Chapter 1269 – ##05_God Mother Dorothy (3)
##18
1.
Why do humans, why do witches, keep desiring?
Even after repeatedly asking herself, Dorothy couldn’t find the reason, her mind a blank.
She simply acted.
She built the large-scale arms trafficking organization, Angel.
She competed to avoid having her interests taken away.
She pursued higher levels of magic and wealth.
It was a faint hope that, by chasing and pursuing something like them, she might someday find the end to her empty question.
But nothing gave Dorothy an answer.
All that remained was a habit-driven inertia.
The most ridiculous thing was that this mere imitation gave her life some direction.
2.
A pier on the eastern coast of Mexico.
It was just past midnight, Christmas, and the pier was filled with dense rain instead of fluffy snowflakes.
A black sedan slid to a stop in a vacant lot piled high with junk and discarded construction materials.
“We’ve arrived, Madam President.”
Salome, the driver and attendant, opened the door and held up an umbrella.
The heavy rain soaked the hems of her pants and coat.
Dorothy stood there for a moment, a cigar angled between her lips, lost in thought.
A life with no reason to live.
But also a life with no reason to die.
What value could such a life hold?
For a brief moment, the urge to throw it all away welled up like a puddle of muddy water.
“Madam President?”
“Rainy days always make me feel gloomy~ Let’s go.”
After giving a vague excuse to the puzzled Salome, Dorothy entered the old warehouse.
Inside, seven subordinates were waiting for Dorothy in the warehouse, where military supplies covered with tarps gleamed under the pale mercury lights.
One of them had once been a subordinate.
‘Hella,’ the rival organization of ‘Angel,’ was led by Bianca Bellili, the witch of desire.
Bianca wanted to swallow Angel, which had many excellent clients, and Dorothy wasn’t a saint who would refuse a fight, though she didn’t particularly want to cause trouble.
In the public world, appearing weak meant death.
And our mole had passed on important information to Hella, such as the location of the military warehouse, client information, and the organization’s cash flow.
It was a kind of industrial espionage, and such information leaks were a huge blow to a public business.
In short, it was a crime punishable by death.
“……”
Dorothy nodded, and her subordinates grabbed the traitor and knelt him before her.
The traitor, Dana, looked miserable.
Her pretty blonde hair was stained with blood, turning it red.
All her fingernails had been pulled out, and about half of her fingers were missing.
Strangely, a hazy memory overlapped with this.
Dana was a clumsy exile who had been swept away by the wave of immigrants and settled in the New World.
She was a frivolous, clueless, and not very cruel person, who ended up doing errands for other bully exiles, barely keeping herself alive.
Dorothy had taken Dana in.
She had scolded her for being so stupid, but after scolding her, she would comfort her, teach her about life and mindset, and guide her from beginning to end so that she could become a proper member of the organization.
It was hard to say it herself, but probably no employer in the public world had built up such popularity.
It wasn’t for nothing that Salome had called her a bitch.
Dorothy was Dana’s benefactor.
Well, Dana wasn’t all bad either.
She was particularly good at flattering and overly observant of others, but she was sensitive to even the smallest signs and was considerate.
There was this episode too.
One day, Dana suddenly presented her with a pot of beautiful roses, saying,
They were Juliet roses, a pale pink rose with petals so dense that the buds were heavy.
‘Madam President. Would you like to grow this?’
‘What’s this?’
‘Oh, it’s nothing much, but you always seem bored… I thought it would make me happy if you grew this flower, thinking of it as me.’
‘What~ are you indirectly saying I look like I have nothing to do?’
‘No! It’s not that… it’s just that, well… you seem a little empty.’
Dorothy was a little surprised that only the idiot Dana had noticed her emptiness, which none of the other members had noticed, but she gratefully accepted the gift.
Watering the pot, letting it bask in the sun, and cutting off the dry branches, the beautiful roses that bloomed were a way to soothe her loneliness.
Her thought process, which had been vaguely rummaging through old memories, refocused on reality.
“Dana, I taught you, didn’t I? If you’re going to betray someone, crush their back so thoroughly that they can never rise again.”
“…Madam President.”
“I also taught you, didn’t I? When digging a hole, always dig two~”
Dorothy didn’t bother asking why Dana had betrayed her.
“Convince me.”
Instead, she asked, making eye contact.
Why Dorothy shouldn’t kill the traitor.
A hot fervor rose in Dana’s eyes, which had been crushed by despair and fear.
It was a desire to survive, a determination to live.
“I also have data from Hella. While passing on information, I also received information from them.”
