Chapter 22
Ernesto
Casimiro’s smirk, his whispered threats, the calculation of loyalty and betrayal–they’re a constant, ugly current in my mind.
Business pressures, the intricate dance of contracts, alliances, and strategies.
I carry it all, alone, in the cold, hard confines of my mind.
I’m the head of the Damos family, El Rey del Imperio que mi padre construyó con sus propias manos.
Yet, I feel completely powerless when it comes to protecting those around me.
My gaze drifts across my room, past the heavy drapes and the dark polished furniture, to the bed.
Alejandra lies curled on her side, the silk sheets pooled around her.
Her breathing is soft and even. My wife sleeps, unaware of the battles raging just beyond the same doors that keep her safe.
Battles I fight to keep her and everything that is mine safe.
I tell myself I keep watching her for security, silently assessing the constant risks.
The Ofrenda still stands in the garden, with Elena's photograph at its center, like a silent, haunting testament.
I’m deep into my self-loathing thoughts when a high-pitched, desperate scream rips through the quiet of the night.
Camilla.
I’m off the coach before the sound of the glass tumbler half full of mezcal hits the carpet with a thud. My feet hit the cold marble floor as I run to Camilla’s room.
Her door is slightly ajar, but I slam it open the rest of the way and hit the light switch next to it.
The sudden noise echoes in her room. Camilla sits bolt upright in her bed, a small trembling figure in the dark.
Fat tears streak her cheeks, and her nightgown is soaked from her sweat.
Her small body still shakes with violent tremors, as her wide eyes full of terror take my presence in.
“PAPI!” Camilla screams for me as she launches herself across the bed. I catch her in my arms and pull her against my chest. Her little arms wrap around my neck in a frantic grip as she buries her face against my shoulder. She feels impossibly fragile in my arms as her sobs rack her small frame.
“Mi amor. Mi nina hermosa, ?qué tienes, chiquita? ?Qué pasó?” I murmur into her ear, trying to calm her down. My free hand strokes her tangled hair in a soothing motion.
“My…” She clings to me, her breath hitching. “My dream. I was scared.”
“It was just a dream, mi vida. Bad dreams can’t hurt you here.” I tell her as I tighten my hold on her.
She pulls back to meet my eyes, her tear-filled ones searching mine. “It was…it was mommy.”
My heart seizes. Elena?
“She was in my dream,” Camilla whispers, her voice barely audible.
“She was so beautiful, Papi. Like in the pictures you have.” A fresh wave of tears tracks paths through her dried ones.
“She was standing very far away. Like, at the end of the hallway. I tried to run to her, papi, I really did. I tried my fastest to run, but I couldn’t get closer to her.
She just stayed far away from me. I even called her name, Papi.
I called her, but she didn’t move, and she wouldn’t talk to me. ”
She looks up at me, lower lip trembling, her small hands clutching desperately at my shirt. “Why don’t I remember her, Papi?”
The question lands in my gut like a brutal punch by Santiago. This feels heavier than any business threat or any cartel ultimatum I’ve dealt with.
Camilla was born into a world of silence.
Elena died hours after giving birth to my baby girl.
She heard no lullabies or whispered reassurances from her mother’s voice.
No skin-to-skin warmth that etches the mother’s scent into the child’s memory.
No time to etch Elena’s voice to imprint in her daughter’s mind.
All Camilla has are photographs and stories told by others.
Fragments she has been trying to piece together into who she thinks her mother is.
She’s grown so much, it’s to the point those fragmented pieces aren’t enough anymore.
My little girl isn’t afraid of forgetting her mom.
She’s afraid of never having had anything about her to remember.
"I don’t know what she sounds like, Papi," Camilla says, her voice cracking, breaking my heart into a thousand pieces. "When you tell me her laugh sounds like a song… I try to hear it. I close my eyes and squeeze them really hard so I can try to make her laugh in my head, like you say. But I can’t. I don’t know what it sounds like. "
I’ve spent Camilla’s entire life describing Elena’s laugh to Camilla.
Bright. Full. Slightly breathless but always from the heart.
How it always made my own heart dance and beat faster each time I heard her laugh.
