My most sincere gratitude to you, ECE23, for your wonderful support and precious beta-reading!
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2
The day after, around ten in the morning...
Alejandro Fuentes was sipping his tea very slowly, holding the delicate china cup with his left hand while writing down with the right one in a small black leather notebook in front of him. He was sitting alone at a table about fifteen feet away from the Steinway piano. Finally, after a couple of long gulps, he put the empty cup back on the saucer to his left and vaguely looked in the direction of the black musician shuffling through a series of partitions. The young girl standing next to the piano was obviously a bit nervous and Alejandro had no difficulty understanding why.
He tried several times to discreetly catch the attention of the young brunette to grant her a reassuring and somewhat fatherly smile but she was not paying attention to him. She was standing next to the grand piano with her hands flat on the black shiny top, with her eyes closed. She was pushing her voice on a new tune she had been rehearsing for about an hour now. Alejandro was listening to the sound of that low and sensual voice and, in his turn, he closed his eyes for a moment and tried to relax himself. However, he could not manage to concentrate for more than a couple of minutes, for the image of his young nephew Rico popped up in his mind, which disturbed him from his quiet thoughts and forced him to open his eyes again. He heaved a long and profound sigh and resumed his writing.
Alejandro Fuentes was a 54-year-old very tall man. He had spent about the last thirty years building his own drug business. He did not want to call it an empire, for it had little to do with the giant concern some drugs lords had established back home, in South America. Al's mother, Maria Angeles, a short and always discreet creature, had tried to keep her son away from his father's trail and raise him in the purest Catholic tradition of respect and obedience to the laws of her Holy God. But the call for adventure had been so strong for the little Alejandro that he quickly started fights at school over petty reasons at first, but mainly because he was the Son of one of the local drug bosses.
At the age of sixteen, he gained his reputation of someone to be respected and accounted for, when a twenty-one year old tough guy from another town started to show off in the bar where Al used to party over tequila drinks with a couple of friends. The discussion became an argument and the argument became a dispute. In a matter of minutes, Al was being called bad names. The frail Alejandro brutally jumped on the verbal aggressor and almost strangled him, after having hit his face so hard with his bare hands that it took almost two weeks for the other guy to be able to see properly again, and start eating something solid instead of ingesting liquids with a straw.
After that memorable day, no one dared to bother him ever again and he almost immediately earned the nickname "El Fuerte". He quit school to the despair of his mother and joined his father to learn the business.
When he reached the age of 20, he had his share of the local deals and was even sometimes solicited for deals outside his own father's jurisdiction. The country was big enough for many drugs lords to settle their business and Al's father had never been one of the biggest. Strangely enough, this did not bother Alejandro, who had always shown the utmost respect for his father Ricardo Fuentes, a little strong man with a high-pitched voice but a famous handshake that would make many stronger men's hand bones crack. What they had settled over the years was enough to grant the family sufficient well-being and the Fuentes name an aura of respect in the area.
The only reason Alejandro rapidly became the head of the family and the business at the same time was that his father died of a heart attack shortly after Al celebrated his 21st birthday. That was the key to the young man's access to majority, independence and the top of the pyramid, all at once.
All the while during his Colombian reign, El Fuerte had always been regarded as the Just; strong, tough, but always straightforward and keeping his promises, even when he promised to take revenge on someone who had cheated or betrayed him. Then, his eyes would turn to a cold steel color and his voice would cut like a machete and everyone standing around him would shiver in anticipation of some cold-blooded and mastered retaliation.
One year after his accession to the Fuentes "throne", his younger sister, Miranda, gave birth to a son, ten months after she fell in love and got married to one of Al's best lieutenants. She had already been trying to kill herself after her husband got shot in a vendetta trap set by a rival gang, although she was three months pregnant. However, Alejandro had kept a close eye on her and managed to save her body, her soul and the baby from a premature death. She named the little boy she gave birth to after their father - Ricardo - and never left the family mansion again, refusing to live the normal life she would have been entitled to as a gorgeous young Colombian brunette.
