Chapter 4 - A Father’s Rage, A Guard’s Loyalty
Five hundred million dollars. The number bounced around Emiliano’s skull like a bullet. He had built his empire from nothing, sleeping in his car for six months, eating ramen noodles while he coded the algorithm that would change global logistics. He had done it to secure a legacy. To ensure his daughters would never know the hunger or the fear he had known growing up in the foster system.
And now, that legacy was supposed to pay for his own murder.
He thought of the policy. He remembered the day he’d signed it. Patricia had been so sweet, so concerned. “Emiliano, you fly so much. You work so hard. What if something happens? The girls need to be protected. Let’s just get this paperwork done, it’s just a formality.”
She had guided his hand to the dotted line. She had smiled at him with that perfect, empty smile. And she had already decided exactly how she was going to spend the payout.
“Jax,” Emiliano barked into the radio, gripping the device so hard the plastic creaked. “I don’t care what you have to hack. Banks. Phone towers. Her sister’s Facebook. I need to know who she was meeting. Who is the co-conspirator? If they know I’m onto them, they might move up the timeline.”
“Working on it, boss,” Jax replied, the clack of mechanical keyboards audible in the background. “Her burner phone pinged a cell tower near the docks an hour ago. Whoever it is, they’re local. And they’re paranoid. She’s using encrypted apps, but I’m brute-forcing the key. Give me forty minutes.”
“Twenty.”
“…Thirty. Don’t rush genius.”
The line went dead.
Emiliano began to pace the small room. The monitors flickered with the mundane rhythm of the morning. The gardener was trimming the hedges. The chef was prepping vegetables. And upstairs, in the master suite, Patricia was waking up. He switched the main feed to the camera hidden in the master bedroom’s smoke detector—a camera he’d forgotten he’d installed after a break-in attempt five years ago, and one Patricia clearly didn’t know existed.
She was sitting up in bed, wearing a silk negligee that cost more than Rosa made in a month. She was scrolling through her phone, smiling. Then she dialed a number and put it on speaker.
“Hey, baby,” she purred. Her voice was unrecognizable. It was throaty, sexual, raw. Nothing like the refined debutante she played for Emiliano. “Yeah, he’s wheels up in London by now. Relax. Everything is perfect. The girls are terrified, the maid is one wrong move away from being arrested for abuse, and my signature is dry on the insurance policy.”
She laughed, a throaty, dirty sound. “Yeah, I know. Poor schmuck. He actually thought I loved him. He cried at dinner last night talking about how ‘complete’ his family felt. It was disgusting. But hey, a girl’s gotta eat. And this time, we eat very well.”
Emiliano felt the rage rise in him like a tide. It wasn’t just anger anymore. It was a deep, primal hatred. This woman had invaded his home, defiled his wife’s memory, tortured his children, and planned his execution… and she had done it all while lying in his bed, eating his food, spending his money.
He watched as she ran a hand down her body, still talking to the mystery man. “When do we do it? The weekend? Yeah, the yacht is perfect. We take it out to the canyon, the ‘accident’ happens, the Coast Guard finds the wreckage… and by Monday, I’m the grieving billionaire widow and you’re my ‘financial advisor’ who helps me through the hard times.”
She paused, listening. Her smile widened.
“Of course I’ve got the pills. The same ones I used on the last one. Undetectable in the autopsy if you mix it with enough scotch. He’ll just look like he had a heart attack mid-vacation. The girls will be distraught, they’ll cling to me… and Rosa? She’ll be in jail for child abuse by the end of the week. I planted the photoshopped texts on her work laptop last night. It’s foolproof.”
Emiliano stopped pacing.
The yacht. This weekend. Pills.
They were going to kill him in three days. He had three days to unravel a conspiracy that had been a year in the making.
“Marco,” he said into the radio. “Get back here now. And bring the tactical team. We’re accelerating the plan.”
Marco burst into the room two minutes later, his face grim. He had heard the audio feed on his own earpiece.
“Sir,” Marco said, his hand resting on the service weapon holstered at his hip. “Give the word. I’ll go up there right now and put her in cuffs myself. We have enough for conspiracy to commit murder. The FBI can meet us here.”
Emiliano looked at his old friend. Marco had been with him through everything. He had been the best man at his wedding. He had held Emiliano when his wife died in the hospital. He was the only man on Earth Emiliano would trust with his life, let alone his daughters’.
