Chapter 4 - The Handwriting's Lie
"If she was pregnant," I snarled, my voice shaking with an uncharacteristic rage that vibrated the walls, "she would have told me! I tore the world apart looking for cures! I brought the best specialists from Zurich, Tokyo, Boston! She was in my arms every night!"
"And you were surrounded by traitors!" Elena cried out, standing up to face me, defying the terrifying aura that kept Chicago's most ruthless killers on their knees. "Look at the handwriting again, Alejandro! Look at the words!"
Mateo scampered off the cot, picked up the crumpled photograph from the concrete floor, and held it up to me.
I took the photograph with fingers that were suddenly numb.
The handwriting across the bottom: *KEEP THEM SAFE FROM ALEJANDRO.*
"Turn it over," Elena said softly.
I flipped the heavy glossy photo paper.
On the back, written in the unmistakable, elegant cursive of the only woman I had ever loved:
*...from Alejandro's world. If he knows, he will burn Chicago to the ground to protect them, and they will die in the crossfire. His love is an inferno, Elena. Hide my boys until the poison in our house is rooted out. Tell him I loved him until my final breath.*
The room went dead silent, save for the rhythmic dripping of condensation from the ceiling pipes.
The sentence on the front wasn't a warning against me. It was an unfinished fragment.
*Keep them safe from Alejandro's world.*
"She didn't carry them to full term herself," Elena explained through choked sobs. "Her body was failing. The doctors told her the babies would die with her. Sofia used an off-grid clinic in Mexico, using surrogate sisters who owed her family their lives. Four embryos survived. Four boys. She died believing they were safe in the countryside."
"And how did they end up here?" I demanded. "In my house?"
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"Because three days ago, the safehouse in Jalisco was burned to the ground," Elena said, her eyes wild with terror. "Everyone was killed. I only managed to get the boys out because Sofia had set up an emergency extraction fund. I had nowhere else to run, Alejandro. Your house was the only fortress left on earth."
***