Find out what happens next in the following chapter.

It was late afternoon by the time I located Andrés.

He hadn't gone to a hotel or checked into a respectable establishment. According to our corporate tracking intelligence, he had retreated to a dingy, smoke-stained hotel bar on the industrial outskirts of Querétaro—a pathetic sanctuary for a man whose illusion of grandeur had violently dissolved into thin air.

I left the girls with Martha at the townhouse, drove my unmarked corporate SUV to the location, and walked through the heavy glass doors of the motel lounge.

The bar was dim, smelling of stale beer, cheap upholstery, and despair. A few weary truck drivers sat near the television playing a muted soccer match. In the far corner booth, slumped over a sticky wooden table with a half-empty glass of tequila in front of him, sat Andrés Villaseñor.

His designer suit jacket was crumpled, his tie was loosened and hanging crookedly around his neck, and his hair was wildly disheveled. He looked ten years older than he had twenty-four hours ago at the hacienda.

I walked across the sticky floor, my heels clicking rhythmically against the linoleum, and slid silently into the booth opposite him.

Andrés didn't look up immediately. He stared blankly into the amber liquid of his glass, swirling it aimlessly.

“I told the front desk not to let the media in,” he muttered, his voice thick with alcohol and self-pity, assuming I was a hotel employee or a debt collector. “I don't have any more statements to give. The hacienda is gone. My accounts are frozen. Are you happy now, Lucía? Did you finally crush me enough to satisfy your pathetic little apartment-sales ego?”

He finally raised his bloodshot eyes, blinking sluggishly through the dim light. When he realized it wasn't a stranger sitting across from him, but his wife—the woman he had spent a decade treating like an invisible servant—his expression twisted into a mask of bitter, drunken hatred.

“You,” he spat out, slamming his glass down so hard some of the tequila sloshed over the rim. “You calculated all of this, didn't you? You played the quiet, obedient fool for eleven years while you were secretly building some corporate empire behind my back! You humiliated me! You destroyed my family!”

I didn't flinch. I rested my forearms calmly on the sticky table, leaning forward just enough to meet his frantic gaze.

“I didn't destroy your family, Andrés. I simply stopped subsidizing your delusions,” I said evenly. “You built your entire life on borrowed money, forged signatures, and arrogant cruelty. You treated your own daughters like second-class citizens because they didn't fit your patriarchal fantasy, and you treated me like a doormat while you played the big businessman.”

Andrés laughed—a harsh, manic, broken sound that echoed off the cheap wood paneling of the booth.

“You think you’ve won, don't you?” he sneered, leaning forward, a desperate, feral light flashing in his eyes. “You think taking the hacienda and freezing my bank accounts means you’ve beaten me?”

“Haven't I?” I raised an eyebrow.

“You don't know everything,” Andrés whispered, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial, paranoid hiss. “You think you control all the chess pieces? You think Horizonte Capital is the only player on the board? I have a backup plan. A real plan. A lifeline that you can never touch.”

I kept my expression entirely neutral, feeding his desperate need to feel superior even as he drowned.

“Is that right?” I asked softly. “And what backup plan would that be, Andrés?”

“San Lucas Holdings,” he whispered triumphantly, a grotesque, lopsided smile twisting his lips. “Our penthouse in Chapultepec Park. You thought it was ours, didn't you? Well, it’s not. I transferred the title into an offshore trust six months ago. And I used it to secure a twenty-five-million-peso loan from a very powerful, very dangerous man named Victor Cruz.”

He leaned back, spreading his arms wide, reveling in his own perceived cleverness.

“Cruz is taking over that penthouse at the end of the month! He’s going to liquidate it, take his cut, and leave me with enough capital to start over in Panama or Madrid! And there is nothing—absolutely nothing—you or your little corporate lawyers can do to stop him!”

I stared at him for a long, agonizing moment. The sheer depth of his betrayal, his staggering stupidity, and his willingness to render his own wife and children homeless just to save his fragile ego was almost breathtaking.

He didn't know that Victor Cruz was a predator who would chew him up and spit him out. He didn't know that Cruz’s offshore shell company was already on my radar. And most importantly, he didn't know that the very penthouse he thought he had successfully hidden was about to become the final nail in his coffin.

I slowly reached into my handbag, pulled out a pristine, white legal envelope, and slid it across the sticky wooden table right beside his glass of tequila.

Andrés frowned, his manic smile faltering. “What is this?”

“Open it,” I said quietly.

With trembling fingers, Andrés picked up the envelope, pulled out the single sheet of heavy-stock paper inside, and scanned the text. As his eyes tracked the words, the color drained completely from his face, leaving him looking like a corpse under the flickering neon bar lights.

It was a complete, notarized assignment of debt and equity ownership for San Lucas Holdings, signed, sealed, and executed three hours ago by the very offshore bank Andrés thought he had partnered with.