The words came out quickly.
“Someone lied to you. Or you have the wrong person.”
Her hand lifted slightly, gesturing toward the photograph.
“That’s Carlos Eduardo. He works in logistics in the city. He doesn’t…..”
Her voice suddenly faltered.
“He doesn’t have enemies.”
The silence that followed was heavy.
Her chest rose and fell unevenly.
And for the first time since the photograph appeared, fear began creeping into the edges of her grief.
A slow, cold realisation pressing at the back of her mind.
Because Santiago Torres Mendoza did not look like a man who made mistakes about death.
“Carlos is dead.”
Santiago’s voice cut cleanly through the room.
“And you are the murderer.”
For a second Daniella did not understand the words.
They floated past her without meaning, like a language she did not speak.
Then they settled heavily in her chest.
Carlos is dead.
Something inside her gave way.
“No.”
The word came out small.
Almost breathless.
Her eyes dropped again to the photograph as if it might change if she looked hard enough.
“No.”
Her head shook once, then again.
“No… that’s not…..”
Her voice broke.
She pressed her lips together, trying to steady herself, but the memories were already pushing forward.
“I didn’t kill him,” she whispered.
Painfully tight..
“We were supposed to get married today.”
The words left her mouth and immediately shattered something in her chest.
She had worn the dress.
Pressed and hung carefully the night before.
She had arrived early.
She had waited.
She had called his phone until the automated voice told her the number was busy.
She had waited another hour after that because she told herself traffic in the city was terrible and Carlos always ran late and good things still happened to people who were patient.
Her vision blurred.
She blinked hard trying to stop her eyes from watering like a broken dam.
Not here.
Not in front of this man.
“I was at the registry office for two hours,” she said, forcing the words out.
“The clerk saw me. The people waiting saw me. I was there.”
Her voice softened.
“And he never came.”
The room went quiet again.
But the quiet felt different now.
Her mind moved backward through the last year with brutal clarity.
Carlos asking questions.
Gentle questions.
Patient ones.
About her father’s debts.
About the men her father owed.
About the town.
About supply routes.
She had answered them.
All of them.
Because she had believed she was talking to the man she was going to marry. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
Her stomach twisted painfully.
Not from the pregnancy.
From something colder.
Something hollow.
She looked at Santiago slowly.
“Who was he?”
The question barely held together.
Not angry.
Not accusing.
Just broken.
“Who was he to you?”
Santiago said nothing.
He just looked at her, steady, patient and cold.
The kind of look that measured every possibility before deciding if it even deserved acknowledgment.
Daniella’s hands clenched harder, the papers in her lap crumpling slightly.
She wanted to speak.
To ask.
To argue.
To demand.
But his silence answered everything that mattered.
“The police officers,” he said finally, his voice low and precise, almost indifferent, “will be at your door by morning if they have not already called.”
Her stomach twisted.
“You are implicated,” he continued, “and the evidence… points toward you. Witnesses, photographs, a chain of events they will interpret as a motive.”
He paused.
Letting her imagine the rest.
“The family will see you. And they have money.”
Her throat went dry.
“Their money will ensure lawyers, investigators, people who will stop at nothing to see this resolved in their favor. And you….”