All Chapters of Only Her Touch : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Roberto had learned, over the past careful years, to trust very little about his own body, but he trusted this. The sharp, cold drop in his stomach at the sight of that envelope wasn't fear of touch. It was older than that. It was the particular, animal certainty of a man who had once been taken from a place he thought was safe, and had never fully stopped checking the locks since. "Nobody has access to this floor but me, Priya, and building security," he said, staring at the envelope sitting square in the center of the hallway carpet, his voice steadier than he felt. "That's it. That's the entire list."Alicia crouched beside it without touching it, the way she'd clearly been trained to examine things that might be dangerous. She started cataloguing, not reacting. "Then someone on that list let them in. Or someone found a fourth way you don't know about yet."Roberto pulled a pair of gloves from the small drawer in the hallway console; a habit from years of handling contracts he

Alicia woke to sunlight she didn't recognize, in a bed that wasn't hers, in a life that had reshaped itself so many times in the last thirty-six hours that for one disoriented moment she couldn't remember which version of it she'd fallen asleep in. Then she felt the warmth of another body beside her. It was not touching, exactly, Roberto had fallen asleep a careful, deliberate foot away, but close enough that she could hear the slow, even rhythm of his breathing and the last day came rushing back all at once. The gala. The terrace. The contract. The kiss in the elevator, the way he grabbed her neck and held her body. Matt's hospital room, and the sentence he'd left hanging in the air like something too dangerous to finish saying out loud.She eased out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake him after the night he had, and found Priya already waiting in the sitting room with two cups of coffee and an expression that told Alicia the morning wasn't going to be gentle with either of them.

It took less than four hours to find Daniel Reyes. Alicia had expected a fight, or at least a chase for a man who'd resigned in disgrace and vanished with sensitive files and didn't usually want to be found. Instead, Priya's contact inside the building's security team traced his last card swipe to a modest hotel twenty minutes from the office, and when Alicia and Roberto knocked on his door that evening, the man who opened it looked less like a corporate defector and more like someone who hadn't slept in days. "I knew you'd find me," Daniel said, stepping back to let them in without protest, his voice hollow with exhaustion. "I almost hoped you would."The room was small, cluttered with fast food wrappers and a laptop open to a half-finished email, and Alicia recognized the particular disarray of a man who'd stopped taking care of himself somewhere around the same moment he'd stopped believing he had good options left. "Tell us what happened," Roberto said, his voice gentler than Al

The café Mrs. Ignacio chose sat far from anywhere the Vasquez family usually went. Just a small, dim place near the edge of the city, the kind with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu, where nobody would think to look for either of them. Alicia arrived first. Roberto had wanted to come with her, or at least send someone to watch from outside, but she'd asked him to let her do this one alone. Whatever her mother had to say, Alicia suspected it would come easier without an audience, and some old, careful part of her still wanted, foolishly perhaps, to give the woman who'd raised her one chance to be honest without an audience to perform for.Mrs. Ignacio arrived ten minutes later, dressed plainly, no sapphires tonight, her hair pulled back in a way Alicia had never once seen in eighteen years of galas and dinners. She looked, Alicia thought, like a different woman entirely. She looked smaller, and somehow more real. "Thank you for coming," Mrs. Ignacio said, sliding into the seat

The next forty minutes were the longest of Alicia's life. Roberto had every resource he owned moving within seconds of Marcus's message. With security dispatched to the abandoned car, a call was placed to a private investigator he trusted more than the police, Priya running through every camera feed within four blocks of where the vehicle had been found. Alicia sat on the edge of the sofa, the photograph of her mother still clutched in one hand, feeling for the first time in years genuinely, helplessly powerless. "She wouldn't have just left the car," Alicia said, more to herself than to Roberto, turning the same thought over and over. "Not unless something forced her to.""Or unless she was smart enough to ditch it herself," Roberto said, crouching in front of her, his hands closing gently over hers. "Alicia, look at me. She spent thirty years learning to survive that family. If she panicked after seeing Cole, running on foot and abandoning a traceable car is exactly the kind of d