Chapter 8 - The Truth Was Worse Than the Lie
Mateo’s arrest should have ended everything.
It didn’t.
The evidence did.
Federal investigators opened the archive.
Accounts.
Payments.
Murders.
Bribery.
Extortion.
And buried among Mateo’s crimes were transactions authorized by Ernesto and Gabriel decades earlier.
Neither man was innocent.
Valeria found Gabriel sitting alone.
“Are you going to prison?”
“Possibly.”
“You helped stop Mateo.”
“That doesn’t erase what I did before you were born.”
She appreciated that he didn’t make excuses.
Ernesto reached the same conclusion.
His attorneys offered strategies.
He refused them.
“I’m cooperating.”
His advisers were stunned.
Sofia wasn’t.
“You meant what you said on the roof.”
“I’m trying to.”
Isabella watched him carefully.
Trust would take longer.
Maybe years.
But for the first time, Ernesto wasn’t demanding it.
Alessandra struggled most.
Freedom frightened her.
She had spent her entire life waiting for Mateo’s next command.
Now nobody told her where to sleep.
What to wear.
What to study.
Who to follow.
One morning, Sofia found her standing in the kitchen staring at twenty different cereal boxes.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know which one I’m allowed to have.”
Sofia’s heart broke.
“All of them.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Welcome to freedom.”
Alessandra laughed.
It was possibly the first unguarded laugh of her adult life.
The three girls began building a relationship.
Not sisters exactly.
Not yet.
Something stranger.
Something chosen.
Valeria remained closest to Sofia.
Their childhood connection seemed to have survived somewhere beneath memory.
But a new problem emerged.
The birth certificate Gabriel had produced was fake.
Valeria confronted him.
“You said it was original.”
“I believed it was.”
Lucia examined it.
“This isn’t my signature.”
Then whose was it?
Investigators traced the document.
It had been created eighteen years earlier.
By Marco.
Ernesto summoned him.
Marco arrived on crutches.
“You forged it?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To protect Valeria.”
Gabriel looked furious.
“By naming me as her father?”
Marco shook his head.
“You are not her father.”
Silence.
Valeria felt the room disappear.
Gabriel stared.
“What?”
Lucia closed her eyes.
“Marco.”
Valeria looked at her mother.
“You knew.”
Lucia began crying.
“Valeria—”
“No.”
Not again.
Not another secret.
“Who is my father?”
Lucia could barely answer.
“His name was Daniel Cruz.”
Elena’s older brother.
A doctor.
A good man.
Lucia had loved him before the war.
Gabriel and Lucia’s marriage had been arranged between powerful families.
She became pregnant with Daniel’s child.
Valeria.
Gabriel had discovered the affair shortly before the birth.
“And you still protected me?” Valeria asked.
Gabriel looked at her.
“You were hers.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“Yes, it is.”
His eyes filled.
“I loved Lucia. You were her daughter. That was enough.”
Valeria stared at him.
All her life she had imagined finding her biological father.
Now she had discovered biology mattered less than she expected.
“What happened to Daniel?”
Lucia looked toward Marco.
Marco answered.
“Mateo killed him.”
Valeria closed her eyes.
Another life stolen.
Another truth buried.
“Why forge the certificate?”
“Because Mateo knew Daniel was your father. If anyone traced you to the Cruz family, he could find you.”
Marco had changed the father’s name to Gabriel.
A powerful shield.
And Gabriel?
He had believed the document.
Lucia had never corrected him.
“You let me believe she was mine,” Gabriel whispered.
Lucia looked at him.
“You treated her like she was.”
Gabriel looked toward Valeria.
“I still do.”
She began crying.
So did he.
Valeria walked into his arms.
“You’re still Dad.”
Gabriel held her tightly.
Across the room, Ernesto looked at Sofia.
“Apparently paperwork isn’t doing very well in this family.”
Sofia laughed through tears.
Even Isabella smiled.
But Marco had one more confession.
“There’s something else.”
Everyone groaned.
“No,” Valeria said. “Absolutely not. We are banning that sentence.”
Marco almost smiled.
Then his expression became serious.
“Mateo wasn’t working alone.”
Ernesto frowned.
“We arrested his people.”
“Not the person above him.”
“Above Mateo?”
Marco nodded.
“The money behind his organization came from someone else.”
“Who?”
Marco placed a photograph on the table.
Isabella gasped.
Lucia stepped backward.
Ernesto stared.
The photograph showed an elderly man leaving a private aircraft.
Sofia had seen him before.
In family portraits.
Ernesto’s father.
Alejandro Vega.
The man whose funeral Ernesto and Mateo had attended fifteen years earlier.
Valeria whispered:
“Please don’t tell me another dead person is alive.”
Marco shook his head.
“He’s dead.”
Everyone relaxed slightly.
Then Marco continued.
“But before he died, Alejandro created a trust designed to fund Mateo until one condition was met.”
“What condition?” Ernesto asked.
Marco looked at the three girls.
“The death of every surviving heir except one.”
Alessandra went pale.
“Me.”
Marco nodded.
Mateo had not simply raised Alessandra as an heir.
He had been preparing her to inherit everything.
And according to the trust documents, Mateo’s arrest activated a final clause.
If Mateo became unable to complete the succession—
May you like
someone else would.
Somewhere in San Aurelio, another person had just received orders to kill Sofia and Valeria.
