Five years of shouting his innocence to gray walls that never answered. In a few hours, he would face his sentence.
“I want to see my daughter,” he said in a dry voice, worn by confinement. “That’s all I ask. Let me see Salomé before it’s all over.” The younger guard lowered his eyes. The older one shook his head contemptuously.
“Convicts have no rights.”
“She’s an eight-year-old girl.” “I haven’t seen her for three years.” The request reached the prison director, Colonel Méndez. Sixty years old. Three decades spent watching guilty men, liars, and broken men pass through its doors. But something about Ramiro’s case had always troubled him. The evidence was overwhelming: fingerprints on the weapon, bloodstained clothing, a witness who had seen him leave the house that evening.
Everything pointed to him.
And yet… his gaze wasn’t that of a murderer.
Méndez had learned to recognize guilt. And in Ramiro, he saw something else.
« Bring me the girl, » he ordered.