But that description, those words, have never given my daughter the one thing she craves: proof—the tangible, visceral proof of a mother’s presence.
That realization breaks me.
Tears, hot and unstoppable, stream down my face.
Not controlled tears, not the quiet grief I allow myself in the dark in my own solitude.
These tears are from years of buried pain, of guilt, of unspoken loss, erupt.
I weep openly, my body shaking, in front of my daughter.
I mourn Elena again, but this time it is through Camilla’s eyes, through the emptiness my daughter carries, through the mother she never got to have.
The guilt suddenly feels crushing, like a physical weight pressing the air from my lungs. I can clearly remember the hospital room—the sterile, metallic smell of blood. The doctor’s voice, quiet and apologetic, lowered itself to a whisper to deliver the horrifying news.
The flatline on the monitor, the finality of the machines stopping as the code team turns them off.
Then there were the nurses. Their faces grim and full of sadness as they placed Camilla—a tiny, squalling bundle—into my arms while Elena’s body lay still on the bed beside us. I remember promising her, promising Elena, I would protect our daughter.
For six years, I have kept Camilla alive and safe by keeping her existence as secret as I can. But no matter what I did, I couldn't give her a mother. I couldn't give her that.
Until now.
There’s a soft rustle in the doorway as Alejandra makes her way into the room.
At first, I barely register her presence. My world has shrunk to Camilla and her trembling body, to the wet warmth of tears against my chest.
Alejandra doesn’t rush the moment. She doesn’t offer any dramatic comfort or platitudes. Nor does she try to speak for Elena or explain death to Camilla. She simply kneels beside the bed, her movements quiet and calm.
“Mila,” she says, her voice a soft, steady beacon in the storm that is our grief. “Would you like to sleep in our bed with us tonight? My Nana Lupe would always let me sleep with her whenever I had a bad dream.”
Camilla’s head slowly lifts from my chest. Her eyes, still full of tears, dart to Alejandra. She nods immediately, a small, desperate movement.
“Ok. Let’s go.” Alejandra tells Camilla as she stands back up.
I watch both of them out of the room and down the hallway towards my bedroom–our bedroom. Camilla’s little hand wrapped in Alejandra’s, her grip a fragile yet trusting grip. I follow silently behind them, like a ghost in my own home. I am a man stripped bare tonight.
Alejandra lifts Camilla onto the bed, settling her down right in the center of the California King bed.
She settles beside her, pulling the duvet over her small frame.
Alejandra finally talks at this moment, not about dreams or mothers, but about simple things.
Ordinary things. School, what to do tomorrow.
What they’ll eat for breakfast later. An ordinary conversation.
She’s grounding Camilla back into our world.
Camilla listens. Her breath, ragged moments ago, is now steady and easy. Within minutes, the soft, even breaths of sleep fill the room.
I stand at the foot of the bed, a silent observer.
I have given Camilla only memories, filling the absence with explanations.
All while Alejandra has given her safety, and real memories fill Camilla’s life with her presence. That’s the difference. And that difference unsettles me more deeply than my own breakdown.
I see it now. The reason Alejandra will never replace Elena is because Elena never actually had a place in Camilla’s life. Alejandra doesn’t have to compete with a ghost because she actually has something to offer Camilla—a real maternal presence.
And that realization shakes me to my core.
Because this means my daughter might begin to look to Alejandra for comfort, for that specific, tender loving touch a mother gives.
It means attachment could form, deep and lasting.
It means Elena’s memory, as sacred and untouched as it sat for so long, might someday share the same space with someone new.
I lie down on the opposite side of the bed, stiff and careful. My body is rigid, ensuring I don’t accidentally touch Alejandra. Camilla sleeps between us, a small, fragile bridge connecting my raw past and Alejandra’s uncertain future in this house.
I can’t sleep as I stare at the ceiling. I have fought my enemies with guns and strategy. I crush any threat before they even surface. There’s a slow, quiet shift inside my own home, inside my life, that is happening.
My daughter will grow up knowing her mother, but only through stories. Stories someone else in her life is helping shape now, and I know, with a certainty that chills me to my core, because for the first time in my life this is something I can’t control.