2025-11-17 06:52:02Years passed like shadows crawling across broken walls—slow at first, then gone before either brother noticed. The docks had given them a name, but the streets beyond gave them purpose. By fifteen, Harold and Diego were no longer just survivors; they were fixtures in the city’s underbelly, half-known faces in a hundred whispered stories.
The slums stretched out from the harbor like a bruise—alleys choked with smoke, markets where voices rose over the stink of meat, the constant rhythm of a city too tired to sleep. The brothers lived in a shack made of stolen tin and plywood, tucked behind an auto repair shop whose owner didn’t ask questions as long as they didn’t steal his spark plugs.
Diego had grown taller, shoulders broad, voice roughened by smoke and arguments. He ran errands for small-time dealers, carried packages, sometimes guarded backroom card games for a few coins. Harold stayed quiet, working his mind like a blade, writing in his black notebook every night under the flicker of a dying bulb.
Their world ran on rules unwritten and enforced by fear. Diego moved through it with charm; Harold mapped it with precision.
---
One night, Diego kicked open the shack door, grinning through the rain. “Got us dinner, hermano,” he said, tossing a bag of bread and cold sausage onto the floor. “Old Rico paid me extra tonight. Says I got ‘the look of a man who gets things done.’”
Harold didn’t look up from his notes. “You’re seventeen.”
Diego laughed, tearing a piece of bread with his teeth. “And you’re fifteen going on forty. You ever stop writing in that damn book?”
“Not until I understand how all this works.”
“What’s to understand? You get money, you don’t get killed. Simple.”
Harold finally looked up. “You really think it’s that simple?”
Diego chewed and shrugged. “Maybe not for you. You’re the thinker. I’m the doer.”
“That’s the problem,” Harold murmured.
Diego frowned. “Problem?”
“You keep walking into people’s games without knowing who owns the board.”
Diego pointed with the bread. “And you keep staring at the board so long you forget to move a piece.”
For a moment, neither spoke. The rain rattled on the roof like distant applause.
Harold sighed, closing his notebook. “Maybe that’s why we work.”
“Damn right it is,” Diego said, laughing again, and tossed him a piece of sausage. “Eat something before you think yourself to death.”
---
Days blurred into a grind of small hustles and late-night whispers. Diego ran deliveries, earned respect from older men who saw in him the makings of a street soldier. Harold followed him sometimes, staying silent, learning who controlled which corners, which cops looked the other way.
In the markets, kids fought over scraps while preachers shouted salvation from under torn umbrellas. The air always smelled of gasoline and sweat.
One afternoon, Harold found Diego arguing with a man near the meat stalls. The man—tall, with tattoos running down his neck—had a hand on Diego’s collar.
“Your brother owe us,” the man growled.
Diego spat blood and smirked. “I don’t owe you a damn thing, Vico. You want money, talk to Rico.”
Vico’s hand tightened. “Rico’s dead.”
The words hung there like a knife.
Harold stepped forward, voice cold. “Let him go.”
Vico turned, grinning. “Oh, look—the little brother with the big mouth.”
Harold’s face didn’t change. “You’re standing in the open, middle of a crowded market. You really wanna do this here?”
Vico laughed, but his eyes flicked around. Harold saw it—the hesitation, the flicker of doubt.
He pressed harder. “You make a scene, you’ll have ten people watching, maybe one calling the cops. You won’t walk two streets before someone sticks a blade in you for the bounty.”
Vico sneered, but his grip loosened. “You talk too much, kid.”
“Maybe. But you listen, and that’s what matters.”
Vico shoved Diego away. “Tell your brother Rico’s debt doesn’t die with him.” He disappeared into the crowd.
Diego rubbed his neck, still breathing hard. “You could’ve got us both killed.”
Harold stared after the man. “No. He was already scared. Just needed to remind him of it.”
Diego shook his head. “One day that mouth’s gonna write a check your fists can’t cash.”
“Then you’ll have to cash it for me,” Harold said.
Despite himself, Diego smiled. “You really are crazy.”
---
That night, they sat behind their shack, the city humming in the distance. Harold scribbled in his notebook again, candlelight flickering on his face. Diego leaned back, lighting a cigarette.
“What are you writing now?”
“Vico. Rico. Debt routes. Power shifts since last week.”
Diego exhaled smoke toward the stars. “You keep that book like it’s a bible.”
“Maybe it is,” Harold said. “Except mine doesn’t talk about heaven.”
“What does it talk about, then?”
“Control.”
Diego raised an eyebrow. “You think you can control this?” He gestured toward the city, its chaos, its noise.
“Not yet,” Harold said quietly. “But I can learn how the ones who do it think. Every man leaves a pattern. Even the ones who think they’re unpredictable.”