But Emiliano shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Sir? With all due respect, she just admitted to planning your murder on tape. She admitted to killing a man in Houston. If we wait—”
“If we arrest her now,” Emiliano interrupted, his voice cold and sharp, “her partner runs. And if the partner runs, he takes the evidence with him. And worse, Marco… if we arrest her now, we get justice for me. But do you know what the girls get?”
He pointed to the screen, where Rosa was now helping a sleepy-eyed Martina put on her shoes in the foyer.
“They get a lifetime of wondering. They get a lifetime of people whispering that their stepmother was a murderer. They get dragged through depositions. They get to relive every single moment of that abuse in open court, in front of the world, while Patricia’s lawyer tries to paint them as liars and me as a neglectful father who drove a poor, innocent woman to desperation.”
Emiliano’s eyes blazed.
“I don’t just want her in jail, Marco. I want her destroyed. I want her to stand in the middle of this house, in front of my daughters, and realize that every single move she made was watched. That she was the rat in the maze, not the scientist. I want her to feel the exact same terror my babies felt. Every single second of it.”
He turned to his friend. “And I want the partner. I want them both. I want the whole organization dismantled so they can never do this to another family again.”
Marco stared at him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. He understood. This wasn’t just police work anymore. This was personal. This was a father’s vengeance.
“What’s the play, sir?”
“Jax is tracing the call. He’ll have a name and a location in thirty minutes. We let Patricia make her move today. She’s planning to plant the final ‘evidence’ on Rosa’s laptop to get her arrested. We let her think it worked. We even have the local cops—ones we pay, not hers—show up and pretend to take Rosa in for questioning.”
Marco’s eyes widened. “You want to use Rosa as bait?”
“Rosa is the strongest person in this house,” Emiliano said, and there was absolute conviction in his voice. “She has survived Patricia for a year. She can survive one more day of acting. And when Patricia thinks she’s won… that’s when she’ll make her mistake. That’s when she’ll call her partner to celebrate. And when she does… we follow the money. We follow the signal. And we end this.”
He looked at the clock. 7:45 a.m.
“Get Rosa a wire. The smallest one we have. And tell her the plan. Tell her that when the police cars pull up, she has to look scared. She has to look defeated. She has to make Patricia believe she’s won.”
Downstairs on the monitor, the front door opened.
Patricia walked into the foyer. She was wearing a simple white dress, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, looking like the picture of innocent domesticity. She smiled at the girls, a warm, bright smile.
“Good morning, my darlings!” she chirped, bending down to kiss their foreheads. The girls flinched, but they didn’t pull away. They knew the rules. “Did you sleep well? I was thinking, since Daddy is gone, we could have a girls’ day! Shopping! Ice cream! Whatever you want!”
She looked up at Rosa, her eyes glinting with malice under the sugary sweetness.
“Rosa, dear? Could you please bring me my laptop from the study? I need to check on some reservations for the weekend. And… be a dear and grab yours too? IT called last night. They said there’s a virus on the server and they need to do a sweep of all personal devices. Just standard procedure.”
Rosa’s eyes flicked to the camera in the corner, almost imperceptibly. She knew.
“Of course, Miss Patricia,” Rosa said, her voice perfectly subservient. “Right away.”
Emiliano watched as Rosa turned toward the study. He watched Patricia’s smile widen as she watched her go.
It’s showtime, Emiliano thought. Dance, puppet. Dance.
He picked up the radio.
“Jax? Status on that trace?”
“Got it!” Jax yelled back, triumphant. “The call routed through a VPN, but I back-traced the voice biometrics and the tower data. You’re not gonna believe this, sir.”
“Spit it out.”
“The accomplice? The man she’s been sleeping with and planning to kill you with? It’s your Head of Operations, Julian Croft.”
Emiliano froze.
Julian Croft.
His protégé. The man he had mentored since college. The man he had planned to hand the company to when he retired. The man who was godfather to his daughters.
The betrayal was so complete, so absolute, that for a second Emiliano couldn’t breathe.
And then, he laughed. A dark, bitter sound.
“Of course it is,” he whispered. “Of course it’s the man I trusted most in the world. The snake was in the boardroom and the bedroom.”
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He looked back at the screen, where Patricia was now helping Martina with her backpack, her fingers lingering a little too long, a little too tight, on the child’s shoulder.
“Okay, Marco,” Emiliano said, his voice now completely devoid of emotion. Deadly. “Change of plans. We’re not just arresting a gold-digger today. We’re taking down a kingpin. Get the tactical team ready. And call the FBI again. Tell them we’ve got RICO charges. Conspiracy. Murder for hire. And tell them to bring enough cuffs for two.”
