Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
NINE YEARS AGO
The elevator lights above Lucía hummed softly. Somewhere below, the firm was settling into its nightly silence, screensavers blooming across empty monitors, the hum of expensive machinery whispering through the bones of the building.
Lucía gripped her satchel with both hands. Her pulse felt loud. She wasn’t late. Not technically. But Mateo had texted her twice. Just the letter: L?
She’d replied: On my way.
The elevator chimed. The doors opened onto the 9th floor, Legal Records and Archives.
He was already there. Waiting. He didn’t turn when he heard her steps, just kept scanning a large screen, his arms folded across his chest.
The overhead lights were too bright. Rows of filing cabinets and locked shelves gleamed dully around them.
“Mateo?” she asked.
His voice was flat. “When were you going to tell me?”
Lucía blinked. “Tell you what?”
He turned now. His eyes were tired. Angry. Hurt. “That you’re working on something, something Javier hasn’t cleared through audit or legal.”
Her mouth opened, but no words came.
“I know you,” he said. “You don’t miss steps. You don’t forget protocols. So if you’re hiding something—”
“I’m not hiding it.”
“You’ve encrypted it off-grid.”
She exhaled slowly. “It’s a side project. Confidential. He trusts me.”
Mateo barked out a short, mirthless laugh. “He owns you.”
“Don’t,” she said, and the word came out harsher than she intended.
He stared at her. “Lucía, you know what this is. I found the shell company he used in Panama. It connects back to a holding firm in Jalisco. And that connects to—”
“Stop,” she said again. Her hand was trembling. “You don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me.”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. Maybe because she’d only vetted this in a dark corner of her own mind.
Only given it the green light because it fed into her own ambition, but which she knew she could never justify out loud.
Could never explain the logic behind continuing to work with a man who’d abused his own position of power over her to try and get up her skirt.
And then let him pull her even deeper into a very dangerous world.
Mateo stepped closer. He lowered his voice. “Look, I’m not accusing you. I’m trying to help. But I need to know what he’s making you do. Are you helping him launder money? Cartel money?”
She flinched.
He saw it. That was all the answer he needed.
A long silence passed between them, cold and breathless. Finally, Lucía said, “He’ll kill you, Mateo.”
“If that’s a threat—”
“It’s not. It’s a fact. You don’t cross him. Not out loud. Not even in your head.”
“I’m not afraid of him.”
“Well, I am.”
Another silence. But softer now.
He reached out and took her hand. “You don’t have to do this alone. We can fix it. Together.”
She looked at his fingers curled around hers.
They were warm and steady. She remembered how his hands had been one of the first things she’d noticed about him.
She’d never had a dirty thought about him; never fantasized about those hands gripping her hair or her ass, but that might have come, if she’d let him in.
If she hadn’t been hypnotized, like a snake dancing to Javier’s tune.
And it wasn’t too late, right?
She squeezed Mateo’s hands, and he squeezed back. For the first time in weeks, she let herself breathe. “You’d really help me?”
He nodded.
“I don’t know how,” she whispered.
“We’ll figure it out. We just need time.”
She nodded. Slowly.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Meet me at my place. We’ll plan everything then.”
“Okay.”
He squeezed her hand again. “I missed you,” he said.
She didn’t answer, but she didn’t let go either. And for the first time since she set foot in this place, she began to feel the tension drain from her body, and a petal of hope begin to bloom.
Lucía stood outside Mateo’s apartment, her heart beating fast. She’d walked here, carrying nothing but the USB in her jacket pocket and her phone. Every step she’d taken had felt lighter than the last.
They had a plan. Mateo had said they’d fix it. Together.
She knocked again. Firmer this time.
Nothing.
The hallway was quiet. No neighbors coming or going. Just the ticking fluorescent overhead and the low buzz of a dying fly near the window.
She tried the handle. It wasn’t locked. Her stomach dropped. She stood on the threshold, the handle still in her hand, ice creeping up her spine.
It took all her mental strength to convince herself to step inside.
“Mateo?”
No answer.
The place was dim. Curtains still drawn. Coffee mug half-full on the table. Seeing them gave her a flare of hope. Maybe he’d overslept. Maybe he was in the shower. Maybe—
She turned toward the bedroom. And stopped.
