“He died…” Mateo whispered. “And after that… I was completely alone…”
Her eyes welled with tears.
—No name… no past… no one…
Silence returned.
A crushing one.
The kind that suffocates the soul.
“Until three weeks ago,” he went on, “I saw my face on television… and everything began to come back…”
Don Ricardo clenched his fists.
Five years.
Five years lost somewhere in the world… while they grieved at the wrong grave.
The phone rang.
The DNA results.
Don Ricardo picked up with shaking hands.
He listened.
Closed his eyes.
And when he ended the call… his strength gave out.
He dropped to his knees.
“It’s him…” he whispered. “It’s our son…”
Doña Elena cried out through her tears.
Mateo… the son they had lost… had come back from the dead.
But what no one knew…
What none of them could have imagined…
Was that, that very night…
While tears of joy filled the house…
Elsewhere in the city…
Someone received a message.
“Matthew is alive.”
And the smile that spread across her face…
Wasn’t happiness.
It was something far more terrifying.
Because the dead…
Do not return without bringing the truth with them.
And the truth…
Can destroy everything.
The smile on her face slowly disappeared.
“No…” the man whispered, staring at his phone. “That’s impossible…”
But the message remained.
Unmoving. Unforgiving.
“Matthew is alive.”
The silence in the office was suffocating.
She paced restlessly, dragging a hand through her hair. Everything had been perfectly planned… every detail exactly as intended…
Until now.
“If he’s alive…” she muttered, “then he remembers…”
And if he remembered…
It would all fall apart.
That same night, at the Salazar mansion, joy had returned… but something felt off.
Mateo couldn’t sleep.
Lying in his old room, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars still stuck to the ceiling from his childhood… a deep unease gripped him.
Something… wasn’t right.
He shut his eyes.
And then—
A memory hit him.
Incomplete. Blurred. Like lightning cutting through darkness.
A bathroom… pounding music… neon lights…
And a voice.
—“You’re going to do what I say… or you’ll regret it.”
Mateo’s eyes flew open, his breathing uneven.
That voice…
He knew it.
But he couldn’t place it.
He pressed his hands to his head.
—Who… who were you…?
The pain was sharp, overwhelming.
But he didn’t stop.
Because something inside him… was urging him to keep going.
The next morning, the mood at the table felt strange.
Doña Elena kept watching him, as if afraid he might vanish again.
Don Ricardo was quiet, more serious than usual.