Alejandro's heart went void when his sister finally managed to commit what she had attempted to do during her pregnancy. Their mother had died when Al and his sister were young teenagers and when in turn their father died, Al suddenly felt like his family had been cursed because of all the sins accumulated over the years, and now - being the only survivor of his generation - he felt he had to pay the price for all that had been done wrong all these years. His decision to raise his nephew Ricardo Mendoza as his own son was part of some penitence he had imposed on himself, even if he knew he would drag the little boy into an unlawful direction, whatsoever. His heart had been broken too many times and being alone in his sorrow was only natural and justified in his eyes.
He developed a cold attitude towards everything happening around and ran his business with an iron hand in an iron glove. No one would dare to contradict his decisions...ever. One day, a man came to Alejandro and offered him his unquestioned loyalty. A couple of weeks before, Al had taken care of some thug who had tried to unwisely monopolize part of his network. The thug had ended up with a nice elegant Colombian tie. The coincidence had brought justice to Sebastian, who was about the same age as Al. Fuentes had, unknowingly, avenged Seb's best friend's death at the hands of the thug and thus earned Seb's loyalty for life.
The local police had never been able to apprehend Al nor any of his employees, for the Fuentes family, besides having developed a safe and smoothly run business, had also managed to hire a couple of the best lawyers to make sure the family would not be bothered nor disturbed. Bribery and menacing were commonly used and had proven efficient over the years.
A little less than three years ago, one of his rivals found the guts to go a step further than his predecessors and made it clear he wanted to take over the Fuentes business. There were a series of attempts at negotiations which soon led to warnings, then threats. As Alejandro was certainly not the type of man to be intimidated, the rival clan found Al's soft spot and hit him hard. Fuentes had been secretly dating a young brunette - a sweet athletic girl who used to sing at night for her beloved Al in the secrecy of their hidden love nest - whom he had managed to keep isolated and protected for a long time. Yet, despite all his efforts and discretion, the others had found his girlfriend. When Al discovered her, only her once-radiant but now expressionless face allowed Al to identify the body which had apparently been battered and left to dry in the sun, not too far from Al's mansion.
His rage had never been more intense than at that moment and with the help of his faithful Sebastian, he organized a brutal vendetta. His lawyers told him this time it could be harder to escape any sort of justice and Alejandro decided to leave the place where so many dramas had forged his now-more-than-ever tempered steel attitude. He moved to Miami, along with his nephew who could have been endangered by enemies' retaliation attempts, and of course, his loyal Sebastian, plus some others who would remain at his side and help him build a new business in the States. A few stayed behind, in the shadow, and promised Al to go on ensuring supply for him. That's when he started his flower business, supposed to elegantly serve as a masquerade for another flavor hiding behind the precious and rare roses he imported from Colombia.
During his stay in Miami, he developed a strong feeling for American jazz, which seemed to be the only music able to soothe his sorrow. Soon, girls succeeded one another beside him, staying sometimes a couple of days, sometimes a couple of weeks. All of them were apparently chosen according to a few strict criteria. They were all brunettes and had a voice. That is, they were good singers, maybe not professional, but somehow all the girls who spent some time with Fuentes had to be able to display a good share of talents and distract him if only a little with blues or jazz rhythms which would make him feel at home again.
When Al felt the Vice guys were definitely coming too close and the menace took the form of a gorgeous and curvaceous undercover brunette named Gina, Al mysteriously lost some of his fighting spirit and did not feel like tempting the devil again. Somehow he seemed to wish for a more discreet and hidden existence, away from tragedies that had already torn his heart in several pieces.
He moved to Bay City, two years after having set foot on the American soil.
The roses business was created again on the West Coast. His contacts in Colombia had managed to remain faithful - and alive! And behind the roses business, the same white fragrance. But this time, Alejandro strangely decided to keep a low profile and to content himself with what was necessary to ensure a pleasant and comfortable life to him and his family and to prepare a satisfying legacy to Ricardo.
S*H ~ S*H ~ S*H ~ S*H ~ S*H ~ S*H ~ S*H ~