength again, staggering.

He made it through the gate, up the path and hit the ground three meters from the front door.

No matter how hard he tried to get up, he didn’t get back up. All he felt was the light spilling out from the door. Then voices.

"Is that him?"

"It is. He actually came back."

Margaret showed up, then Gerald. Then Derek who was putting on a shirt different from the one he wore to Vivian's apartment, standing there fresh and unbothered while Ethan bled on their front path. Vivian was behind him her hands clung to Derek who was holding her like a prized possession.

Of course, she came to watch.

Swoosh.

A glass of water splashed over him without warning. He gasped at the cold and tried to push himself up but nothing was working. His body was too exhausted to work right now.

"Look at this." Margaret said like she knew this would definitely happen. "He really crawled back like a stray who doesn’t know that it has been put out."

"I need medical attention," Ethan said, his voice rough and quiet. "Please. I think my ribs are…"

"This is not a hospital." Gerald crossed his arms. "If you want a hospital, find one."

"I have nowhere…"

"That is not our problem." Gerald said like he was reading from a document he had already signed. "You made your choices tonight when you hit my son. Now live with them."

Ethan coughed out blood. “I… I didn’t hit him.”

"You attacked Derek in front of witnesses," Margaret shot back aggressively. "You embarrassed this family and now you have the audacity to come back here and bleed on my front path to ask for help?"

"He started it," Ethan said.

Derek laughed. "Did I? Because from where I am standing, you broke into my woman’s home and assaulted me. I have two people who will say exactly that in any room you choose."

Vivian said nothing. She stood beside Derek with her arms folded and an uninterested look on her face. 

‘That was my woman.' He thought painfully. ‘After professing her love to me for two years, she betrayed me and now she cannot look at me.'

"Please." He hated the word coming out of his mouth. "I am not asking for much. Just let me clean up and sleep. I will be gone in the morning and I won’t cause any trouble. Please."

"No," Margaret said and turned to go back inside.

"You know what your problem is, Ethan?" Derek crouched down so they were at eye level. He kept his voice low and almost friendly. "You have always believed that doing the right thing would eventually pay off. That if you just kept your head down and kept giving everything you had, someone would notice and it would all be worth it one day." He tilted his head. "It is not going to be worth it. It was never going to be worth it. You were never going to be anything. Not in this house, not in this city and not anywhere."

Ethan looked at him and said nothing. 

He was lying in a yard he had maintained for eighteen years, bleeding from injuries sustained while defending a stranger. He was being talked to like an inconvenience by the man who had spent the last two hours dismantling his life because he had nothing.

Headlights appeared at the end of the street, one set, then another and another after that. The vehicles moved in groups. Quiet, organized black vehicles all armored. Moving in formation.

Derek straightened up slowly.

"What is that?" Margaret's voice changed.

The vehicles stopped outside the gate and armed men stepped out first. 

Military. 

The kind of military that worked for exactly one type of employer. They moved to the sides of the gate and stood there, saying nothing while the whole yard went completely still.

The rear door of the next car opened and the woman from the road stepped out.

She looked different. Powerful. Nothing like the frightened woman who was being attacked by four men. The cut above her eyebrow was perfectly covered in smooth make up and she no longer wore a tore dress. 

She walked through the gate, across the yard and stopped two meters from Ethan. She looked down at him, then turned and looked at the Cole family lined up on the porch with their mouths wide open.

"This man saved my life tonight," she said quietly because she did not need to be loud. "And you left him bleeding out in your yard."

Gerald stepped forward. “Your Excellency…”

She raised an arm up and Gerald mouth closed immediately.

She turned back to the vehicle and the door opened. Her father stepped out with the official badge of the president of America and black sunshades.

President Victor Ashford looked at the family on the porch, the armed men and the man on the ground. Then his eyes found the ring and he went absolutely still.

His face did something that Ethan could not fully read from the ground. Recognition and disbelief flashed through his eyes at that same moment.

His eyes darkened as he turned away from all of them and put the phone to his ear. He spoke in low clipped voices for less than thirty seconds. Then turned to his security detail and said two words.

"Take him."

They lifted Ethan off the ground and carried him to the presidential vehicle. The door closed and the whole world outside disappeared.

The last thing Ethan saw before the tinted window blocked his view was the Cole family standing on their porch in the dark. None of them moved. They all stared at them shocked. The whole thing happened in less than ten minutes not giving chance to Gerald who had stepped forward to address the president about what was happening in his front porch.

Vivian took a step away from the rest of them and her arms dropped to her sides.

Ashford sat across him in the dark and looked at the ring one more time. Then he looked out the window and spoke in a low and quiet voice.

"Drive. The Godfather is already waiting.”