Chapter 20 - The Shadow over the Hacienda
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The man in the tailored suit slowly slid the photograph back into his pocket and picked up his leather briefcase.
"Your usefulness to us has ended, Valeria," the man said smoothly, standing up from his stool. "You will spend the rest of your miserable life in this cage, forgotten by the world."
"Wait! Don't leave me!" Valeria screamed, banging her cuffed hands against the thick glass. "What are you going to do to them?!"
The man didn't answer. He simply gave her a final, chilling look of absolute indifference, hung up the telephone receiver, and walked out through the heavy steel doors.
Back at the sun-drenched hacienda, the late afternoon breeze blew softly through the courtyard.
Doña Rosa sat in her wheelchair, watching Sofia sleep peacefully in a hammock under the shade of a large oak tree. Don Fernando had stepped inside the house to take a phone call from his legal team.
Rosa reached into her cardigan pocket and pulled out a small, metallic silver USB drive attached to a heavy gold key ring—the master encryption key Fernando had handed her for safekeeping earlier that morning.
“If anything ever happens to me, Rosa,” Fernando had told her with absolute gravity, “this key holds the entire future of my legacy. Keep it safe.”
Rosa looked down at the tiny piece of metal resting in her palm.
Suddenly, her satellite phone on the outdoor table vibrated quietly.
There was no ringtone. Just a single text message from an unregistered, international number.
Rosa picked up the phone and opened the message.
It contained no text—only a single, high-resolution photograph taken from the treeline just beyond the hacienda's security fence.
The photo was taken from a high-powered sniper lens. It showed Rosa sitting in her wheelchair, holding the silver USB drive in her hand, with a bright red laser dot resting precisely over the center of her chest.
Below the image, a single line of text appeared:
The game isn't over, Doña Rosa. Welcome to the real table.
Rosa’s breath caught in her throat. She looked out toward the dark, silent forest bordering the estate. The wind rustled the leaves, but the tree line remained pitch black, guarding its deadly secrets.
She closed her hand tightly around the silver key, her heart pounding with a familiar, terrifying rhythm.
May you like
The nightmare with Valeria was over.
But as the red laser dot flickered silently across the white sleeve of her cardigan, Doña Rosa realized that the war for Don Fernando’s empire had only just begun.
