Chapter 3: What He Said Next
"Is the baby even mine?"
Alejandro went completely still.
Those four words.
Spoken by a man whose wife was in surgery.
Whose child might not survive the night.
And that was the first thing out of his mouth.
Not *is she okay*.
Not *I'm coming*.
Not *I'm sorry*.
"What did you just say?" Alejandro's voice dropped to something quiet and dangerous.
"You heard me." Mateo's tone shifted — the drunk sloppiness hardening into something uglier underneath.
"She's been acting strange for months.
Distant.
Secretive.
And now she's calling *you* in the middle of the night instead of anyone else?
You tell me what that looks like."
"It looks like a woman who was dying on the floor of your house while you had your phone on airplane mode for another woman."
A pause.
"That's not—" Mateo started.
"Seventeen calls, Mateo.
I counted them on her phone when I picked it up off the floor.
Seventeen.
The last one came in at 2:09 in the morning.
You rejected it at 2:09 and eleven seconds."
Silence again.
Longer this time.
"I'm coming to the hospital."
"Don't." The word came out flat and final.
"She is in surgery.
Your presence will not help her.
And I need you to understand something before you walk through those doors."
"You don't get to tell me—"
"I found the gate security logs, Mateo." Alejandro kept his voice even.
"The gate at your mansion has a camera system.
Motion-activated.
It records every time the gate is accessed remotely." He let that sit for exactly two seconds.
"Someone opened that gate from outside the property at 11:47 last night.
While Camila was already inside.
Alone."
The silence on Mateo's end changed texture entirely.
"That's not possible."
"I have the timestamp.
I have the access code used.
And I have the number it was accessed from." Alejandro stood up from the corridor bench, his voice dropping further.
"Do you want to tell me whose number that is?
Or should I keep reading?"
"You're lying."
"I'm standing in a hospital corridor at five in the morning because your wife called me when she had no one else.
I have no reason to lie to you.
I have every reason to tell you exactly what I know." A beat.
"And what I know is that someone made sure that gate stayed locked from the outside after she fell.
Someone who knew she was alone.
Someone who had the access code."
The line went quiet for so long that Alejandro checked to see if the call had dropped.
It hadn't.
"I'll be there in twenty minutes," Mateo finally said.
His voice had lost all its bluster.
What replaced it was something Alejandro couldn't quite name — not grief, not guilt.
Something more calculated than either.
"Mateo." Alejandro's hand tightened on the phone.
"If you had anything to do with what happened to her tonight — anything at all — I will find out.
And I will not be quiet about it."
The call ended without another word.
Alejandro stood in the empty corridor and looked at the closed surgical doors at the far end of the hall.
A nurse passed him with a tray.
A clock on the wall read 5:03 a.m.
Then his phone buzzed.
A message from his head of security, sent two minutes ago.
*The access code used to lock the gate belongs to a secondary account.
Registered eight months ago.
The billing address is an apartment in Colonia del Valle.*
Alejandro knew that neighborhood.
May you like
He knew it well.
It was where Valeria lived.
