Your mouth goes dry.
“How do you know me?” you ask.
His smile widens slightly.
“I know everything,” he says. “That’s why I’m here.”
You feel cold crawl up your spine.
“You should leave,” you say, trying to sound stronger than you feel.
Sebastián chuckles.
“Oh, I will,” he says. “But first, a warning.”
He leans closer, voice dropping. “Families like ours don’t enjoy surprises.”
Then he adds, softly, “And we don’t like strangers wearing our blood.”
You freeze.
Because he said it like he already knows.
Or like he suspects enough to threaten.
When you tell Don Esteban, his face turns deadly calm.
“Stay with security,” he says immediately.
You blink. “Security?”
He nods.
“You think the street was dangerous because of the cold,” he says. “But the Salgado family is a different kind of winter.”
Then he looks at you, voice firm. “I won’t let them touch you.”
You don’t like the word “them.”
It makes your stomach twist, because if you’re his niece, then “them” is also your family in some twisted way.
But you’ve lived long enough to know blood doesn’t automatically mean love.
Sometimes blood just means someone thinks they own you.
The lawyer accelerates.
She files requests. She digs through sealed records. She contacts an old midwife rumored to have helped “girls in trouble” decades ago.
And in the middle of all that, you get a message that nearly stops your heart.
A photo.
A picture of your mother leaving the clinic, taken from far away.
Attached text: Tell Esteban to stop digging, or the old woman stops breathing.
You drop your phone.
Your lungs seize.
You run to your mother’s room, trembling, checking the hallway, checking the corners, checking shadows like they’ve learned your name.
Don Esteban arrives within minutes, fury in his eyes.
He takes your phone, reads the message, and his face goes blank.
Not calm. Not controlled. Blank, like a switch flipped from businessman to protector.
He calls someone.
Not the police.
Someone else.
That night, you learn a new side of Don Esteban.
He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t posture.
He just moves, quietly, decisively, like a man who once slept behind markets and learned how predators operate.
Security doubles at the clinic.
Your mother is moved to another facility under a different name.
You’re taken to a safe house, a place that looks ordinary from the outside but has cameras and locks that click like teeth.
And you sit on a couch staring at your hands, realizing your life is no longer yours to navigate alone.
“You’re not a prisoner,” Don Esteban tells you, reading your expression.
“You’re protected.”
You laugh bitterly.
“Protected feels a lot like trapped,” you say.
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