You grab the letters and the flash drive and stumble back into the living room just as the second man lunges for you.
Your father meets him first.
Samuel was never a large man, never a fighter, never anyone strangers would notice twice. But desperation has a way of stripping age off a body. He drives his shoulder into the man’s ribs, slamming both of them into the wall hard enough to rattle the framed family photo above the mantle.
The glass cracks.
For one insane second, you see your family reflected in that broken surface exactly as it is.
Your father bleeding at the lip.
Daniel on the floor.
Alejandro grappling with a stranger.
Hector standing still in the middle of it all like he expected the whole world to collapse around him and wanted a front-row seat.
Then the frame falls and shatters.
“Give me the letters,” Hector says.
You step back.
“No.”
His face empties. Not anger. That would be human. This is colder than anger. It is the expression of a man who cannot conceive of being denied.
He starts toward you.
And Daniel, of all people, gets in his way.
It is clumsy and pathetic and nowhere near heroic. He stumbles up from the floor and spreads his arms, shaking so badly he can barely stand.
“Leave him out of it,” Daniel says.
Hector actually pauses.
“You?” he says. “Now?”
Daniel swallows. “You said it was business. You said it was just money, just signatures, just moving things around until no one could trace them.”
“It was business.”
“You had Amalia followed.”
Silence snaps through the room.
You stop breathing.
Daniel’s face is gray.
“She wanted to take the baby and disappear,” he says, looking not at Hector but at the floor, as if the confession is easier when he does not have to see who it destroys. “She found out about the shell accounts, the properties, the land transfers, everything in my name, everything connected back to you. She said she was going to the police. You told me to calm her down. Told me to keep her close until you handled it.”
Alejandro goes still, his hands still fisted in the front of the man he was fighting.
Your father closes his eyes.
“And?” Alejandro asks, his voice almost too quiet to hear.
Daniel’s mouth trembles.
“And I told you I’d take care of it,” Hector says, cutting across him.
Every head turns.
Hector does not look rattled anymore. If anything, he seems relieved. As if the secret has grown too heavy and he is tired of pretending it matters whether it is hidden.
“Amalia was unstable by then,” he says. “She imagined nobility where there was none. She thought motherhood made her dangerous. It only made her inconvenient.”
Alejandro makes a sound you have never heard from another human being. It is not a shout. It is not a curse. It is the raw sound of grief finally tearing into daylight.
He launches himself at Hector.
The two men crash into the sideboard, sending porcelain and old bills and a lamp to the floor. One of Hector’s guards moves to intervene, but your father, breathing hard and leaning against the wall, rips the fireplace poker from its stand and swings. The iron catches the man across the forearm with a brutal crack.
