CHAPTER 16
HELENA
◆
Sofia arrived at the farmhouse carrying three laptops, two grocery bags, and her daughter’s pink backpack.
“Lia is with my sister,” she said before I could ask. “The backpack contains drives because no one steals from a seven-year-old who labels everything UNICORNS.”
I hugged her hard enough to crush the bread between us.
She smelled like coconut shampoo and the newsroom’s terrible hand soap. For one dangerous second, I wanted to go backward—to a desk buried in paper, lunch eaten cold over interview notes, and arguments about headlines that did not result in arrest warrants.
Sofia held me tighter. “Your apartment.”
“I know.”
“Your shoes.”
“I know.”
“The red ones?”
“One survived in a philosophical sense.”
She pulled back and examined me. “You are wearing a billionaire’s shirt.”
I looked down. Gabriel’s black button-down hung over my jeans, sleeves rolled to the elbows.
“My clothes burned.”
“That does not explain your face.”
“What is wrong with my face?”
“You have the expression of a woman who discovered moral ambiguity has shoulders.”
From the kitchen, Gabriel said, “I can hear you.”
Sofia looked past me. “Good. Then make coffee that respects her.”
“I have been criticized already.”
“Not enough.”
She walked into the farmhouse as if she had owned it before Bastion acquired it through a holding company. Mara met her at the table. Within three minutes they were comparing secure publication routes and insulting Gabriel’s password policies.
I loved them both for it.
The farmhouse sat inside an abandoned citrus estate two hours from the capital. White walls, red tile roof, an orchard stretching toward low hills.
It was not connected to Bastion’s main network. The only security system was local, powered by solar batteries and controlled from a panel near the pantry.
Gabriel had opened the shutters before we arrived.
The gesture had become quiet between us. He never pointed it out. I never thanked him where words might make it formal.
Sofia unpacked the unicorn backpack. “We have twenty-three outlets willing to publish simultaneously. Nine domestic, fourteen international. They need primary documents, verification notes, and a clean explanation no longer than eight hundred words.”
“Eight hundred?” I asked.
“People will read a banking conspiracy if you explain who loses rent money.”
“Feeling before framework,” Gabriel said.
I looked at him. “Who taught you that?”
“You.”
The answer warmed me more than it should have.
We spread evidence across the dining table. Inês’s ledger page. Photographs of the court certificates.
The copy of my father’s audit sheet. Dario’s recorded statements from the attorney call. Mara built a chain-of-custody index while Sofia drafted the simplest possible spine.
A private bank sold questionable payroll credits to a state bank.
The credits were created through a court-controlled data mirror.
A justice’s institute received millions each month while sealed orders forced approvals.
The same justice now planned to declare the resulting panic an emergency.
“Still too many nouns,” Sofia said.
“The court made fake loans, sold them to the public, and plans to arrest anyone who explains it,” I said.
She pointed at me. “Headline.”
Gabriel leaned back in his chair. “We cannot prove the court created the loans yet.”
I hated that he was right.
“Then we hold,” I said.
Sofia stared. “Your site is erased. Your home was burned. Every channel is calling you a terrorist, and you want to wait?”
“If we publish before the root source is proven, Vale will use one weak line to discredit everything.”
“Your father would publish.”
The words landed harder because Sofia loved me enough to use them.
“My father published too early once,” I said. “He trusted an internal memo without the original ledger. Vale called the discrepancy fabrication and used it to bury the entire case.”
Sofia’s anger softened. “You never told me that.”
“I blamed myself for losing the source.”
“You were twenty-four.”
“I was his researcher.”
“You were his daughter.”
Both things were true. I had spent years choosing the one that hurt more.
Gabriel reached beneath the table and rested his hand on my knee. No public speech.
No rescue. Just contact.
Sofia saw the movement and looked away with a small smile.
“All right,” she said. “We build everything but schedule nothing until the root proof arrives.”
“Thank you.”
“You can thank me by surviving.”
“I am working on it.”
“Work faster.”
We broke for food near sunset. The grocery bags contained cheese, tomatoes, coffee, chocolate, and three types of pastry.
“Emergency nutrition,” Sofia said.
