Chapter 2 - The Boy Who Was Supposed to Be Dead
The door of the black SUV slammed behind me.
For one terrible second, I believed I had traded drowning in the river for dying inside a stranger’s car.
The windows were dark enough to turn the city outside into shadows. Mateo Vargas sat across from me, still wearing his soaked black suit. River water dripped from his sleeves onto the leather floor, but none of the armed men around him dared mention it.
I pressed myself against the door.
“My sack,” I said.
Vargas stared at me. “What?”
“My bottles. I left them by the river.”
One of the guards laughed.
Vargas did not.
“You nearly drowned saving my life,” he said, “and you are worried about a sack of trash?”
“It isn’t trash. I can sell those bottles.”
Something moved behind his eyes. Not kindness. Mateo Vargas did not look like a man who carried much kindness inside him.
But he understood hunger.
He leaned toward the driver.
“Go back for the boy’s sack.”
The laughing guard stopped smiling.
The vehicle turned away from the river and climbed into the wealthy northern district. I watched gated homes, polished cars, and gardens larger than the park where I slept pass outside the window.
“Where are you taking me?” I asked.
“Somewhere no one can reach you.”
“Who is trying to reach me?”
Vargas’s jaw tightened.
“That is what I intend to discover.”
He opened a compartment beside him and removed an old photograph sealed inside a plastic sleeve.
My breath caught.
My grandmother stood in the center of the picture.
She was younger, but I recognized her eyes immediately. She wore a white dress and held a leather book against her chest. Beside her stood Mateo Vargas, perhaps twenty years younger, and another man whose face had been scratched away with something sharp.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered.
“Your grandmother gave it to me.”
“She hated men like you.”
A guard shifted angrily, but Vargas lifted one hand.
“She had good reason.”
He handed me the photograph.
On the back, written in my grandmother’s handwriting, were six words:
When the river rises, protect Aurelio.
My fingers began to shake.
“She knew you?” I asked.
“She saved my life long before you did.”
I looked up sharply.
Vargas stared past me as if the tinted glass had become a doorway into another time.
“Esperanza Mendoza kept the financial records for the Vargas organization,” he said. “Not because she wanted money. Because your grandfather owed a debt he could never repay.”
“My grandfather died before I was born.”
“That is what you were told.”
Every answer opened another wound.
Vargas continued.
“Your grandmother discovered that powerful men were stealing from my family and paying police officers, judges, and politicians to help them. She copied everything into a private ledger. Names. Dates. Accounts. Murders disguised as accidents.”
“The leather book?”
His eyes returned to the photograph.
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“No one knows.”
“Then why do people think I’m dead?”
The vehicle grew silent.
Vargas spoke carefully.
“Twelve years ago, someone attacked your family’s home. The building burned. Three bodies were found inside—a man, a woman, and a newborn child.”
I stopped breathing.
“The police report said the Mendoza family had died,” he continued. “Your grandmother appeared weeks later, alone. She claimed the baby was dead and begged me never to search for him.”
“But she raised me.”
“Under different names. In different neighborhoods. Never staying longer than a year.”
Memories returned in pieces: moving before sunrise, curtains always closed, Grandmother refusing to be photographed, her fear whenever a black sedan remained outside too long.
I had thought poverty made us move.
Now I understood.
We had been hiding.
“Who burned the house?” I asked.
Vargas looked toward the guard sitting beside him.
The older man from the riverbank was named Rafael Cruz. Gray touched his hair, and a thin scar crossed his throat.
Rafael lowered his eyes.
“We believed it was ordered by Don Esteban Vargas,” he said.
I looked between them. “Who is that?”
Mateo’s expression hardened.
“My older brother.”
The SUV passed through iron gates and entered an estate surrounded by stone walls. Armed men stood at every entrance.
The mansion looked less like a home than a palace preparing for war.
Before the vehicle stopped, Vargas caught my wrist.
“Listen to me, Aurelio. No one outside this car can know what I have told you. Not my servants. Not my captains. Not even the people who have served me for years.”
“Why?”
“Because your grandmother’s enemies may already be inside my house.”
The door opened.
A woman in a dark green dress waited at the top of the marble steps. She appeared to be in her forties, with calm eyes and a silver cross around her neck.
“This is Doctor Elena Marquez,” Vargas said. “She will examine you.”
“I’m not sick.”
“You swallowed river water.”
“So did you.”
“I have my own doctor.”
“You have everything.”
For the first time, the corner of his mouth almost moved.
Then a shot cracked across the courtyard.
The window beside my head exploded.
Rafael threw himself over me as guards drew their weapons. Men shouted. Another bullet struck the side of the vehicle.
Vargas dragged me onto the floor.
“Inside!” he roared.
The shooter fired a third time.
The bullet tore through the open door and buried itself in the leather seat exactly where my chest had been.
Vargas looked at the smoking hole.
Then he looked at me.
No one at the river had known where he was taking me.
Only the men inside the SUV knew.
One of them had sent the message.
And as Rafael pulled me toward the mansion, Mateo Vargas whispered the truth that frightened me more than the bullets.
“They were not shooting at me, Aurelio.”
May you like
His hand tightened around my arm.
“They were shooting at you.”
