Chapter 3: Chapter 3

Songs for this chapter are:

Damascus - Hulvey

War Cry - Social Club Misfits

One of a kind - Social Club Misfits

Dynamite - BTS

Yemisi

Sacrifice. Repudiation. Denial.

These things, I was very familiar with them. It was one attribute people who loved me knew me for. As a leader, I've always been one to lose her life if need be for the people she loved. It was something I lived for – putting people first.

In as much as I felt like I lived by the principle of making sacrifices, it felt like I had lost a great amount of knowledge on what it takes to make a sacrificial act. Like the principles, I lived for had outdated methods.

Personally, I believe that sacrifices should be made early, at the very start of someone's life, something like an investment you make or put in out of your grind and labor just to ensure the eventual, fruitful betterment of the future of the person you love and you're trying to secure.

Sometimes, however, sacrifices are made at crucial points and it doesn't matter if we made selfless acts in the past. Sacrifices like this don't leave you with the bliss of having alternatives to choose from because you know that those alternatives won't even pay as much as letting go of something or denying yourself of something that would be beneficial to you just to see someone you love happy.

Most times in my life, I'd sacrificed a lot and it became a norm. While growing up with five younger siblings under unfavorable economical conditions, I gave up my education so I could assist my parents to earn some income so my younger siblings would be able to go to school.

I hawked various goods on the streets for years as a young child when I should have been worrying about nothing else but how to get my school homework done. Instead, I worried about not getting raped by male customers and losing money to pickpockets and thieves.

It'd been my norm to always make the people I loved happy at my own expense.

But what exactly went wrong with Cassandra? Why had her life turned to be so much of a nightmare when I could have done something along the line to avert the avalanche of doom? What exactly did I fail to sacrifice for her sake? Was it my time?

Was it?

Yes, it was.

It was my time and affection that I had failed to sacrifice. But mostly my time.

I had a life of my own and a share of problems to deal with for her but I never joked with my family: my siblings, my parents. I was always there to save them whenever they needed me and it didn't matter where I was whenever they called on to me for help. I suspended what was occupying my time and attended to their needs.

But with Cassandra?

It was just very overwhelming to realize that her life had been so endangered and I did nothing about it. I was completely neglectful.

How so?

Even after she'd been liberated from slavery years ago and came back to us, I had never done anything so substantial to protect her from harm that was to come in the farthest future. I only made myself available and useful when the danger was already there simply because I was so preoccupied with the personal problems I had to deal with.

I slacked on the standards I set to live by and it backfired. Terribly so.

My sister is now on her sickbed if I were, to put it mildly, battling with a terminal disease affecting her lungs and might die at any time and now, I am beginning to put in a lot of efforts to make sure that she gets the justice she deserves but they don't even look promising because as I made each step, gathering all of the evidence against Dan, my mind always reverted back to the image of my sister in that hospital room, with beeping machines and an oxygen mask in which she depended on, letting out each breath in excruciating pain.

It made me unable to do all of the things I felt I could still do with an assurance of safety and peace of mind because I was making those sacrifices and efforts, way too late. If I'd started to pay attention to her life ever since that slavery occurrence, definitely my mind wouldn't be all over the place like it is now. I would have carried out my investigations and findings peacefully.

Now that so much damage has been done and all I could have been worrying about was my sister's health, praying earnestly and looking after her (since the ailment was practically inevitable), I'd been lurking around the ghetto in the outskirts of Lagos where Dan had grown up, assaulting those women and stealing money from people so he could survive.

After a successful, thorough, interrogation with Dan which required some cajoling and subtle threatening where I'd painfully had to use Cassie as bait, he told me about those women he assaulted in the ghetto and the history of how his father became the notorious loan shark.

Thankfully, when I found the ghetto where he lived, I met some of the women he described intricately and interrogated them. They attested to the fact and explained in detail, all of Dan's notorious escapades and the chaos he caused during his stay. Everything they'd said word for word was penned down. I'd even managed to let them agree into being witnesses when the day of Dan's court hearing arrives.

