All Chapters of Oh! My Pretty Boy: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

The west room opened under government seal at nine in the morning.That sounded official enough to be safe.It was not.Official things had signatures. Witnesses. Stamps. Men in pressed shirts holding clipboards as if paper could keep old houses from lying. Official things created the illusion that history behaved better when watched by the proper people.The Gonzalez mansion had been watched for more than a century.It had lied anyway.We arrived in three cars.Elise insisted on three. One for Yvette and Grandmother. One for me and Dr. Aragon. One for Elise, two legal observers, and a heritage commission officer who looked as if he had spent the night regretting every career decision that led him to old families and hidden rooms.Yvette did not ride with me.That remained correct.It also remained unpleasant.I sat in the back seat beside Dr. Aragon while the city moved past the window and the golden key lay in a sealed evidence pouch on his lap.Not around my neck.Not in my pocket.

The alliance began with a list.Not a kiss.Not forgiveness.Not one of Elise’s carefully worded statements designed to make disaster look intentional.A list.Yvette wrote it herself on a clean sheet of paper in the library the morning after my apology. She sat at the long table with Antonio’s note to her left, Luisa’s copied letter to her right, and Altagracia’s diary open beneath one hand. The golden key lay in a sealed pouch near Grandmother, no longer jewelry, not yet fully evidence because Elise said evidence had procedures and procedures had people to threaten.I sat across from Yvette.Across had become our safest geography.Elise stood at the window with her phone pressed to one ear and a second phone in her hand, informing someone from the heritage commission that if the west room seal was disturbed without her knowledge, she would treat it as both a legal violation and a personal hobby. Dr. Aragon was late, which made Elise call him useful only in retrospect. Grandmother ha

Yvette decided to use the engagement before Elise did.That offended Elise on several levels.We were in the library the morning after the stone came over the wall. The stone sat in its evidence bag on the side table, labeled in Yvette’s careful hand. FRAUDS BELONG IN GRAVES had already become a headline because one of the guards talked to a cousin who talked to a reporter who had the survival instincts of mold.Elise had spent the morning finding the leak.I had spent the morning trying not to go outside and become footage.Yvette had spent the morning reading invitations.That was the first sign of trouble.Old families had begun sending them after the public turned. Not kind invitations. Not social ones. These were invitations disguised as concern, curiosity dressed in embossed paper. A luncheon for heritage preservation. A private rosary for the repose of revolutionary martyrs. A small gathering of women supporting responsible stewardship of ancestral properties.Responsible stewa

My father came before breakfast.He did not ask permission.That was his mistake.The house had changed since he last believed it answered to him. Servants still bowed, yes. Guards still straightened when his car reached the gravel. The front doors still opened before he touched them. Old habits survived longer than loyalty.But Grandmother had been awake since dawn.Elise had slept in the library for two hours and woken up mean enough to count as armed.Yvette sat at the long table with Rafael’s packet indexed into three stacks: statement, corroboration, threat. Dr. Aragon had arrived with certified registry copies still warm from the machine. I stood by the window holding my phone and reading the same sentence from my father’s last message over and over until the words stopped meaning anything.Do not release anything from that packet until we speak.We had spoken enough through other people’s silence.When my father entered the library, no one stood.That was the first real insult.

The witness drawer opened at noon.Not in secret.Nothing opened in secret anymore.That was one of Yvette’s rules, and by then even the house had begun to obey her better than most men did.The silver key lay on the library table in a labeled evidence pouch beside the Mercado master key, Rafael’s vine key, and the old ring wrapped in cloth. The black key remained missing. Its absence had become a shape of its own, present in every conversation, every map, every plan. A missing tooth in the mouth of the story.Dr. Aragon arrived with two heritage officers, a preservation kit, and the expression of a man who had not slept because footnotes had attacked him in the night.Elise met him at the door. “If you say there is one more complication, I will throw you into the fountain.”“There are several.”“I respect honesty and hate you.”Grandmother sat by the fire in a gray shawl, pale but upright. She had refused to return to bed. Yvette had asked once. Grandmother had said, “When dead men s