“I expected something better,” he says. “After all the noise, all the sacrifice, all the years of hiding, this is where he ended up.”
You realize he means you.
Your hands curl into fists.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” you say.
Hector’s eyes settle on your face. They are cold, washed-out blue, and almost elegant in the way winter ice is elegant right before someone falls through it.
“That wasn’t a request.”
The two men beside him spread out slightly, one near the stairs, the other by the front door. You understand then that this was never a family visit. It was a retrieval. A collection. A final move on a board that had been set before you were old enough to speak.
Your father straightens with effort.
“He’s not yours,” he says.
Hector turns to him with mild disdain.
“You were useful once, Samuel. Don’t mistake that for importance.”
The name lands in the room like a dropped knife. Your father, Samuel, the man who raised you, does not answer. But you see something in his face change. Shame is still there. So is guilt. Yet beneath both, something older begins to surface. Something that looks a lot like the man he must have been before fear bent his back.
“You took enough from Amalia,” Samuel says quietly. “You don’t get him too.”
Hector sighs, as if patience itself has become tiresome.
“Amalia was emotional. Daniel was weak. You were provincial. I did what men of consequence do. I preserved the family.”
The word family nearly makes you laugh.
It comes out more like a choking sound.
Daniel finally lifts his head. “You said you’d protect me.”
Hector does not even look at him.
“I said I’d use you as long as you remained useful. That was not the same thing.”
Daniel stares as if those words are somehow worse than all the others. Maybe they are. There is something uniquely ruinous about hearing the truth from the mouth of the person who taught you how to lie.
Alejandro turns to you.
“Julián,” he says, low and urgent, “in the box. Look under the false bottom.”
You blink, thrown by the command, but he does not repeat himself. He does not need to. Something in his face tells you this matters now. Maybe more than anything else.
While the room hangs on the edge of violence, you move.
You drop to the wooden box in the hidden room and run your fingers along the inside. For a second you find nothing. Then your thumb catches a seam. You pry up a thin panel and beneath it there is a stack of envelopes, a flash drive sealed in plastic, and a revolver wrapped in oil cloth.
Your breath sticks.
Alejandro sees the envelopes first.
“The letters,” he says.
One of Hector’s men notices too and starts toward you. Alejandro slams into him before he takes a second step. The house erupts. A chair flips. Your father shouts. Daniel scrambles backward across the rug like a man trying to crawl out of his own life.
