Chapter 2
I moved Isabel into my bedroom, but she refused to let the children leave.
Sofia sat beside her holding one hand. Mateo pressed against her shoulder. Alma kept touching Isabel’s face every few seconds as if she needed proof her mother would still be there each time she looked back.
I understood.
I needed the same proof.
The man from the library finally gave his name when Salvatore pressed him hard enough.
Evan Mercer.
A Vega associate who had been allowed into my home because I believed he handled internal household security. That realization angered me almost as much as Victoria’s betrayal.
Mercer had not broken into my house.
I had paid him to protect it.
“How long?” I asked Isabel.
Her eyes went to the children.
I lowered my voice.
“How long were you behind that door?”
“Nine months.”
Sofia immediately started crying.
I closed my eyes.
Nine months.
I had walked past that corridor. Held meetings in the adjoining library. Left the mansion for council business while Isabel lived twenty feet away behind reinforced steel.
Victoria had sat at my table.
Beside my children.
Inside my grief.
Isabel drank before she continued.
“She never wanted me dead at first.”
I looked at her.
“At first?”
“She needed me alive because she didn’t know where I hid something.”
The map cabinet.
“What?”
“An old Vega marker collection.”
I frowned.
“Not money,” Isabel said. “Names.”
That changed everything.
The Vega organization had always been controlled through people before territory. Captains. Cousins. old debts. widows. men who remembered promises longer than facts.
“What names?”
“People who promised your father they would never serve you.”
The room went silent.
My father had been dead six years.
Isabel looked toward Sofia.
“I found the list by accident in the antique-map cabinet. Victoria saw me with it before I could show you.”
“What did she do?”
“She told me if I screamed, she would bring the children to the door one at a time.”
My hands curled.
“She never had to hurt them then,” Isabel whispered. “She only had to make me imagine it.”
That method felt older than Victoria.
More disciplined.
I looked toward Salvatore.
“Who taught her?”
Before Isabel could answer, one guard entered carrying a heavy black signet ring.
“We searched Mercer.”
I recognized the crest.
So did Salvatore.
“That belonged to Rafael Vega.”
My uncle.
A man supposedly gone from the family for four years.
May you like
I stared at the ring.
And nine months of imprisonment stopped looking like one woman’s ambition.
