Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Night Boss: Kabanata 71 - Kabanata 80

Salvatore Marquez never reacted to bad news the way other men did.Where most bosses broke glasses, punched walls, or barked orders, Marquez leaned into stillness. His men knew it well—when the cigar between his fingers burned too long without being tapped, when his eyes turned glassy as oil, that was when danger came.The news of Rico being held in a police station reached him just as twilight bled over the south docks. He sat in his Maserati, the purr of the engine, a glass of red wine balanced delicately in one hand. Marco, his driver, had been the one to bring it.“Boss, word is he’s speaking tomorrow. The police and the world will hear everything.” Marco said.Marquez didn’t answer at first. He swirled the wine, letting it catch the dying light. He thought of Rico: the boy who had once run errands through these very docks, who had earned his way into Marquez’s notice not through brutality, but through patience, loyalty, endurance. Rico had once reminded him of himself. That was w

In the cell, Rico sat hunched against the iron bars, his ribs sore from nights of poor rest, his stomach hollow from hunger. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like wasps, drilling into his temples, but the true noise was in his heart—the gathering thunder of memories he had tried for years to bury.The inspectors wanted his confession. The city wanted his words. But before Rico could open his mouth to the cameras, the ghosts of his past marched forward. He remembered his father, Micheal Jack, the man whose shadow had once seemed unshakable and then vanished like mist under the burning cruelty of disease.Micheal had been a good man, but a poor one. He worked odd jobs—construction sites, loading docks, carrying other men’s fortunes on his back. One winter, the sickness came. A slow cancer, like a thief in the night, robbed him of sight, strength, and eventually his will to stand. Rico could still see him lying on the mattress in their cramped one-room home, his hands trembling as

The memories were suffocating that night. Not because the walls were closing in, but because Rico’s own mind was heavy with ghosts. His head sank into his arms, the cot screeching when he shifted. For the first time since his capture, he allowed himself to surrender to memory, to revisit the moments he had buried beneath layers of silence and denial.And it all began with that same man — Sandro Danso.The inspectors thought they could break him by starving him, by forcing him into despair. What they did not know was that Rico had already been breaking long before he stepped foot into the station. His conscience had been cracking since the day he pulled that trigger. Rico was too young and naive, burning with loyalty and desperate to prove himself. He can still remember Kroos’s words clearly:“Don’t think, don’t ask. Just do what I tell you, Rico. You owe me your life, and it’s time you pay me back. The Cartel man? He talks too much. End him.”Rico didn’t know the man in question at t

The Confession Begins (Kroos)The room was alive with tension, as though the very walls of the police station had grown ears, listening for the words that would finally unmask the shadows ruling the city. Cameras whirred, journalists gripped their pens, and officers sat upright, their eyes trained on the man seated at the center of it all. Rico sat across from the inspectors, his wrists still bound loosely in handcuffs, though the weight of the moment pressed heavier on him than steel chains ever could.The chief inspector, a broad-shouldered man with years etched into his face, leaned forward. “Rico… this is your chance. The city is listening. We want the truth. Start at the beginning.”Rico sighed, his chest rising and falling like a man who had been holding his breath for years. He lifted his face, meeting the unblinking eye of the nearest camera. The city was indeed listening, and for once, he wanted them to hear him—not the monster they painted him as, but the boy who was forced

The cameras stayed locked on him, the journalists pens noting across notepads, some typing on laptops. The officers sat forward, their silence heavy. Inspectors leaned against the walls with arms crossed, as though they already knew what Rico was about to spill but wanted to hear it from his own lips.Rico drew a breath. His throat felt raw, his eyes dark pools of exhaustion and fear. Yet there was something else, something deeper — relief. The kind that came when a man had carried boulders of secrets for too long and now, finally, had the chance to set them down in front of the world.“I ran far,” Rico started, voice trembling, “after I killed Sandro Danso. I didn’t even think, I just ran. My legs moved faster than my mind could. Kroos… if he found out, he would’ve killed me before dawn. That man didn’t forgive mistakes, not the smallest ones. And this wasn’t small. I had shot someone so powerful right hand, one of the most feared men in the city. I was done for.”The room shifted. R