Chapter 6 - The Face of an Angel
The corrugated metal door of the shed was riddled with over a hundred bullet holes. Smoke seeped through the jagged punctures.
"Luca!" I shouted, coughing against the burning chemical fumes drifting from the destroyed technical trucks. "It’s over! Stand down!"
A heavy iron bar clattered against the inside of the door.
The sheet metal swung open with a screech.
Luca Moretti stood in the opening, leaning heavily against the doorframe. His tactical vest was torn to ribbons, his left arm wrapped tightly in a bloody tourniquet, his face smeared with soot and grim satisfaction.
He looked at me, looked at the smoking wreck of Hernan’s helicopter up on the ledge, and let out a dry, ragged laugh.
"You took your sweet time, cousin," Luca coughed, spitting a mouthful of blood onto the gravel.
"You look terrible," I replied, stepping forward and clapping my good hand against the back of his neck, pulling him into a brief, fierce embrace. "Thank you. For keeping them alive."
"Don't thank me yet," Luca whispered, his voice cracking with emotion as he stepped aside. "Go inside."
I stepped across the threshold into the dim, shadowy interior of the shed.
Shafts of sunlight cut through the bullet holes in the ceiling, illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air like floating gold leaf.
Sitting on an overturned wooden crate, clutching an old blanket around her shivering shoulders, was Sofia.
She looked up.
Time stopped.
The five years of agony, the sleepless nights spent drinking myself into oblivion in an empty mansion, the ghost that had haunted every room, every mirror, every memory—all of it vanished in the space of a single heartbeat.
Her face was gaunt, her cheekbones sharper than they had been when we were young, and a blood-soaked bandage was taped over her left collarbone. But her eyes—those dark, fierce, magnificent eyes—were the exact same eyes that had commanded my heart the day I married her.
"Alejandro," she breathed, her lips trembling.
I fell to my knees in front of her. The cartel king, the billionaire untouchable of Mexico City, dropped into the dirt and buried his face into the fabric of her lap.
Her hands, rough and calloused from five years of hiding and labor, tangled themselves into my hair. She wept, silent and deep, her tears falling hot against the back of my neck.
"You found us," she sobbed softly. "You really found us."
"You should have told me, Sofia," I choked out, the words tearing their way out of my chest like jagged glass. "I would have burned the world to ashes before I let anyone touch you. You didn't have to carry this alone."
She lifted my face with both hands, forcing me to look at her.
"If you had burned the world, Alejandro, you would have burned the father right out of your soul," she said fiercely, wiping the blood from my forehead with her thumb. "I didn't just want my children to have an empire. I wanted them to have *you*. The man, not the monster."
I caught her hand, kissing her palm, feeling the steady, miraculous pulse of her life beneath my lips.
"They're outside," I whispered.
Sofia froze. Her breath caught in her throat. "What?"
"In the helicopter," I smiled, a real smile, one I hadn't felt on my face since the day she disappeared. "All four of them. Mateo told me to bring their mother home."
Sofia let out a ragged cry of pure, unadulterated joy, struggling to stand on her shaking legs.
May you like
I scooped her up into my functional arm, supporting her weight against my chest, and carried her out of the darkness of the shed into the brilliant, blinding light of the afternoon sun.
***
