Chapter 3 - THE BROTHER BURIED WITHOUT A BODY
The hatch stopped opening halfway.
Darkness waited beneath it.
Cold air rose from underground carrying the smell of concrete, rust, stale water, and something chemical enough to make Ramon instinctively pull Lucia farther back.
Nobody spoke for several seconds.
Gabriel is alive.
Three words.
Three impossible words.
Ramon looked at Isabel.
“You're sure?”
She nodded weakly.
“I saw him.”
Victor glanced at Ramon.
“When?”
Isabel swallowed.
“Two nights ago.”
Ramon's face became unreadable.
“Where?”
She pointed beneath them.
No one moved.
Finally Victor said, “Boss, we don't know what's down there.”
“We know enough.”
“We know somebody planned for us to find the entrance.”
“Yes.”
“And they opened fire without trying very hard to kill us.”
“Yes.”
“So going underground is exactly what they want.”
Ramon looked at him.
Victor rarely challenged him.
That was one reason Ramon trusted him.
“You're right.”
Victor seemed relieved for approximately one second.
“Which means we're not going down until Isabel and Lucia are secure.”
Ramon closed the hatch.
The hidden lock engaged.
Then he removed his signet ring.
He stared at it.
His father had made a ceremony of giving him that ring.
An old Ortega tradition.
Power recognizes blood, Salvador Ortega had said.
At the time Ramon had thought it was another dramatic speech from a man obsessed with legacy.
Now he wondered what else the ring recognized.
Rafael arrived twenty-two minutes later with Dr. Amelia Grant, a trauma physician Ramon had helped years earlier when her brother disappeared into debt owed to people far less patient than Ramon.
She asked no unnecessary questions.
One look at Isabel, however, and her expression changed.
“We need to move.”
They carried Isabel through the forest on a collapsible medical stretcher.
Ramon carried Lucia again.
This time the girl didn't speak.
She kept looking back toward the clearing.
Once they reached the convoy, Amelia examined both mother and daughter inside the rear of an SUV.
“Dehydration, exposure, bruising. Her shoulder may be partially dislocated. She's fortunate the rope supported her torso.”
“Will she live?” Ramon asked.
Amelia looked at him.
“If nobody shoots at us on the way, probably.”
Victor almost smiled.
Ramon didn't.
“Then let's go.”
The north house was a fortified estate forty minutes away, registered through three companies and used mostly as a quiet meeting location.
By the time they arrived, Ramon had summoned additional security.
Twenty men surrounded the property.
Electronic surveillance was swept twice.
Phones were placed in shielded cases.
Vehicles were searched.
Ramon trusted systems less than he trusted people, and at that moment he trusted almost no people.
Lucia refused to leave her mother's bedside until Amelia promised Isabel was stable.
Only then did exhaustion finally win.
The girl fell asleep curled in an armchair wearing one of Ramon's white dress shirts because everything she'd been wearing was wet and filthy.
The shirt reached her ankles.
Ramon stood in the doorway watching her.
Victor appeared behind him.
“You've got mud on a five-thousand-dollar jacket.”
Ramon glanced at the dried stains Lucia had left on his shoulder.
“Send a complaint to the forest.”
Victor's mouth twitched.
Then the humor disappeared.
“We checked the route leak.”
“And?”
“Six people had final confirmation.”
Ramon already knew the list.
Himself.
Victor.
Diego.
Matteo.
His chief of staff Camila Ruiz.
And Esteban Ortega.
His uncle.
Ramon looked away.
“Esteban didn't need the exact route.”
“He asked for it.”
“When?”
“Last night. Told Camila he wanted to coordinate security near the northern property.”
Ramon felt nothing at first.
Then too much.
Esteban Ortega had helped raise him after Gabriel's death.
Had taught him to shoot.
To negotiate.
To identify lies.
Had sat beside Ramon at his mother's funeral.
Had told him family was the only currency nobody could replace.
“Where is he now?”
Victor checked his phone.
“According to his office, at a charity board meeting in the city.”
“Verify it without alerting him.”
Victor nodded.
Then he looked toward the bedroom.
“You believe her?”
Ramon considered that.
“I believe she saw someone.”
“Could be someone pretending to be Gabriel.”
“Yes.”
“But?”
Ramon turned.
“But she knew his name before I gave it to her.”
Victor went silent.
An hour later, Isabel woke.
She found Ramon sitting alone beside the window.
Lucia still slept across the room.
Isabel tried to sit.
Pain stopped her.
“Don't.”
“I need water.”
Ramon handed her a glass.
She drank slowly.
Then examined him.
“You don't look like him.”
“Gabriel?”
A faint nod.
“No.”
“He said you wouldn't.”
Ramon's hand tightened around the chair arm.
“What exactly did he say?”
Isabel looked toward Lucia.
“You need to promise me something.”
“I don't make blind promises.”
“If I tell you everything, my daughter leaves this life.”
Ramon's expression didn't change.
“This life?”
“Your world.”
“My world just carried your daughter out of a forest.”
“And your world put us there.”
That landed.
Ramon didn't defend himself.
“Tell me why.”
Isabel took a long breath.
“I'm an accountant.”
Victor, standing outside the room, entered.
Isabel noticed him.
Ramon said, “He stays.”
She hesitated.
Then continued.
