NOVEL NEXT Chapter 292: Friend.
He was a magician, a trickster, the first-generation drug lord, the one who held the city in his hand. The one everyone feared, even beyond borders, his name whispered on an international level. That was Lucian… But above all, his words carried wisdom. He was a man who had lived it all, who knew what it meant to crawl up from the slums to rise as the one in control, the one who had everything. Money, women, power, everything a man could ever wish for.
But they say it's lonely at the top… and for Lucian, it truly was.
All of his friends… the ones he went hungry with in the slums, the ones he robbed with, the ones he could call brothers, the ones he could trust… were gone. Over the years, they all fell. Some overdosed, some were killed, and some were thrown behind bars, just to tighten the knot around Lucian's neck.
Nobody remained by his side… he was alone. And worse, he grew unstable, because when there's no one you can trust a hundred percent, you start questioning everything around you.
There's no money, no drug, no power that can silence that feeling, the feeling that death is closing in. That people are waiting to throw you to the police or to the enemies of you. That everything you built, year after year, is about to shatter. All of it is decades of work, so many deaths, so much blood and in the end, the only thing left to do… is accept it.
Accept the fact that your time is up that deep down, you always knew it would come. But Lucian… no. He never accepted it. Instead, he burned with anger. Angry at life, angry at the world, angry at everything around him.
His friends died, all of them died, nobody was on his side to support him, he was lonely, he was alone… and then he suddenly popped out of nowhere.
James Bellini.
The only person who reminded him of them, of his friends, of those younger years when they were just stubborn kids with fire in their eyes… was James. He carried that same flame, that same defiance. Lucian felt jealousy, even envy toward him… so young, with so much time still ahead. But then, the stories about James began to reach his ears.
The tales of James Bellini, how he operates, what he does, how brutal he is… this fucking young guy just dominating everybody, that they made an alliance to contain him and he willingly accepted it like he was playing with them.
Lucian felt so fresh about it… he felt like James Bellini is a friend, even though at that time they had not yet met, still he felt they are connected, they are the same… he is just like his friends were… no, no, he is like him.
So Lucian did it, yeah, he sent watchers on James to look at him, to get to know him better, to see how he was doing things, and he noted everything… what he did good, what he did wrong… he wanted to protect him from everything that he experienced in his life.
He wanted to protect James… Lucian almost looked at him like a son… because James operated just like him in his younger days, the upcoming days… of course James didn't know what he was doing, it was all coincidences, all luckiness, mistakes, but it worked out in a good way.
But then Lucian started to see more mistakes, more and more mistakes, and it seemed like James was taking that path… a path that only led to quick death, that only comes with suffering, with the darkness swallowing you down.
James was too close to his real family, too close to his mother, too close to his little brother.
Yeah, he seemed like a genuinely good guy, somebody who cared for his loved ones… and Lucian knew firsthand that it was the biggest mistake to do in their world… to have close friends, to have family, though he made the same mistake, but he learned to not chain himself down.
Learned to not care about Charlotte, even if it sounds bad, well everything about Lucian was bad, but that's how he operated… he was doing everything to keep up his empire.
The second mistake was that James moved too fast stretching his hands across the whole drug market. From Lucian's eyes, from his experience, it was impossible to control it all, because if just one piece slipped out of balance, the whole thing would shatter with it.
The third mistake was giving too much freedom to his men, especially to Hector and the others, they just roamed free, just did whatever they wanted.
The fourth mistake, the one Lucian saw as the worst of all, was the family, at least the way James built it. Too many people without quality. The kind who would snitch, rat, betray and in this world, that's all it takes to bring everything crashing down.
And the final mistake, the alliance, the trust. Those people, the so-called joint families, any of it was the biggest mistake. Because the only person you can trust is yourself. The only one you kneel before is God, not some fuckers trying to make deals, whether it's the police, the feds, gangs, or cartels. Crush them all. Break them. Make them kneel, lick your shoe, because that's what they deserve.
That's what it takes to survive at the top.
There was his point of James, the mistakes, but time went on and his mistakes became… like successful hits.
First, he took over the drug market or at least controlled a lot of it, even with that puppet alliance. Then his family was still intact, nothing happened to them, but Lucian still looked at it as a major mistake in the future. Then the freedom with the men too became a success as Hector did deals and business operations that put the family on a whole other level, and of course Bella and Ferucci and Hans's names too spread widely, how dangerous they are.
But the worst mistake wasn't a success, it wasn't solved, because James was gathering people like it was a fucking homeless shelter, hundreds of people, without quality in them, and of course the alliances, something that made Lucian's blood boil, how the fuck could James be that stupid?
He might have become a ruler, a lord of the underworld, but Lucian knew this all too well, once things start to shake, they shatter. Everything can turn upside down in an instant.
And that's why he met with James, that's why in other words he was a fan of him, was a stalker of him… because he resembled him, he resembled the friends he lost, the friends who made the same mistakes.
Lucian wanted to be a mentor, a friend, a brother… and in the end yeah, he became a friend, but his words weren't heard by James… not because he didn't want to hear it, didn't want to take it, but because he was acting, he didn't know shit about the world, what's right, what's wrong, what is a mistake, how to deal with it… and time passed and passed.
Lucian was arrested, his empire crumbled and then he died, he died knowing James would surpass him, died knowing he wasn't alone but with a friend, died knowing his daughter would be in good hands.
But in the end, he couldn't do what he wanted most… to save James from it all, or at least prepare him for the darkness and suffering… but how ironic, because Lucian died because of his own mistakes too.
Yeah, he died, but at least he gained a true friend and left a huge impression on him, he impacted him.
And now the words of Lucian, that back then went past James's ear, the words he didn't listen to, suddenly resurfaced, suddenly he remembered all of it, like if that motherfucker Lucian ghost was there on his side whispering those wise words.
"James?" Mike's voice came through, faint, hesitant.
Even he could feel it… something was about to happen, something was off, because that smile on James's face… it was inhuman.
He just sat there, staring at his own hand without blinking… with that smile, and nothing else.
It was not the darkness. It was not suffering, not despair, not any of it. No… it was just Lucian's fucking voice, whispering those wise, goddamn words. Yeah, it wasn't the void, it wasn't the emptiness… it was the—
Recognition and acceptance.
James understood. Understood everything Lucian had lived, everything he had lost, everything he had tried to teach him. And that understanding… it burned, it woke something inside him.
And that smile… it wasn't just a smile anymore. It was understanding, fire, and reckoning all at once. The same smile that once was on Lucian's face. It was not joy, not amusement… it was recognition, acceptance, and something more…
The kind of smile that sees everything, feels everything, and promises nothing will ever be the same again.