The Ilokana

Chapter Three

Vigan - November 6, 20XX

"I don't like him."

"I know, Manong."

Patrick closed the door not a few seconds earlier, when they dropped him off a few blocks away from the Reyes residence in Bantay. Michael's playful joking to call him if Patrick was refused entry gave way to an angry look the moment the door closed.

Victoria didn't offer to go with ex-boyfriend and only said that dinner would be at eight. Michael then drove off, allowing a scowl to reach his face now that Patrick was gone.

"What business does some kid from Pasig have with Ving Reyes?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know how he's related to them?" A pair of brown eyes looked at her from the rear view mirror. Victoria slumped back in her seat, diverting her eyes back out the window.

"No, I didn't know he knew anyone up there."

Michael swore in a low voice. On the outside, the Reyes family and the Brillantes were friendly rivals and on the national stage, members of the families often sided with each other to get mutually beneficial things done.

However, for the last two hundred years, the Reyes had been a thorn in the Brillantes' side. They were an upstart mercantile family that moved to Vigan in hopes of making a name for themselves among the wealthy and influential members of Vigan's elite. They succeeded, but not without crossing the Brillantes.

They, too, followed the tradition of blades and took in some poor farming family to turn into their branch of assassins. Her family knew them more as would-be gangsters than precision killers the Aglabans and other blade families were. Many blamed the Reyes' lack of controlling and educating their blades for past clashes.

The sixties and seventies were a particularly violent time between the two families, but in order to keep the city calm and not embroil it in their personal turmoil, all the fighting was done unseen.

Victoria once had an aunt and uncle she would never meet because they died in the fighting before she was born. Uncle Greg's youngest brother didn't make it past his twentieth birthday, and various other extended members of both families were injured or killed on the street.

The Reyes didn't escape unharmed, either. Victoria had it on good authority that her late Lolo Victor, her namesake, killed all five sons of the Reyes' blade family, and his sister, Lola Felicia orchestrated an car crash that killed the then Reyes patriarch's younger brother and his family. No one thought it could've been an elderly widow, but they didn't know Lola Felicia.

Lola believed none of that would've been possible if she wasn't as well educated and trained as her brothers.

"Those blades of Reyes...they don't know what they're doing," Lola Felicia told her when she was a child. "They think it is men's work, but it's not, anak. That is where we have the advantage. In Aglaban, everyone fights."

Ving Reyes' late father eventually tightened control over their thugs and the eighties and early nineties were surprisingly quiet. Then, Ving and Uncle Greg were up for mayor of Vigan and the election turned ugly quick. Rumors were spread, slander was posted, and communities took sides.

There was a lot of tension, but no major violence until the day her brother and Michael were returning home early from school.

A small gang under the Reyes family appeared and Michael told her that Danny fought better than all of them. There were just too many to fight against and Danny, while trying to both shield Michael and fight, was overwhelmed. Two young men were killed, four got away, injured. She later found out that three eventually died from their wounds, but she didn't care.