Diego studied him for a long moment. “Sometimes you scare me, Harry.”
“Good,” Harold replied. “Means I’m doing something right.”
---
Weeks later, tragedy came in the form of a friend.
Tino was a street kid like them—skinny, quick, always smiling. He’d run with Diego for years, a loyal follower with nothing to lose. One night, Tino was caught in a crossfire between rival dealers. They found his body in a drainage ditch two blocks from their shack.
Diego smashed a crate against the wall when he heard. “He was just a kid!”
Harold stood silent, his expression unreadable. “They all are.”
Diego turned on him. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“What do you want me to do, scream, shout? No, it won’t bring him back.”
“I want you to care, damn it!”
Harold’s jaw tightened. “You think I don’t? I care so much I can’t breathe half the time.” He slammed his notebook shut. “But caring doesn’t fix anything. Understanding does.”
“Understanding?” Diego spat. “You sound like some old man in a library. You think writing names in that stupid book’s gonna stop bullets?”
“No,” Harold said softly. “But it’ll tell me who fired them.”
For the first time, Diego saw the rage beneath Harold’s calm. Not loud or wild, but something precise, cold, surgical.
“You’re changing, Harry.”
Harold looked up. “So are you. Everyone is.”
Diego didn’t answer. The silence between them was heavy, filled with ghosts.
---
After Tino’s death, Harold’s obsession deepened. He charted the city’s underworld in that notebook—the gangs, the dealers, the middlemen, the dirty cops. Every name had a story; every story had a weakness. He began to see how the pieces fit, how one death could ripple through ten lives.
One night, Diego found him awake again, eyes red from hours of writing.
“You’re gonna lose your mind if you keep this up,” he said, sitting beside him.
Harold didn’t look up. “Perhaps. But I’ll lose more if I stop.”
Diego watched the candlelight dance on the pages. “You ever think about leaving? Just... running away? Start fresh somewhere else?”
Harold closed the notebook gently. “And leave what behind? The people who did this to us? The ones who killed Mom and Dad?”
Diego hesitated. “That was years ago.”
“For me,” Harold said, “it was yesterday.”
He leaned back, staring into the darkness. “I can still see their faces in the fire. Martinez’s men. The way they smiled when they pulled the trigger.” His voice was barely a whisper. “I remember every face.”
Diego reached out, gripping his shoulder. “We’ll get them. One day.”
Harold nodded slowly. “One day.”
But in his heart, that day had already begun.
---
By the time dawn bled into the sky, Harold had filled another page of his notebook. The slums around them stirred awake—the cries of vendors, the growl of engines, the city’s endless heartbeat.
Diego stepped outside, stretching, and looked back at his brother. “You coming?”
Harold closed the book, slipping it under his arm. “Always.”
They walked into the day side by side, two brothers bound not by blood alone but by a silent promise—one that neither fully understood yet.
The world had taken everything from them. Now, piece by piece, Harold was learning how to take it back.
And Diego, without knowing it, was learning how to rule it.
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“Every King Needs a Shadow”
The sea is gray that evening --the kind of gray that swallows light instead of reflecting it. Waves crash softly against the crumbling boardwalk, their rhythm neither mournful nor joyful, simply inevitable. The air smells of salt and wood rot, the eternal perfume of forgotten harbors.An old man sits alone on a weathered bench overlooking the tide. His coat is patched, his face carved by time and memory. The gulls circle lazily above him, tracing the same orbit again and again, as though tethered to some invisible axis of habit. Beside him rests a battered cane and a book --its spine cracked, its cover barely legible: The King in the Dark.He reads without really seeing. He’s read it countless times, though never all at once. Some pages he skips, some he lingers on, others he can no longer bear. The story, he knows, is not about kings or crowns or fire. It’s about consequences. It’s about what remains after the flame dies.Footsteps echo behind him --hesitant, uneven, the gait of y
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“The Mirror”
“The Mirror”They called it the lost fragment --a single, wind-stained page found tucked between the linings of the same lockbox that held The Price of Flame. Unlike the other writings, this one was not inked in the deliberate, sharp strokes of a man addressing history. It was trembling, uneven, the letters smeared as though written by candlelight, or perhaps by a hand uncertain of its own steadiness.The archivist who found it described the page as “alive.” The edges were signed, not by accident but with precision --as if Harold himself had intended the fire to kiss the paper without consuming it. Across the top, in faint graphite pencil rather than ink, was a title that seemed almost reluctant to declare itself:“The Mirror.”Then, beneath it, the opening line:“Every brother I killed lived in me.”There was no date. No closing signature. Only the whisper of the pen’s trail and the ghost of a man unraveling himself into confession.----------It was unlike anything Harold ha
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The Young Boy Finds a Book
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