Chapter 4
The drive from the office to our home in Morumbi was a blur.
I remembered only gripping the steering wheel until my fingers went numb and ignoring every red light in my path.
My car’s engine roared through the streets of S?o Paulo, but the sound was nothing compared with the thunder inside my own head.
My mother is dead.
The phrase repeated itself in a maddening loop, distilling a poison that paralyzed my thinking. Eleonora Vasconcelos, the unshakable matriarch, the woman who ruled our empire with an iron fist. Dead…
When I turned the corner onto our street, the abstract panic that had been suffocating me turned into a physical, searing reality.
The entrance to the mansion was in chaos.
Police vehicles blocked the massive wrought-iron gates, and the red and blue lights of the flashing sirens swept across the imposing facade of the house, transforming my sanctuary into a funeral scene.
I abandoned the car haphazardly on the driveway, leaving the driver’s door open. My feet touched the stone pavement, and I ran. With every step, the air grew thinner, as if the atmosphere itself were pushing me away.
I walked past the police officers at the entrance without even glancing at them, pushing open the heavy double doors made of solid oak.
The cold, air-conditioned air of the house hit my face, carrying with it a smell I’ll never forget: the acrid, metallic odor of fresh blood.
I stopped at the threshold of the entry hall. My pulse faltered.
The yellow and black police tape cut across the room, separating my world before the tragedy from the hell that had just taken hold.
In the center of the imported white marble floor, a silver sheet covered a human form.
But the sheet wasn’t large enough to hide the dark, thick pool that stained the polished stone.
I took an instinctive step forward, my chest rising and falling in short, gasping breaths.
“Mr. Vasconcelos!” Roberto, my head of security, appeared in my field of vision, stepping into my path with his hands raised in a conciliatory gesture.
“Get out of my way, Roberto,” I ordered in a harsh, raspy growl.
“Sir, please, the forensic team is working. You can’t cross the tape.”
I looked over his shoulder. Two men in lab coats were taking photos of the floor, the stair steps, and the body under the sheet.
Reality hit me like a concrete wall. My mother.
That stubborn, sharp-tongued woman who taught me to be the shark I was in the business world—she was lying there, broken on the floor of my own home.
A bald man approached where Roberto and I were standing. He held a notepad in his hand and had the clinical gaze of someone who dealt with death on a daily basis.
“Mr. Vasconcelos? I’m Detective Carvalho.” He didn’t offer his hand. “I’m sorry for your loss. We need you to stay calm so we can do our work.”
“Calm?” I repeated the word as if it were a foreign language. “What happened here, Detective? How did my mother fall from that staircase?”
Carvalho looked at Roberto, then at me, his eyes narrowed in professional skepticism.
“That’s exactly the question we’re trying to answer, sir. The fall was brutal. But what’s puzzling the investigation is that, according to preliminary reports from your employees, your mother and your wife didn’t have a… friendly relationship.”
The name Maria Rita hit me like an electric shock. The blind panic of losing her resurfaced amid all that chaos.
“Where is my wife?” I demanded, anger beginning to supplant my grief, boiling in my veins. “What have you done to her?”
“She’s in the living room, sir,” Carvalho replied, his tone carefully neutral. “She was the first to reach the body. And she was by her side when the security guards and the housekeeper arrived.”
The cogs in my mind—wired to foresee corporate attacks and anticipate market betrayals—began turning in a dark direction. My mother had never accepted Maria Rita. Their arguments were constant, a poison dripped daily through the hallways of this very house. My mother had sworn to destroy her.
I turned my face toward the adjacent living room.
Maria Rita was standing there.
The woman I loved, the girl I had brought from the sert?o to be the mistress of my life, was there. The light-colored dress she had been wearing that morning, when we woke up embraced and lost in each other, was ruined. Her hands…
My eyes locked on Maria Rita’s skin. There was my mother’s blood staining my wife’s hands, wrists, and the sleeves of her dress.
“Eduardo!” she cried out through her tears, taking unsteady steps toward me.
She sought my gaze—that refuge I had always offered her, the silent promise that I would face the world for her. But when my eyes met hers, something inside me broke.
I didn’t see the innocent girl walking barefoot on the beach. The excruciating pain of losing my mother clouded my vision. The investigator’s words and my own family’s constant warnings about the character of those who come from nothing and gain everything exploded in my mind all at once.
“Eduardo, my love!” she called again, stopping a few steps away from me, her face contorted with terror.
I recoiled. It was an involuntary movement, an imperceptible step backward, but the impact of that recoil filled the space between us with devastating force.
“What did you do?” The question slipped from my lips before I could hold it back, in a hoarse whisper laden with horror.
Her eyes widened; the tears stopped flowing for a moment of sheer shock.
“I didn’t do anything! Eduardo, for God’s sake, do you think I…”
“You two were alone!” My voice rose; grief was tearing me apart from the inside and turning me into a man I didn’t recognize. I pointed toward the entryway, at the covered body. “She hated you, Maria Rita. Now my mother is dead at the foot of my stairs!”
“She fell! I heard the noise and came downstairs—I swear by everything that’s sacred—I found her there!” Maria Rita pressed her bloodstained hands to her own face in despair, staining her pale cheeks with my family’s blood. “You can’t believe them, Eduardo. You know me!”
Did I know her? The question echoed in my mind, poisoned by pain. Just a few months ago, she was a stranger waiting tables. I had given her the world, and my mother was the only obstacle standing in the way of her having absolute control over everything without being questioned.
I closed my eyes tightly, pressing my fingers against my temples, feeling my sanity slip away.
The pain was so unbearable that I needed someone to blame to anchor my rage.
I needed the world to make logical sense, and the image of her, covered in Eleonora’s blood, was the only tangible evidence before me.
“Mr. Vasconcelos,” Detective Carvalho interjected, stepping between me and my wife, his expression hardening. “We need to take Mrs. Vasconcelos to the police station. Given the scene and the preliminary statements, she is the prime suspect and needs to be formally questioned.”
Maria Rita looked at me. There was a silent, heart-wrenching plea in those brown eyes—a cry for help, begging the prince to save her from that nightmare.
But I was no longer her prince. Grief had consumed me.
“Take her away,” I ordered, turning my back on the woman I loved, my jaw clenched as I walked toward my mother’s body.
“Eduardo, no!” Her scream tore through the room, a shrill sound, laden with betrayal and utter despair that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “Please, don’t let me go with them! Eduardo!”
The sound of the police officers holding her back, Maria Rita’s convulsive sobs as she was dragged toward the police cars, the murmurs of the staff—it all mingled with the deafening buzz in my head.
I fell to my knees on the cold marble floor, next to the police tape, and covered my face with my hands.
On that dark night in S?o Paulo, I didn’t just lose the woman who gave me life.
I lost the only woman who had taught my heart to beat, poisoned by the suspicion that I myself had brought a murderer into my own home.