Pretending to Be an Untouchable Crime Boss

Chapter 413: Slipping.

"Oh, you’re back."

"What is this?" James asked as he still could not piece the fragments together, still could not decide whether anything was truly happening at all.

"Well, you’re dying, aren’t you?" Lucian asked, though it sounded like that he was stating something obvious.

"I killed myself!"

"You didn’t."

"How would you know that? You’re just a part of my own mind!"

"That is exactly why I know it," Lucian replied as he locked eyes with Joseph. You didn’t shoot yourself, and Hector didn’t die." He did not break eye contact. "You got shot, you fell to the ground, and you started bleeding out, and that is when your mind created your own reality to escape what was actually happening, which is a bit crazy when you think about it, isn’t it? You created this hallucination where Hector died, where you shot his dead body, and then ended yourself?"

Lucian shook his head but then a smile appeared on his face. "You are truly insane, James."

"No," James whispered at first as he was trying to convince himself. "No, that is not true. I remember it, I remember everything."

"And that is exactly the problem. You remember what your mind wants you to remember, not what actually happened."

Joseph took a step back, then another, his shoes scraping against nothingness, yet somehow still making a sound that echoed too loudly in the empty space around them.

"You’re lying," he said. "You have to be lying, because if you are not, then what the hell is this? What is all of this?"

"This," Lucian gesturing vaguely at the endless fog, at the darkness that seemed to pulse with Joseph’s own thoughts, "is what your mind built to protect you from the truth."

"And what truth is that?"

"That you are not dead," Lucian said. "Not yet. Crazy right?"

It was not just crazy, it was something that James actually understood deep down, yet he still could not bring himself to face it fully.

Linda had called him, and that part was real, it actually happened.

She had been screaming through the phone, telling him that a woman was there to kill him, and that woman was not Olivia, it was Sophia.

But James never had time to react, never had time to defend himself, never even had a single second to process what he was hearing, because Sophia didn’t wait and fired her gun.

That was what Linda heard on the other end of the call, the gunshots followed by the sound of the phone hitting the ground, and then the heavier sound of James’ body collapsing right after it.

He had been shot and blood immediately started gushing out of his gunshot wounds and that was the exact moment his mind broke away from reality.

That was the moment it created something else, something false, an illusion where everything happened differently.

In that version, Hector saved him, but he died in the process.

And maybe that was the worst part of all, because it was not random, it was not meaningless, it was chosen.

Hector was the one who died for a reason.

Because James felt like Hector was the pillar of the family, the one people believed in, the one they followed without question, and James could feel himself losing that position, losing control, losing importance, and his mind searched for a solution that would remove that conflict entirely.

So it gave him one.

It made Hector the one who died and after it was followed by the inevitable end of James himself.

Because in the end, it was not enough for Hector to die.

James had to die too.

Because living with the truth, living with the realization that a part of him wanted Hector gone, that he had created a reality where Hector died in his place, was something he could never accept.

So his mind chose the only escape it could find.

If he died as well, then there would be nothing left to face. freewёbn૦νeɭ.com

Lucian said it right after all, or at least that was what it felt like to James in that moment, but even that was not fully accurate, because it was not Lucian speaking, it was James’ own mind constructing him, shaping him into a voice that could deliver the truth.

It was James talking to himself, through a version of Lucian that only existed inside his collapsing perception of reality. James was telling himself that he was breaking apart, that he was slowly following a path that led straight into madness.

And it all happened because of the combination of medications, the constant pain and torment, the fragmented memories looping over and over again, the overwhelming worry about the family and what would happen next, and the weight of everything he had done up until this point, all of it was mixing together.

Everything was collapsing into one single point of pressure.

The darkness, Lucian, the memories, the fear, even the people he thought he knew, all of it blending together until nothing felt real anymore, and nothing felt stable enough to hold onto.

He was falling apart.

Not slowly, not gently, but completely, like something inside him was cracking in multiple places at once, unable to support itself any longer.

And more than that, he was not just breaking.

He was dying for real this time, not inside his head, not in a constructed reality, but they were trying to pull him back.

Linda, Mike, and now even Ramirez were there, trying their best to stop the bleeding, to pull James back. They were all trying to save the person who had, in one way or another, given each of them a new purpose in their lives, even if that purpose had been built through violence, through fear, through blood.

He had changed all of them in ways they could not undo, and now they were trying to return that impact, trying to pull him back from the edge he was falling over.

But his body kept betraying him. James was slipping away, and if they did not pull him back right now, there would be nothing left to save at all.

The Angel of Death was dying and with him his legacy.