Or worse.
He closed the file slowly, not because he was finished with it, but because he needed a moment to think before acting. Over the years, Victor had developed a reputation for control, for discipline, for running his facility with a level of order that others respected, even if they didn’t always like it. He believed in structure, in procedure, in the idea that if you followed the rules closely enough, chaos could be kept at a distance.
But this—
This didn’t fit into any structure he trusted.
“Get me surveillance from Block D,” he said finally, pressing the intercom without taking his eyes off the folder. “Past six weeks. All angles.”
There was a brief pause on the other end. “Everything, sir?”
“Everything,” he repeated.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.
Elena Marquez had once been someone people trusted with their lives.
Before the arrest, before the trial that moved too quickly for her to understand what was happening, before the sentence that felt less like a verdict and more like a conclusion already decided, she had been a senior nurse at a public hospital on the outskirts of Veracruz. Not the kind of nurse who did the bare minimum and went home, but the kind who stayed late, who remembered names, who could calm patients without saying much, simply by being present in a way that made fear feel manageable.
She had built her life out of responsibility. Raising her daughter, Sofia, largely on her own after a relationship that had ended more quietly than it had begun, she learned early how to carry more than one burden at a time. There were bills to pay, shifts to cover, a child to protect, and through it all, she maintained something that people often commented on without fully understanding—an ability to remain steady, even when everything around her wasn’t.
