Chapter Five: Four Days Left To Stop Them Before It Is Too Late

Nobody argued with Duarte. We simply moved, the way people move when fear finally outranks pride, four adults and one terrified young notary clerk scrambling back into two cars on a gravel road behind a half collapsed chapel, none of us speaking, all of us watching the tree line like it might produce an answer.

I drove home with Renata following close behind me, and Ines squeezed into my passenger seat because she said, quite reasonably, that she did not want to be alone anywhere for the rest of the day. I did not blame her.

"You should not have come," I told her, once my hands had steadied enough to trust them on the wheel. "Whoever sent that text knew you would be there."

"I know," she said. "I keep asking myself who else knew about this meeting, and the answer is almost nobody. You, me, and whoever I was foolish enough to mention it to without realizing it mattered."

"Who did you mention it to?"

She went quiet for a long moment, staring out the window at the vine rows blurring past.

"My supervisor," she said finally. "Before I understood what the backdated stamp actually meant, I asked him a casual question about it, weeks ago, as if it were nothing. I did not think anything of it at the time."

"And your supervisor works for."

"The regional notary board," she said. "Which handles filings for half the estates in this valley, including, before you ask, both Ferreira and Del Prado."

I felt something settle into place, cold and certain, the way a puzzle piece does right before you understand the whole picture is far uglier than you hoped.

Andres was waiting on the front steps when I pulled in, and the look on his face told me Tomas had already radioed ahead with whatever alarmed, half garbled version of the morning he had managed to piece together.

"Are you hurt," Andres asked, before I had even opened the door, which was, despite everything, the first thing he had gotten right all day.

"No," I said. "But we need to talk. All of us. Now."

We ended up in the tasting room, the same room where I had first seen his face on that television screen barely six hours earlier, though it already felt like a different lifetime. Renata sat pressed into the corner of the old leather couch, still occasionally wiping her eyes. Ines stood near the door like she was ready to run if the conversation turned. Andres paced.

"Someone connected to the regional notary board is involved," I said, laying it out plainly, because plain was the only thing that felt survivable right now. "Someone with reach across both our families' filings. Someone who knew the exact minute I was standing at that chapel with proof in my hands."

"Valentina's family sits on that board," Andres said quietly.

The room went very still.

"You never told me that," I said.

"I did not think it mattered until now," he said, and had the decency, at least, to look ashamed of that sentence as it left his mouth.

As if summoned by her own name, my phone buzzed with a call, not a text this time, an actual incoming call, and the screen showed a name I had genuinely not expected to see today.

Valentina Del Prado.

I looked at Andres. He looked back at me, and for once neither of us reached for the phone first.

I answered it on speaker, my hand shaking only slightly now, mostly out of habit rather than real fear.

"Camila," Valentina said, her voice tight, none of the easy television confidence from that morning's broadcast anywhere in it. "I need you to listen to me for exactly one minute before you decide I am your enemy."

"You have thirty seconds," I said.

"My family's board seat processed an emergency filing an hour ago," she said, the words coming fast now, urgent. "Someone used my father's credentials to move the merger deadline up. It is no longer nineteen days."

My stomach dropped straight through the floor of that tasting room.

"How long do we have," I asked, though some part of me already knew the answer would be worse than I could prepare for.

"Four days," Valentina said. "You have four days, Camila, and I promise you, whatever you think of me, I did not do this, and I do not think Andres did either."

"Then who did."

There was a pause on the line, and in it I heard something that sounded almost like her own fear finally cracking through.

"I think it is someone none of us have considered yet," she said. "Someone who has had access to every document, every signature, every filing on both sides of this family for longer than either of us has been alive."

I looked across the room at Andres, who had gone pale, clearly following the same terrible arithmetic I was.

"My father is eighty three years old," Valentina said quietly. "And he has not answered his phone since this morning."