Chapter 5 - THE CONFRONTATION AT SUNSET
When Diego returned to the villa, the sun was setting behind the Sierra de Guanajuato, casting long, bloody streaks of crimson and orange across the sky.
The patio was quiet. The nurse was inside preparing dinner, and Teresa sat in her wheelchair by the edge of the stone terrace, watching the horizon.
Her dry traditional shawl was wrapped tightly around her shoulders, her face serene, enjoying the cool evening breeze.
Diego walked up behind her slowly, his footsteps heavy. He didn’t know how to ask the question that was burning a hole through his chest.
He knelt beside her wheelchair, taking her fragile, cool hand into his own, just as he had done on the day Brenda was arrested.
“Mamá,” Diego said softly, his voice barely louder than the rustling of the rose leaves. “I need to ask you about the time before I was born.”
Teresa turned her head slowly, her hazel eyes clouded with age but still remarkably sharp. She saw the tension in his jaw, the shadow in his eyes.
“Dieguito…” she whispered, her voice still slightly strained from the effects of the stroke. “What is wrong?”
“Did Father ever talk to you about Zacatecas?” Diego asked directly, looking into her eyes. “Did he ever talk about a woman named Sofia?”
The moment the name left Diego’s lips, he felt a sudden, violent tremor pass through his mother’s hand.
Her eyes widened in a flash of old, buried terror. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. She looked away, her gaze fixing on the stone floor.
“You knew,” Diego said, his heart sinking into his stomach. “You knew about him the whole time.”
Teresa began to breathe heavily, her chest rising and falling beneath the wet shawl. A single tear escaped her eye, tracking through the deep wrinkles of her cheek.
“Your father… he promised,” she managed to say, her words broken, her voice shaking with an ancient humiliation. “He promised it was over. He said the boy would never come here.”
“He had a son, Mamá! An older son named Mateo!” Diego’s voice rose, a rare slip of his emotional restraint. “And Brenda knew about it. She was looking for something in this house before she was arrested.”
“She was looking for a key to a vault. A vault filled with Father’s hidden money.”
Teresa turned back to him, her face pale, her expression shifting from fear to a desperate, protective anger.
“No gold… is worth his anger,” she whispered, her grip tightening around Diego’s wrist with surprising strength. “Mateo… he came here, Diego. Before your father died. He stood at that very gate.”
“He didn’t want money. He wanted to see me suffer. He looked at me and said he would take everything your father built, stone by stone.”
Before Diego could respond, his phone buzzed violently in his pocket. It was an urgent text message from Javier, his private investigator.
The message contained a single address and a live location pin in the mountains just outside Guanajuato city.
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“Diego, I found Mateo’s truck. It’s parked outside an abandoned silver mine called El Nido. But there’s something else. Another car just pulled up. It’s registered to a local private security firm hired by Brenda’s lawyers before she went to prison.”
“They’re breaking into the old vault right now.”
