"Remember well, son, to defend what you want, you must be so lethal that no one else would dare touch what is yours.
You must defend those who aggress you; no matter how much blood you see, don't stop hitting until you're sure your enemy won't stand up again. If you know they'll never surrender, then you must make sure they'll never walk again.
"Yes, father, I'll do just that." Dominic said as he pulled a black knife from his jacket. Had his father ever told him to have compassion? No, his father always told him to be lethal and extremely aggressive against the enemy. In his previous life, he didn't have a father, so in this life, he wasn't ungrateful to the one who raised him. But truth be told, he only endured because he was a teenage boy in a child's body.
"I'll defend what matters to me."
Saying this, Dominic walked towards the elevator and watched as it slowly ascended the floors. If he was right, the enemy should be ascending at this moment, so he needed to stop them at this point. But being honest, they would take much longer than expected to reach Emma's floor, so he just had to wait patiently.
"There shouldn't be more than three coming up through the floors looking for me, but that would only be if those gang members left a driver outside waiting for them. In that case, there would be four, and they must all be armed. If I want to do this quickly and without complications, I'll have to be the one looking for them."
The only way to resolve this is to search for them and end this once and for all. If he doesn't do it this way, those bastards will likely go after Emma or wait for her outside. Dominic couldn't let that happen, so he knew he first had to find the one responsible for these problems and prevent them from escaping.
"If they're smart, some should be going up by the elevator and one by the stairs; if they do it this way, there won't be any problems when I find them." Dominic then covered his face with a black mask and took off his jacket. The hidden muscles showed on his arms, and after that, he wrapped his left hand with the same jacket he took off.
In a knife fight, the only thing you can do to win is wrap a limb with a part of your clothing. If you do it right, you can use one hand to block the knife blade while keeping the other hand free to eliminate threats.
"I hope there won't be any gunfire." Dominic walked and stood in front of the elevator, watching the numbers indicate its ascent.
"Here they come..."
Dominic pretended to be drunk as he leaned against the elevator entrance, the knife in his hand hidden from anyone coming from the front, and his hand covered with his jacket raised over his chest.
Crack!
The buzz of the elevator finally alerted him, and Dominic saw the doors open with a mechanical snap. The two individuals, sturdy and tattooed, came out laughing and joking with each other. However, their laughter turned to silence when they realized they weren't alone.
But Dominic, who was making strange noises with his mouth and bending his back oddly, soon took away their sense of alertness.
"Do you have any spare change?" Dominic, with a hoarse voice and a lethargic tone, acted very similar to any other addict needing money to continue consuming substances. That performance was good, and because the gang members were drugged, they didn't pay much attention to him.
"Get lost, you damn junkie!"
"That chick is so hot, bro; she'll scream like the bitch she's made of when I get my hands on her!"
"And how the hell do you plan to find that bitch if you don't even know where she lives?" The first gang member was the one who wasn't present in the supermarket, but the one behind him was the same one who harassed Emma before Dominic arrived.
Dominic, with his heart pounding in his chest full of excitement, awaited the exact moment when these two individuals would give him the best opportunity to kill them. He knew those two men, the same ones who had threatened his girlfriend, would soon show up.
"I clearly told your friend not to come looking for me." Dominic emerged from the floor with unexpected speed. His right hand held a gleaming knife, and his tense jaw prepared for the fight. His fiery expression met surprise and fear in the eyes of the first man in front of him. Without saying another word, Dominic lunged at them.
"This son of a bitch!"
Crack! Crack! Crack!
The first gang member, who was taller and more muscular, tried to react, but Dominic was faster. With a precise wrist twist, his knife sliced through the air and plunged into the man's shoulder with a dull sound, and then twice more into his stomach. A cry of agony tore through the silence as the gang member fell to the ground, clutching his bloody wound.
"Son of a bitch..."
Dominic didn't even flinch as hot blood spilled from the gang member's stomach; his brain simply acted on instinct, and his eyes focused on the next target.
The second man, smaller but agile, moved quickly, throwing a wild punch at Dominic. He managed to hit him on the cheek, but Dominic barely staggered as he looked at the man he had stabbed motionless on the ground.
"Hello again, gangster dog..." Dominic was unrecognizable under the fury filling his body; he quickly returned the blow he was receiving, and his left fist struck the gang member's nose, making blood gush out.
The first man who had been lying on the ground got up with difficulty, wielding his own knife. Dominic, with his reflexes firing at full throttle, dove just in time to dodge the slash aimed at his head and then struck with a kick to the stomach of the gang member right where he had been stabbed twice. The man fell to the ground again, gasping and struggling to breathe.