Mara opened a package. “I approve this operation.”
Gabriel stood at the stove attempting eggs.
The first batch became rubber. The second fused to the pan. On the third, he stared at the spatula as if it had betrayed national security.
“You can land a damaged aircraft,” I reminded him.
“The aircraft follows instructions.”
“So does the recipe.”
“It says cook until done. That is not an instruction. It is an outcome.”
Sofia laughed so hard she had to sit down.
The sound transformed the room. For ten minutes, we ate burned eggs and warm bread while Mara told a story about Gabriel being locked out of his own office by a prototype he had insisted was foolproof.
“I fired the prototype,” he said.
“You argued with a door for forty minutes,” Mara corrected.
I looked at him. “This is why you shoot them now.”
His gaze met mine, and the private memory moved between us.
After dinner, Sofia and I carried coffee to the back porch. The orchard smelled green and damp after rain. Fireflies blinked between the trees.
“You like him,” she said.
“I distrust him in a complicated way.”
“You slept with him.”
I nearly spilled my coffee. “Mara told you?”
“Your hair told me. Your mouth told me. He watches you like someone put gravity in a black shirt.”
I stared into the orchard. “He helped execute the order against my father.”
“Did he know?”
“No. He signed another seizure that gave Vale the source database.”
“That is worse.”
“Yes.”
“And he told you.”
“Yes.”
Sofia drank her coffee. “Men with power usually confess only what cannot hurt them.”
“I know.”
“Can this hurt him?”
“It could destroy Bastion.”
“That is not what I asked.”
I looked through the kitchen window. Gabriel stood beside Mara, listening to a security update.
Even in an old farmhouse, he occupied space like a man accustomed to command. Then he glanced toward the porch, found me immediately, and his whole face shifted by a fraction.
“Yes,” I said. “It hurts him.”
Sofia nodded. “That matters. It does not erase anything.”
“I know.”
“Do you feel safe with him?”
The answer should have been impossible after two days.
“He makes space for my exits.”
“That was not a metaphor, was it?”
“No.”
She squeezed my hand. “Then make sure he learns safety is not the same as surveillance.”
“He is learning.”
“Are you?”
I looked at Sofia. We had met twelve years earlier when she corrected my headline in red ink and then bought me dinner because junior reporters were paid in humiliation.
She had held my hand at my father’s funeral, slept on my sofa after my mother died, and once brought Lia to the newsroom in pajamas because a minister released budget records at midnight.
She knew every version of me that existed before Gabriel. That made her question harder than jealousy and safer than permission.
“I am learning that being protected feels good,” I said. “That scares me more than danger. Danger has obvious edges.”
“Then keep the pleasure and inspect the edges,” she said. “Women are allowed to want strong arms without signing away their own.”
A faint mechanical buzz moved above the orchard.
I looked up.
A small black drone hovered beyond the third row of trees, almost invisible against the darkening sky.
The red camera light blinked once.
“Inside,” I said.
Sofia did not ask why. We moved through the door as Gabriel and Mara drew weapons.
The drone accelerated toward the house.
Gabriel shoved us behind the stone kitchen island. Mara triggered the local signal jammer. The drone veered, struck an orange tree, and exploded in a burst of sparks.
Glass shook in the windows.
“Surveillance or weapon?” I asked.
“Both,” Mara said. “Small charge. Enough to kill someone on the porch.”
Gabriel’s hands moved over my arms, checking. “Were you hit?”
“No. Sofia?”
“I am reconsidering my career.” Her face was pale, but her voice held. “Maybe restaurant criticism.”
Mara retrieved a shielded evidence bag and went outside with two guards.
Gabriel turned to the security panel. “No external transmission from this house. No vehicle tail. Only six people knew the location.”
“Name them,” I said.
“You, me, Mara, Lucia, Camila, and—”
“Tomás.”
I had told him during the conference attack that Sofia would meet us at the citrus property. I had not given an address, but a senator could find a holding record.
My phone vibrated.
A message from Tomás.
ARE YOU SAFE? I HEARD ABOUT THE DRONE.
The explosion had happened forty-seven seconds earlier.