Chapter 5 - The Order
The sound made me flinch.
Gabriel turned toward the door.
Andrés opened it immediately.
The hallway was empty.
No footsteps.
No shadow.
Nothing.
Yet someone had been there.
Gabriel returned his attention to me.
“The person who ordered your death isn't Teresa.”
I felt a chill move through me.
“Then who?”
He didn't answer.
Instead, he asked for my phone.
Andrés handed it to him.
Gabriel opened the messages.
He stopped at Mateo's warning.
“He knows.”
“Knows what?”
“That I survived.”
I stared at him.
“You've met Mateo?”
“Once.”
“When?”
“The night before your accident.”
My stomach tightened.
Gabriel explained that he had confronted Mateo about the foundation accounts.
Mateo had denied everything.
Then he had asked Gabriel a strange question.
“What did my mother tell you about Valeria?”
Gabriel realized Mateo knew about the investigation.
But he didn't understand why.
Until the insurance policy appeared.
“Mateo wasn't trying to collect the money for himself,” Gabriel said.
“Then who?”
He placed another document on my bed.
The beneficiary had been changed twice.
First to Mateo.
Then to a trust.
And the final beneficiary was a company registered under an unfamiliar name.
I read it twice.
“Who owns it?”
Gabriel looked at me.
“You.”
My heart stopped.
“What?”
“The company was created using your identity.”
Jimena grabbed the document.
“This means someone has been using Valeria's identity to move money.”
Andrés's face hardened.
“That's why they need her dead.”
The realization hit me.
If I died, the forged documents would become harder to challenge.
My death would erase the witness.
But there was another problem.
My signature had already been used on documents I had never seen.
Gabriel leaned closer.
“You were not chosen randomly.”
“Why me?”
“Because you were the first person who could read the books.”
I looked at Mateo's photograph.
“Did he know?”
Gabriel hesitated.
“Yes.”
My eyes filled with tears.
That answer hurt more than any fracture.
I had spent three years telling myself Mateo was weak.
Maybe he wasn't weak.
Maybe he had simply been waiting.
The door opened.
Rebeca stepped inside.
She was trembling.
“Valeria,” she whispered.
“What happened?”
She held up a hospital badge.
“This was found inside the elevator.”
I looked at the name.
It belonged to a nurse who had never worked on my floor.
Then Rebeca whispered:
May you like
“She was here the night you fell.”
And suddenly the monitor beside my bed began to beep faster...