The second gang member, with a broken nose and eyes full of rage, lunged at Dominic with a knife in hand. Dominic, with quick and precise movements, parried the attack with his own knife, disarming him just as his hand hit the gang member's trachea. With astonishing agility, Dominic spun and plunged his knife into the chest of the man in front of him, who let out a groan of agony before collapsing to the floor.
Breathing heavily, Dominic surveyed the carnage in the elevator and quickly pulled out his cell phone, calling his uncle: "I have two dogs in the elevator; where are you, uncle?"
"Come down to the second floor; I'll take care of it." His uncle Antonio, with a calm voice, quickly went to the security room for camera footage. With a few hundred dollars, the job should be done, and just as he was about to turn off the cameras, he temporarily saw a gang member spying on what was happening on the second floor.
"That damn demon gangster..." Antonio quickly ran down the stairs while pulling out his pistol and fitting a silencer.
Crack!
When the elevator opened, Dominic, who had looted the two dead men, caught sight from the corner of his eye of a figure dressed similarly and hiding in one of the corners by the elevator door.
"Cesar?!" shouted the man from afar, and when he saw all the blood, he immediately pulled out his gun, but at that moment, a silent shot pierced through his nape and out through his right eye, splattering the floor with thick blood and brain matter.
"Never consider something finished when you know perfectly well you have another enemy still in the area, stupid kid." Antonio emerged from a hallway corner and, after seeing the corpses, showed a disgusted expression. "This is a bloody mess; good thing I came prepared."
"I'm delighted to see you, uncle. How's the family?"
"Haha, now you ask those silly questions? I guess your girlfriend must have messed up your brain; how can you do this in broad daylight?" Antonio asked as he dragged the corpse he had shot and put it inside the elevator.
"What do we do about the blood?" Dominic asked, still a bit dazed by thinking about the consequences.
"It's just ketchup..." Antonio pulled out a large bottle of ketchup and began spreading it all over the hallway. After emptying the bottle, he tossed it aside and entered the elevator.
"You're always so clever, uncle; I should have attended some of your classes." Dominic smiled sinisterly as he leaned towards the other gang member and whispered with a cold voice, "You should never have gone after my girlfriend, you damn dog."
Antonio, lighting a cigarette, looked at Dominic and then shook his head. "You're quite terrifying when you behave like that; you know I'll have to report this to your father?"
"He won't answer; I lost contact with him days ago, so he's probably on one of his crazy missions again." Dominic, who secretly knew about his father's ongoing work, smiled a bit and pointed, "But I'm sure that old madman won't die so easily."
Antonio tousled Dominic's hair and said, "That's true; once I tried to kill him, and he twisted my nose upside down with just one punch. I woke up three days later on a farm sleeping with the pigs. I thought I was dead, but it turns out my nose had been treated, and I was just so drunk that I even think I ended up witnessing a pig orgy."
"I only now remember how much you love telling those bizarre stories." Dominic chatted a bit more with his uncle, but after the doors opened on the floor, one of the six men in cleaning uniforms looked at the corpses and, upon seeing Antonio, started working on cleaning the elevator.
"You better wipe the blood off your face; you look horrible, especially that bruise on your cheek that will surely leave a mark." Antonio sighed and, after seeing how quickly the corpses were wrapped in plastic, turned around.
Dominic was amazed at how all the blood was cleaned from the elevator. These people were definitely professionals at their jobs, so he left with a clear mind.
"Want me to take you home?" Antonio asked as he glanced at the gangsters' car in the distance.
Dominic shook his head and said, "My car's here; we'll see each other later, and I'll thank you properly for this help."
"No need; just stop getting into trouble and study hard so you don't end up like me or your father." Antonio waved his hand and turned back to his car.
After the driver saw Dominic and noticed his reddened cheek, he shook his head. "Just from the look of it, I can tell your girlfriend's father caught you having sex; I don't have anything good to say, but if it's any consolation, something similar happened to me, except instead of being caught by my father-in-law, my girlfriend found me with her mother... You know, I found out she was cheating on me with a seventy-year-old, so I did her mother a favor. Haha, it was the best revenge I could imagine."
Dominic was a bit speechless at such a story and murmured, "I guess you lost contact with them after that."
"Not at all. How do I put it?" asked the driver and then showed a wedding ring. "I became her father, and now her brother is my son, hahaha."
"That's wicked, haha..."
"No, that was my ex-girlfriend who's now my stepdaughter, hahaha."