Chapter 4 - THE SERRANO CONNECTION
The drive to the Sierra Madre mountains was tense. I had swapped my recognizable armored SUV for a discreet, battered pickup truck. Isabel sat in the passenger seat, staring blankly out the window, while Sofia and the baby rested in the back. The radio crackled with encrypted comms from my few remaining loyal lieutenants. Arturo had made his move. He had announced to the syndicate that I had gone mad, murdering my own men, and placed a fifty-million-dollar bounty on my head.
"I need to know everything about Ana Lucía," I said to Isabel, breaking the suffocating silence. "If she gave birth to him, how did she manage to get him out before Arturo's men killed her?"
Isabel took a deep breath. "Ana Lucía was a brilliant hacker. That's how Arturo found her initially—she was laundering money for a rival cartel, and he caught her. He gave her a choice: die, or carry your child. He needed someone smart, someone without a family to miss her. But she outsmarted him. She created a backdoor in Arturo’s financial network. When she went into labor, she threatened to trigger a dead-man's switch that would drain all of Arturo’s offshore accounts if she wasn't allowed to deliver the baby in peace."
"But she didn't survive," I noted grimly.
"No," Isabel said, tears welling in her eyes. "Arturo's men shot her the moment the baby was born. But before she died, she managed to hand the baby to a sympathetic nurse—someone I had planted in the clinic. The nurse smuggled the baby out in a laundry cart. She was supposed to bring him to me, but she got intercepted by Arturo’s hounds. In a panic, she must have hidden the baby in your trash bins, hoping you would find him. They killed the nurse three streets over."
I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. Ana Lucía, a woman I had never met, had died protecting my blood. She had faced down the devil himself to give my son a chance at life.
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From the backseat, Sofia spoke up. "My grandma used to say that bad men only win when good people forget how to fight."
I glanced at the homeless girl in the rearview mirror. She was holding a silver pendant she had salvaged from the streets, dangling it to entertain the newborn. "Your grandmother was a wise woman, Sofia. And we haven't forgotten how to fight. We're just sharpening our knives."