Now, I am back at my office going through the autopsy reports of Cassandra's driver with my assistant. There are several photos affiliated to the case we are investigating spread across the table.

"Albert, take a proper look at this gun, " I point at the photo of the gun in question.

"Yes ma'am, " he slants his posture, squinting his eyes as he peers at the photo on the table. "This gun is clearly of a different type and it's unlike the gun that is being used nowadays by law enforcement agents. I haven't seen any kind of gun like this before, " he answered, drawing imaginary circles on the photo.

"Exactly. If you can remember when Mustafa came to report Cassie's attack on the day her driver died, he mentioned that the gun was the exact type that Cassie had seen the loan shark use to kill her friend, Krystal and so I tried to do background research on the gun and realized that this gun called Hades, is worth a million shekel of diamonds which means that Dan, of course, inherited the gun from his father since you can't find the gun anywhere because this was a gun from thousands of centuries ago."

"Hmm. So...how was the loan shark able to use and find that gun if he died only twenty years ago and died at the age of fifty-five?"

"Now, that brings us to the most important part of the matter. After interrogating Dan, he made me understand that his father, the loan shark was born in an ancient land in which he knew not the name and the loan shark's father was a slave master and he was even more popular, powerful, and nefarious than the loan shark himself. So even after his death, the loan shark was still able to carry on with the slave trade even as modernization was slowly starting to wipe ancient practices away. But the loan shark was still able to thrive upon the fact that there were no banks in existence as at that time so he came to with the system of lending huge loans to paupers in order to acquire slaves so he settled in Northern Nigeria, specifically in between the borders of Gongola and Taraba states. He built a castle in between both states and began targeting the citizens of both states as potential slaves since most of the citizens were very poor as at that then. The government of both states started to discover over time that there was an increased mortality rate, the kidnapping of the citizens, and a rumored slave trade.

The effect of the loan shark's acts was spreading slowly like a virus and soon, when matters worsened, there was a declaration of a war between both states because somehow, the governors of both states were pitiful enough to think that it was an attack coming from the other states. The war lasted for a year and in the aftermath, both states were wiped out, becoming a barren land that almost went into extinction. The loan shark took lordship over the remains of both states and established his empire in between both states, in the middle of the mountains. He captured every citizen left so they could become his slaves. Soon, he began to travel to other cities when he realized he needed to obtain more power and since modernization was fast-spreading, he began to look for victims in Lagos, and then in 2008, he found my sister."

"Hmm. But from all I've learned so far about the loan shark's acts, the majority of them seem counterproductive to me. I mean, if he was lending money to the people he knew would be unable to pay back and was making the relatives of those people collaterals and making them work as slaves, then why did he kill so many of them? And how was that in any way supposed to help him remain affluent, relevant or powerful?"

"It helped him gain more power actually and you know what power does, it fetches you more money. He was familiar with a certain group of occult members who mysteriously accumulate wealth in the slavery business and apparently, the one who was able to gather more slaves became the most powerful, I think he was on the quest of becoming the supreme leader of the ancient land where his father had dominion over."

"And how do things like that work?"

"The use of voodoo and supernatural powers of course."

"But—"

"Yes, I know the law doesn't recognize voodoo. Nevertheless, we will just have to make our findings on the people who died by this gun or survived the effect of the gun because apparently, Dan made me understand that there is a particular Mrs. Jones who was a slave to the loan shark and also survived the gunshot once. I think he made mention of his uncle as well who his father shot in the leg and he became crippled afterward. It will be easier to find Mrs. Jones though. Dan also made me understand that the gun, is called Hades for a reason."

"Hmm?"