“I worked for Arden Logistics.”
Ramon knew the company.
A mid-sized freight operation with warehouses in three states.
He had considered buying it two years earlier.
“On paper,” Isabel said, “we moved medical equipment, industrial parts, private agricultural shipments.”
“On paper.”
“I found accounts that weren't connected to any real shipments. Millions moved through temporary vendors. Payments to judges. County officials. Police. Customs officers.”
Victor's eyes sharpened.
“How much?”
“Over nine years? I stopped counting after four hundred million.”
Even Ramon shifted slightly.
“And you copied it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because people at the company started disappearing.”
Her voice trembled.
“The first was a warehouse supervisor. Then a driver. Then a woman in payroll who asked why dead employees were still receiving deposits.”
Ramon leaned forward.
“Who owns Arden?”
“Nobody obvious.”
“That's not an answer.”
“I followed the holding companies.”
She looked at his right hand.
At the finger where his signet ring had been.
“All the roads eventually led to an old Ortega trust.”
Victor cursed under his breath.
Ramon stayed very still.
“My father's trusts were divided after his death.”
“Not all of them.”
Salvador Ortega had died six years earlier after a stroke.
Ramon had taken complete control of what remained of the family empire.
Or believed he had.
“What did Gabriel have to do with this?”
“I was caught copying the records.”
Isabel's eyes filled with remembered fear.
“They took Lucia and me three weeks ago. They moved us twice. Then they brought us underground.”
“To the forest.”
“Yes.”
“And Gabriel?”
“He was there.”
“In what condition?”
Isabel hesitated.
“Alive.”
“That isn't what I asked.”
“He walks with a cane. There are scars. He looks older than he should. But he knew things.”
“What things?”
“Your mother's name.”
Ramon said nothing.
“The nickname she called you when you were little.”
His eyes changed.
“What nickname?”
Isabel whispered, “Monito.”
Victor looked at Ramon.
Ramon turned toward the window.
No outsider knew that.
Gabriel used to laugh whenever their mother said it.
Little monkey.
Because Ramon had climbed everything as a child.
Trees.
Fences.
Furniture.
Gabriel used to tease him about it endlessly.
The grave Ramon had visited every year for seventeen years suddenly felt obscene.
“Why didn't Gabriel leave?” Victor asked.
Isabel answered.
“Because he couldn't.”
“Prisoner?”
“Not exactly.”
Ramon turned back.
“What does that mean?”
“He said he'd been trapped by his own mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“He wouldn't tell me everything. He said the people running Arden had something powerful enough to destroy hundreds of lives if he tried to expose them.”
“Blackmail.”
“Yes.”
“And who controls him?”
Isabel began crying silently.
Not dramatic tears.
The exhausted kind.
“Your uncle.”
The room changed.
Victor looked down.
Ramon did not move.
“Esteban.”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard them arguing.”
“About what?”
“You.”
Ramon's eyes narrowed.
“What about me?”
“Esteban wanted you brought into the forest.”
Victor stepped forward.
“And Gabriel?”
“He was begging him not to.”
Ramon slowly stood.
“What exactly did my brother say?”
Isabel stared up at him.
“He said, ‘You already stole seventeen years from him. Don't take the rest.’”
Silence.
Then Lucia shifted in the armchair.
Everyone looked at her.
Still asleep.
Ramon's phone vibrated.
Victor pulled the secure device from the table and checked it.
His face changed.
“What?”
Victor looked at Isabel.
Then Ramon.
“The team watching Esteban lost him.”
“Lost him how?”
“He left the charity event through the kitchen seven minutes after we entered the forest.”
Ramon's jaw flexed.
“Find him.”
Victor was already moving.
Then the lights went out.
Complete darkness swallowed the room.
A second later, emergency power should have activated.
It didn't.
Ramon drew his gun.
Lucia woke screaming.
“Mom!”
Ramon moved toward her.
A red laser appeared on the wall.
Then another.
Victor shouted, “Down!”
Glass exploded inward.
Ramon threw himself over Lucia as bullets shattered the bedroom.
Isabel cried out.
The attack stopped as suddenly as it began.
Three seconds.
Maybe four.
Then silence.
Security alarms began screaming throughout the house.
Victor crawled toward the broken window.
“No shooter visible.”
Ramon looked beneath him.
Lucia was alive.
Terrified.
Isabel was alive.
He turned toward the opposite wall.
One bullet had struck a framed painting.
Another had buried itself inside the headboard.
But those shots weren't random.
They formed a line.
A deliberate one.
Ramon followed the angle.
All three bullets had missed the people.
They had hit the wall around a small brass object that had been thrown through the shattered window.
Victor picked it up carefully.
A lighter.
Old.
Dented.
Stamped with a crowned stag.
Ramon recognized it before Victor turned it over.
Gabriel's initials were engraved on the bottom.
G.O.
Victor whispered, “That's impossible.”
Ramon took the lighter.
It was warm.
Someone had been holding it only moments ago.
Then he saw a folded piece of paper tucked beneath it.
One sentence had been written in black ink.
COME ALONE, MONITO, OR THE NEXT ROPE WILL BE AROUND LUCIA'S NECK.
Ramon stared at the handwriting.
He knew it.
May you like
He had not seen it since he was a teenager.
It belonged to his dead brother.
