The message on the back of the card burned inside her mind over and over again.
“I know what happened to your father.”
Her father had disappeared twelve years earlier.
No body.
No goodbye.
No answers.
Only silence.
The next morning, rain poured over Mexico City as Valeria entered the massive Castañeda Global tower. Marble floors. Armed security. Employees whispering nervously.
Everything about the building felt dangerous.
Alejandro waited alone inside the top-floor office, staring at the city skyline.
“You came,” he said quietly.
Valeria slammed the card onto his desk.
“How do you know about my father?”
Alejandro’s jaw tightened.
“Because my family destroyed him.”
The room went silent.
Valeria felt her stomach drop.
“What?”
Alejandro opened an old file and slowly pushed it toward her.
Inside were photographs… contracts… newspaper clippings…
And one picture froze her blood completely.
Her father—
standing beside Alejandro’s mother years ago.
Smiling.
Alive.
“They were in love,” Alejandro admitted.
Valeria stepped backward in shock.
“That’s impossible.”
“My father found out,” Alejandro continued darkly. “And people disappeared after that.”
Valeria’s hands trembled violently.
“You’re lying.”
“I wish I was.”
Suddenly the office doors BURST OPEN.
Security guards rushed inside.
And behind them—
an older man stepped slowly into the room.
Gray hair.
Tired eyes.
Scar across his face.
Valeria stopped breathing.
The coffee cup slipped from her hands and shattered across the floor.
“Dad…?”
The man looked directly at her with tears in his eyes.
Then whispered—
“You were never supposed to find me.”
