You tell your driver to kill the engine in the narrow service alley behind the estate, and for the first time in years, silence feels less like control and more like a trap waiting to spring.
From where you sit in the back of the black SUV, the mansion looks exactly the way you designed it to look after your father died and your company took off. Clean lines. White stone. Imported glass. No warmth visible from the outside, no softness, no weak spots. A fortress for money and discipline, built for a man who learned early that affection was unreliable but systems could be managed.
Your mother is inside that house.
So is Lucía.