The smell hit her first, metallic and musky. The light from the hallway fell across the floorboards. His hand was visible just past the edge of the bed. Palm-up. Still. Fingers half-curled like they’d tried, and failed, to grasp something in the final seconds.
There was blood on the walls. And the floor. Not a pool. A spill. It had soaked into the grain of the wood like ink into paper.
She didn’t scream, she just stood there. Panic and horror were crawling up her windpipe, clutching at her throat, preventing any sound from escaping. The USB in her coat pocket suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
This was the consequence. This was what happened when you said yes to someone else.
Then she heard a sound. A soft click in the hallway.
Lucía froze. The door to the stairwell creaked shut, echoing down the corridor.
Her pulse climbed into her throat. Whoever did this wasn’t just gone, they’d only left minutes ago.
There was a buzz in her pocket. She pulled her phone out with trembling fingers. No number. Just a message.
Are you coming in today? —J
The letters blurred as her vision swam. Javier. He wasn’t really asking her to come in. He was giving her a destination—one he controlled, one she wouldn’t walk out of.
She stared at the body one last time. The weight of guilt and grief pressed against her ribs, but survival screamed louder. She backed out of the apartment, slowly, silently. Yanked the door closed behind her.
In the hallway, she didn’t breathe until she’d made it to the stairwell. She pressed her hand to her chest. Counted to ten. Then again.
She could fall apart later. Right now, she had to disappear.
The bus terminal was loud with engines and shouting. A baby screamed somewhere near the long-distance kiosk. A man smoked beside the restroom sign, his eyes half-shut in the fluorescent light.
Lucía stood at the automated ticket machine, entering a fake name she’d memorized. She paid in cash. The bills were damp with her palm sweat.
Her stomach ached with hunger. She ignored it.
Javier’s USB was zipped into the lining of her coat. She hadn’t let it out of her sight since she left the apartment. Somehow, it still felt heavier than it should. Like it carried Mateo’s body inside it.
The screen blinked. Her ticket printed.
Puebla. Then south. Then gone.
She took the slip and moved like a sleepwalker into the crowd. No calls. No luggage except for her backpack. No goodbyes.
She’d destroyed her old phone in the sink of a public restroom, then flushed the SIM card. Her email was wiped. Her financial trail stopped cold the moment she withdrew the last of her pesos and converted it to anonymous cryptocurrency at a bitcoin ATM.
At the bottom of her pack, wrapped in an old dish towel, was her grandfather’s Colt 1911.
It hadn’t been fired in decades, but it was clean, oiled, and loaded, her father had made sure of that.
She hadn’t planned on taking it. But when she’d seen it in the drawer while she was hastily packing a few clothes into her backpack, she’d known she’d feel safer with it.
By the time they found Mateo’s body, if they even bothered reporting it, she would be a phantom.
But the hardest part wasn’t vanishing. It was staying vanished.
Over the next month, she moved like smoke. Veracruz. Tabasco. Campeche. Each place left behind as quickly as she arrived. She cut her hair. Learned to walk differently. She didn’t keep receipts. She didn’t ask questions. She didn’t look anyone in the eye longer than two seconds.
She used burner laptops for everything. Air-gapped, always wiped. She never stayed anywhere more than five nights. Never visited the same café twice. Never let herself be photographed. She’d learned from the best. Javier had trained her to be precise and fastidious, in his way.
And now she was using every ounce of that education to disappear from him.
In one of her first safehouses, she stood before a cracked mirror, inspecting the lines around her eyes. The dark circles beneath them.
Her old self had died with Mateo. The woman staring back was someone else entirely.
Not Lucía Duarte. Not anyone. Just a shadow wearing human skin.
She lifted the drive to eye level. It was no longer a key, it was a curse. Proof. Power. And vengeance waiting to be unlocked.
One day, she would finish what Mateo had wanted to start. But not yet. Not until she was safe, and ready. Not until she could strike in a way that Javier would feel in the marrow of his bones. She slipped the drive back over her neck. Pulled the curtain closed.
And vanished.