𝐎𝐜𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐁𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐢𝐫𝐞

Chapter Eight

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The guys gave him a tour of the house. It had two sides, the main house, where the family lived, and the other was for guests and a receiving room for outsiders with appointments. It was airtight in terms of security. Matthew watched and listened as they explained a system that sends scanned images when a new face enters the house's private road. He waited and then let out a low groan when Matteo retrieved his image.

"Oh, good God! It looks like a mugshot," he said, somewhat irritated at his image.

"Well, you should learn to smile more." Bruno joked, pushing him to the next monitor to watch as the system checked whether he had a criminal record.

"This is commendable. How do you get this?"

"Money can get you anything," Raph said from beside him. "It also alerts when a foreign device is identified anywhere in the compound."

"Device? What kind of device?"

Raph shrugged, "a drone, for example." Moving forward, they took him through the underground—hiding rooms with beds, a kitchen with a big fridge that remained stocked, emptied every other week, and bathrooms as good as any in a hotel room. They had a contingency plan for every eventuality. Sitting on one of the beds, Matthew ran his eyes around the room and saw the various monitors had a view of every corner of the compound, even deep into their mini forest.

"You have cameras on the trees?"

"Yeah, it's the best chance to keep an omnipresent eye on the place. We need to know our family is safe at all times."

It was impressive, Matthew thought, his eyes still fixed on the monitors. The room was bulletproof; the small alarm at a corner of the room kept blinking red, another rotating square-shaped light in the middle of the ceiling buzzing in a soothing sound, and a ceiling cassette air conditioner along the center.

The house had other hidden rooms—so obscure that you must know its architecture to know where they all were. By the end of the tour, Matthew had pretty much forgotten how to navigate through most of them. He also understood how deeply the guys must be in organized crime to have built such a fortress.

Later, they showed him to his room; surprisingly, it was on the side of the main house. He felt a warm feeling through his guts—an emotion he rarely felt as he leaned on the door, alone in private, looking at his suitcase on top of a bedroom bench. This room meant they considered him part of their family. For the first time in a while, Matthew allowed himself the luxury of imagining what having a family actually entailed.

He imagined Christmas or Thanksgiving in this house, holidays that always found him either in his work office or home office as the rest of the world visited with their families. Although he was not a fan of a crowd, his mind sometimes conjured images of happy, noisy families seated around a barbeque drinking beer while talking over each other.

The only consistent family Matthew knew was father Josè—a man he loved and appreciated than anyone in the world. Although he might never admit it, Matthew loved those morning calls on Christmas morning or new year or Thanksgiving, that boisterous voice on the phone demanding to know whether he was awake or planning to drop by for a visit because he was afraid he might not be around for long.

"Come see me when I'm still around." Father Josè would say, his tone going down a ton as he feigned a cough.

"You will live forever so that you can nag me to death." Matthew often laughed, imagining him drinking filthy tasting cup of coffee his cook had made him in his small office. Even with one of the best coffee makers, he still didn't know how to make it.