Todos los capítulos de The Wife He Tried to Erase: Capítulo 31 - Capítulo 40

The word finally tore loose from my throat the same instant the nearest man's finger tightened against his trigger guard, one single syllable that Tomas had drilled into me an hour earlier in Renata's hospital room, simple, useless sounding, and apparently powerful enough to change everything in half a second.I had practiced saying it in the car on the way over, quietly, under my breath, half convinced I would never actually need it, half terrified that if I did need it, my voice would fail me at the exact moment it mattered most."Harvest," I screamed, and the old house seemed to answer me back, glass shattering somewhere behind the three men as Tomas's discreet unit finally closed the distance they had been holding since I first walked through that front door.Everything after that happened too fast for my mind to properly catalog in order. Shouting, more glass, a body hitting the floor near the doorway, someone yelling for everyone to get down, and through all of it I stood frozen

I did not wait for Andres or Ines to stop me. I crossed the distance to that building faster than I had moved all day, adrenaline burning through the exhaustion in my legs, and stepped through the entrance into a darkness that took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to properly.The air inside smelled faintly of machine oil and disturbed concrete dust, entirely wrong for a building that had spent the last decade storing nothing more dangerous than old harvest equipment and spare irrigation pipe.What I saw once my eyes adjusted made no immediate sense at all. A compact drilling rig stood in the center of the old storage floor, its narrow steel column angled down into a hole someone had cut directly through the concrete slab, the mechanical hum I had heard from outside now unmistakably the sound of a motor drawing a core sample slowly up from somewhere deep beneath my grandfather's land."They are testing it," Tomas said quietly, his flashlight beam sweeping across a folding table n

Beatriz's smile did not falter at my refusal. If anything, it deepened, the particular satisfaction of a woman who had clearly expected exactly this answer and had already planned three moves beyond it.The silence that followed stretched long enough that I could hear the drilling rig still humming quietly behind her, indifferent to everything unfolding in front of it, and somewhere further off, the faint sound of Ines and Diego's footsteps retreating safely back toward the main house."I admire your conviction very much, Camila," she said, her voice still calm, still cultured, still somehow more unsettling than any shouted threat could ever have been. "I truly do. Which is precisely why I brought something to change your mind, rather than simply asking you to change it on principle alone."She reached into her coat a second time, slowly, deliberately, and this time Tomas's hand closed fully around his radio, his whole body coiled with the particular readiness I had watched carry us t

I opened my mouth to answer him, and in that exact same breath, Tomas's radio exploded with a sound none of us were prepared for, a single sharp cry from the hospital unit, cut off mid word, replaced instantly by silence.The silence itself felt louder than any scream could have been, stretching out across that dusty building until every single person inside it had gone completely still, waiting, dreading, unable to look away from the small radio now sitting so ordinarily against Tomas's hip."Renata," I said, the name tearing itself out of me before I could stop it, my whole body lurching toward the doorway before Andres's grip on my arm held me firmly back."Nobody moves," the stranger said calmly, his voice still measured, though something colder had crept into it now, the tone of a man who understood exactly how much leverage a single silence on a radio channel could suddenly provide him. "I find it remarkable how quickly a room full of clever people forgets who actually controls

Tomas's ten minutes had already burned down to six by the time I realized Valentina was no longer standing anywhere in that building, and the sudden, sharp absence of her hit me like one more blow I did not have room left to absorb.My mind raced through every terrible possibility at once, certain for one gutting second that Henrique had somehow taken her too, that this endless day intended to keep stripping away everyone I loved one at a time until nothing remained standing beside me at all."Where is Valentina," I demanded, spinning toward Andres, my voice raw with a fresh spike of panic I could not immediately justify or explain."She left the second Henrique's men secured Beatriz," Andres said quickly, steadying me with both hands on my shoulders. "She said her father needed her, that Beatriz manipulated their entire household once already and she was not leaving him unprotected a second time. Tomas sent two of his own people with her. She is safe, Camila. She made sure I understo