"Yes. He said that he realized that whenever the gun was used on anyone and the person, unfortunately, happens to die by the gunshot, the part where the bullet targets, leaves a mark that looks like it'd been caused by fire and in one hour, thirty minutes to be precise, the entire skin of the corpse, begins to look that part of the body where the bullet targeted, making it look like some fire ignited from within. After a few days, the body catches fire and this explains why we Cassandra's driver's corpse looked like that in the photos we saw, and then days after, he vanished."

"What a mystery! but, how does Dan know that the gun leaves such bizarre marks on corpses when he wasn't even able to see the driver's corpses since he eloped long before?"

"It's because...the thing is, he wasn't the one who directly attacked Cassandra that day. He conspired with someone to get the job done and the aim was to kidnap my sister and kill her driver if he tried to act funny so he gave his accomplice the gun so he could make use of it but the person killed the driver and had attempted to kill Cassandra too. Dan found out later on and he got mad. He killed the person using the same gun and waited to ensure that he died. Then, he saw the grotesque mark."

"Hmm. So through that, he must have seen similar marks like that on Mrs. Jones and on his uncle's leg."

"Exactly!"

"So how are we going to make use of this background information when it's time for the court trial?"

"Of course we are going to use it to establish the fact that, Dan is exactly like his father, the loan shark! He took lives using the same gun and he murdered a few people at the ghetto too according to what the inhabitants made me understand and he captured my dear sister too! Which explains why she's on that sick bed now, writhing in pain! He acted like his dad— he became a captor and enslaved my sister. I will dig up every detail so that the bastard can suffer properly. He made my sister a wreck. He tortured her, used her, and—"

The rest of my words got caught up in my tears and I slam my fists against the table, almost sending the photos flying off.

"It's okay ma'am. Please take it easy. We are already very close to putting Dan permanently behind bars and there is nothing worse than being in captivity all your life. Dan was once in captivity and is soon going back to it because that is where he belongs. With all of this information, he's already doomed."

"But, what if all I'm trying to avenge for becomes vain? I mean, my sister is in the hospital, dying now and here I am trying to protect her when it seems like its already too late."

"It's not over until it's over ma'am."

"Thanks, Albert, " I wiped my tear away. "Sorry about the outburst. Anyway, I will be needing you to visit the ghetto tomorrow to speak with the inhabitants. They already promised me to show a few photos of some corpses they had spotted that they suspected to be murdered by Dan years ago. We are going to look for Mrs. Jones too and we will start to gather all of our evidence and facts together."

"Okay, ma'am."

"You are dismissed."

After he left my office, I picked my phone up to call my younger brother, Alexander so he can let me in on how Cassandra has been doing so far but the news I get instead is entirely different and ten times worse.

"What?"

"I'm being for real sis. The President of Somalia is seriously slandering Cassie and Mustafa on the nation's newspapers and press interviews calling them fraudsters and fake business people who sold boxes of fake gemstones to them and invoking the wrath of the ministry of Azerbaijan. The President of Somalia wants to kill both Cassie and Mustafa!"

"What the hell?! What on earth are we supposed to do?! I mean, did Cassandra really have a deal with the Somalians and dared to swindle them for her own gain? I mean, I know she's been using mustafa for his money but I didn't expect her to go this far. Jeez. This is serious trouble because I have no idea how to defend her right now and I wish she was well enough all I can fire her with questions immediately."

"Sis...there's a new problem, " his voice became low, almost like a whisper. "I think Cassie is dying."

I would have questioned his statement but I heard it myself. The distant but audible, rapid beeping of the machine in her hospital room. The guttural cry. I knew we'd been fighting a battle all along but this was the climax, the cry of defeat.

My precious little sister was dying for real.

***

Exodus 14:14 - "The Lord shall fight for you and you shall hold your peace."

Glossary

• Taraba and Gongola States are actual States in Nigeria. However, I'm not very certain if gongola is still a state but these places do exist. Also, all of the stories circulating round these two states were purely formulated by me and the same also goes for the gun mentioned in this chapter.

Do you think your dear author is intelligent?