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You kissed her.
Not dramatically. Not the kind of kiss designed to bend a plot toward romance. It was brief, cold from the night air, and full of everything there wasn’t time to say properly. She went still for one breath, then kissed you back with the restrained ferocity of a woman who has learned to live without asking for softness but has not forgotten what it costs to refuse it.
When you stepped away, neither of you spoke.
Some silences are cleaner than language.
Then you got into the SUV and left.
The road back to your old life began in darkness and ended in surveillance.
Jonathan arranged a safehouse outside Charlotte owned under a trust no one in the family knew about. By dawn, you had shaved your beard, cut your hair, dressed in a charcoal suit that felt like somebody else’s costume, and looked into a mirror bright enough to show you the fracture lines between Andrés and Alejandro. The man staring back at you could walk into a CNBC interview and make markets twitch. He could also fix a busted coop latch and tell by smell when feed had gone damp. You did not know yet whether those men could stay inside the same skin.
Jonathan arrived first, then Isabella an hour later.
She walked into the study, saw you, stopped dead, and slapped you so hard your head turned.
Then she hugged you with equal force.
“You selfish bastard,” she said into your shoulder, voice breaking in a way you had not heard since your father’s funeral. “Do you have any idea what the last five months have been?”
You held her tighter. “I know enough.”
When she pulled back, her eyes were wet but furious. “Tomás held a memorial dinner without a body.”
That told you almost everything.