Chapter 2 - SOFIA KNEW EXACTLY WHO SHE WAS LOOKING FOR
Sofia had not run toward the convoy by accident.
That was what Elena told Ramon six hours later from a guarded hospital room.
Her injuries were serious but stable.
Ramon sat beside the bed while Sofia slept curled inside a chair under three hospital blankets.
“Elena, start at the beginning.”
She stared toward her daughter.
“Gabriel met me eight years ago.”
Ramon’s jaw tightened.
A year after the funeral.
“Where?”
“At a private rehabilitation clinic.”
“What clinic?”
Elena hesitated.
“Blackwood Recovery.”
Ramon knew the name.
It had closed years earlier.
Officially, it treated executives, celebrities, and wealthy clients who needed absolute privacy.
Unofficially?
Ramon’s uncle Esteban had invested in it.
Elena continued.
“I was a trauma nurse.”
One night, a man arrived without identification.
Sedated.
Badly burned along one arm.
Listed only as:
G. Gray.
The clinic director told Elena the patient had suffered a breakdown and required isolation.
“No phone calls. No visitors. No outside doctors.”
“How did you know it was Gabriel?”
“At first, I didn’t.”
Then he woke.
He knew exactly where he was.
He also knew he wasn’t supposed to leave.
“He told me his name after three weeks.”
Ramon leaned forward.
“Why didn’t he contact me?”
“He said he couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because the people watching him worked for your family.”
The words landed hard.
Elena explained that Gabriel escaped after four months.
She helped him.
They disappeared into Pennsylvania under different names.
Eventually, they fell in love.
Two years later, Sofia was born.
Ramon looked toward the sleeping child.
“She’s seven.”
“Yes.”
“Gabriel has been alive all this time.”
“Yes.”
Anger moved through him like heat.
“You let me think he was dead.”
Elena did not flinch.
“He thought contacting you would kill you.”
That silenced him.
Then she reached into the hospital bedside drawer.
Sofia’s muddy pink backpack had been cleaned and returned by police.
Inside was a folded photograph.
Ramon took it.
Gabriel.
Older.
Thinner.
But unmistakable.
He stood beside Elena holding a baby.
Sofia.
Date stamped seven years earlier.
Ramon’s hands shook.
Then he saw something hanging around Gabriel’s neck.
The Ortega family signet.
The one supposedly recovered from the warehouse fire.
“That ring was buried with him.”
“No.”
Elena looked at him.
“A duplicate was.”
Ramon’s blood ran cold.
Someone had staged the evidence.
“Elena, who?”
“I don’t know who started it.”
“But you know something.”
She nodded.
“Three years ago, Gabriel began investigating why he had been hidden.”
He discovered Blackwood Recovery was one piece of a larger network of properties controlled through shell companies.
Some were tied to Ortega legitimate holdings.
Others were hidden.
Then Gabriel found a name repeated across the documents.
Esteban Ortega.
Ramon’s uncle.
The man who had helped Ramon rebuild the family after their father died.
The man Ramon had trusted more than anyone except his own brother.
Elena continued.
“Gabriel said Esteban wasn’t the only one.”
“Who else?”
“He never told me.”
Then:
“Two years ago, Gabriel disappeared.”
Ramon’s hand tightened around the photograph.
“Taken?”
“Yes.”
Elena and Sofia had been hiding ever since.
Four days ago, Gabriel contacted Elena for the first time in almost two years.
One message.
One location.
The forest.
“He said he was getting out.”
They went.
Instead, men were waiting.
Elena was captured.
Sofia escaped through a gap in an old fence.
Before they separated, Elena gave her daughter one instruction:
Run to the road.
Look for black cars.
Look for Ramon Ortega.
“How did Sofia know what I looked like?”
Elena smiled weakly.
“Gabriel kept a photograph.”
Ramon looked at Sofia again.
Then Elena whispered:
“There was something else in the message.”
“What?”
“A phrase.”
She reached for a hospital notepad and wrote:
THE WOLF IS UNDER THE CHAPEL.
Ramon stared.
He knew the chapel.
The abandoned Ortega family chapel stood seven miles from the clearing.
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And beneath it was a crypt nobody had opened since Ramon’s father was buried.
If Gabriel had hidden evidence anywhere, he had hidden it inside the Ortega family’s own graveyard.
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