“……”
“You probably didn’t know that Hella hired mercenaries to prepare for this conflict? I’ve also secured detailed data on the opium and cocaine plant business plan. I want to trade with you using this as capital. If you give me one more chance, I will definitely be of help.”
After that, Dana enthusiastically added evidence that the information she had was not false.
She tried to prove why the traitor should be spared, her value.
There was no apology for the betrayal, no emotional appeal to old feelings.
It was a persuasion based on the thorough public mindset she had learned from Dorothy.
“……”
Suddenly, this thought occurred to her.
The Dana that Dorothy remembered wasn’t the type of person who would do this.
She didn’t have the guts to betray the organization, the nerve to betray Dorothy, and frankly, she wasn’t that good at scheming.
If Dorothy hadn’t taught her all sorts of things, she would probably still be doing errands.
On the other hand, it could also be seen this way.
Perhaps the way of life that Dorothy had taught her had brought Dana, who was destined to live as an errand boy, to her knees in this place?
If she had pleaded, ‘I gave you a rose as a gift back then,’ instead of saying, ‘If you spare me, I will definitely be of benefit to you,’ would a slightly different ending have awaited her?
“Dana.”
Dorothy interrupted Dana’s passionate speech.
“The data you leaked, the data you received from Hella. It’s all fake.”
“That can’t, that can’t be. I collected it all myself.”
And she told everyone gathered here the truth.
“Everyone, listen up. We’ve secretly made a dispute settlement agreement with Hella. After all, Bianca and I have different business areas, right? There’s no need to clash. Bianca does the drug business, I do the weapons~ We’ve decided to join forces instead of fighting, sharing the profits.”
It was the first time not only the traitor Dana but everyone gathered here had heard this.
Until this morning, they had been expecting a fight with Hella and preparing to respond.
“Here’s the question~ Then why did I act like I was still in conflict with Bianca? Yes~ It was a good opportunity. An opportunity to find potential traitors within each other’s organizations.”
Dana’s face turned pale as she anticipated the answer.
The faces of the other members also hardened at the shocking truth.
“Dana, Dana, poor Dana… You’ve fallen into a trap.”
She learned that Bianca, the head of Hella, and Dorothy were working together to find traitors in each other’s organizations.
The data she thought was her only lifeline was actually trash fabricated for a sting operation.
It meant that there was no path left for Dana to survive.
“Guys, let’s clean up.”
The stiff subordinates approached and grabbed Dana’s arms.
Dana screamed and struggled like a pig being dragged to the slaughterhouse.
“Let go…! Let gooo…! Madam President! Madam President! I, I think I went crazy for a moment! I’m sorry! Please spare me! Dorothy-nim…!”
Salome took out a revolver from a box, loaded it, and handed it to Dorothy, who was listening to the screams expressionlessly.
It was an execution device that mocked the idea that even magic was too good for killing a traitor.
Dorothy thought.
In fact, there was no need to kill Dana.
She wanted to live so badly, and she was a friend with more good memories.
Since there was no real damage, she could just slap her a few times and say, ‘Ugh~ let’s not see each other again,’ and send her away.
But Dana had to die.
The traitor of the organization had to be an example of a miserable end.
That was the life of a public figure.
A life of erasing everything that made you look weak, so that you wouldn’t die.
Then.
Was it a life that had to be maintained so much?
Was it an organization that had to be led so much?
Wasn’t life and the operation of the organization just a continuation of habit-driven inertia anyway?
Seeing Dorothy’s expression not change even when she was screaming, Dana’s cries changed slightly.
“Kill me! Yeah, kill me! I’ll curse you in hell! To think I called someone like you a benefactor…!”
Dana’s final outburst seemed to be telling Dorothy.
Do what you have to do.
What you had to do yesterday, what you have to do today, and probably what you will have to do tomorrow.
“Dana. There’s no such thing as hell.”
Regardless of Dorothy’s feelings, her finger moved casually.
-Bang! Bang! Bang!
The gunshots echoed loudly in the enclosed space.
Behind the muffled ringing in her ears, she heard the sound of a heavy sack falling and the sound of spent cartridges rolling on the floor.
While her subordinates cleaned up Dana’s body and tidied the warehouse.
Dorothy, with a cigar in her mouth, leaned against the warehouse door and washed her hands in the heavy rain.
“Madam President, do you have any other instructions?”
“There’s a flowerpot in my office.”
“A flowerpot? Ah, the rose.”
“Yeah, throw it away.”
She had a hope that this unknown emptiness might be washed away by the rain if she did this.
