Chapter One: The Vidal Debt

(Alondra's POV)

The sound of my mother's voice cut through the kitchen walls like a blade.

"Alberto, please. She is still a child."

I froze with the knife mid-air, the half-sliced onion staring back at me from the cutting board. My father's reply came low, broken, the kind of voice a man used when he had already lost the fight.

"There is nothing left to give them, Remedios. Nothing but her."

Then a door slammed somewhere down the hall and the whole house seemed to flinch with it.

I kept slicing. I did not know why. Maybe because if I stopped, I would scream. The onion was no longer the reason my eyes burned, but the tears still slid down my cheeks and fell onto the wooden board, mixing with the juice. One drop. Two. A small puddle forming around the blade.

I was twenty-one years old.

Twenty-one and my whole life had just been sold across a kitchen table.

Soft footsteps came up behind me. I did not have to look to know it was my mother. She always walked the same way, like she was afraid of waking something.

She stopped beside me and stared at my face for a long moment before her hand came up. Her thumb brushed the wet under my eye, gentle, the way she used to do when I was small and woke up from a bad dream.

"Your father does not want to listen," she whispered.

"He has no choice either, mi vida. Stay strong for me. I will be right there beside you. Always."

She took the knife out of my hand before I could argue. Then she pressed her lips to my cheek, the way she had done every night since I was a baby.

"Go upstairs, Alondra. I will finish the cooking."

I wanted to fight her on it. I wanted to tell her that cooking was the last normal thing I had, that if she took the knife from me, then there was nothing left to hold.

But I did not have the strength for words. So I just nodded and walked past her, past the small kitchen window where the sun was dipping low over the Madrid rooftops, painting everything in that soft orange that always tricked me into thinking life was beautiful.

My mother had always been the sweet one. The softest woman I had ever known. She never raised her voice at me, not once. And maybe that was what made it hurt the most. That a woman this gentle had to stand and accept the fact that that her only daughter was about to be handed over like a debt receipt.

Because that was what I was now.

My father, Alberto Reyes-Salamanca, inherited the debt the day his own father died. Thirty years he had been paying it. Thirty years of pretending we lived a normal life. We did not. We never did. The Vidal-Montenegro family owned half of Spain, and somewhere in the fine print, they had owned a piece of us too.

For a year now, my father had nothing to give them. The bakery was gone. The savings were gone. There was only one thing left in this house worth anything to the most dangerous mafia family in the country.

Me.

I climbed the stairs slowly, one hand dragging along the wooden banister. The wood was warm under my palm. I tried to memorize the feel of it. I did not know why. I just knew that something told me to.

My bedroom looked the same as it had since I was fifteen. Pale yellow walls. A small white desk in the corner stacked with law books I bought with my own money. A framed photo of me on my high school graduation day, grinning like an idiot, holding the acceptance letter from Complutense.

Law school.

I was supposed to start in September.

I was going to be the first person in my family to wear a black robe instead of an apron. I was going to defend people. I was going to be the kind of woman who walked into a room and made men sit up straighter.

Now I was going to be a wife to a man whose name they had not even told me yet.

I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the photo until my eyes went blurry. The girl in that frame did not know what was coming. She was still hopeful. She still believed in things. I wanted to reach into the glass and tell her to run, to take her mother and her father and disappear into a country where the Vidal-Montenegro name meant nothing.

But there was no such country.

I closed my eyes and tried to breathe. The air felt thin. My chest felt tight. There was a small voice in my head saying it would be okay, that I was strong, that I could survive this, but it sounded far away, like someone shouting from the other side of a river.

I did not know how long I sat there.

Then a loud bang slammed against my bedroom door and the whole world snapped back into focus.

"Coming!" I shouted, jumping to my feet. My voice did not sound like mine.

I wiped my face fast with the back of my hand, smoothed my hair behind my ears, and walked to the door. My fingers were shaking on the handle.

I pulled the door open.

Two men stood in the hallway. Both dressed in black suits that fit too well to be cheap. Both wearing dark glasses even though they were standing inside my house. One of them was taller than my father by at least a head. The other had a small scar that ran from the corner of his lip up toward his cheekbone.

I opened my mouth to ask who they were, even though my body already knew. My body had been waiting for this moment since I was old enough to understand the shape of the envelopes my father slid across tables.

Before a single word could leave me, the taller one moved.

His hand came up so fast it was barely a blur, and then there was a white cloth pressed hard against my nose and mouth. The smell hit me first. Sweet. Too sweet. The kind of sweet that did not belong in a real flower.

I tried to scream.

Nothing came out.

I tried to push him, claw at him, kick. My arms felt like they belonged to someone else. My legs forgot how to be legs.

The hallway behind him started to bend at the edges. The wallpaper my mother picked out when I was nine began to swim. The light above his head faded into a soft white circle, then a smaller one, then a pinpoint.

The last thing I saw was my own reflection in his black glasses.

Then everything went white, and the men faded out with it.