She drove until the map became a smear of highways and petrol stations, until a dozen towns blurred into one long, raw line of road. Days folded into nights and back again. Elena slept in the driver's seat sometimes, hunched like armor around her grief. Other times she walked alleys that smelled of beer and oil, knocked on doors in neighborhoods she once feared to cross, and traded blunt questions for blunt answers. Gangs, small-time fixers, dockworkers with little to lose — she went to all of them. She asked until her voice rasped and until someone finally pointed the way.
When the lead led her to the villa it looked tired, like a woman who practiced charm and then let it fall away. A gravel path, a low wall, a gate that creaked when she pushed it. Elena didn't pause. Whatever she had expected, the face that met her at the sunroom window was not it; it was worse and truer than rumor and memory combined.
Camila sat in the sun like a portrait time had failed to ruin — softer than Elena remembered, but the softness didn't reach her eyes. Those belonged to a woman who knew how to bargain lives away.
Elena stopped at the threshold and the world narrowed. Every breath felt like an accusation. Her hand moved before she had time to think: the gun at her hip came up, steady and familiar. The years of training and the nights of rage made the motion as automatic as breathing.
"You made me kill my dad," she said, each word a blade. Her voice shook but the gun did not. "You made me believe he was the one behind this. You planned all this. I didn't even allow him to explain yet I killed my own dad. I did all kinds of things in the past just to find you, but you were not looking for me. You wanted me dead, and you killed your own unborn grandchild who hasn't even seen the world. What kind of a mother are you?"
Camila's face did not twitch with surprise. If anything, a small, practised smile slid across her mouth as if Elena's fury were an expected entry on a ledger.
"Elena, don't be mad at me, okay," she said, soft and dangerous. "If you were in my shoes you would have done the same, girl. You are with the most powerful man in this country and do you know how much he has, how much power and influence he has? If I take you down I can have him to myself and take over your place and take the power you have, Elena. You think I cared about you? No, no. You were a burden to me, Elena. You made me weak and powerless. I never wanted a child but you came in."
The words dropped like acid. Elena's finger tightened on the trigger so hard her knuckles went white.
"You're a monster," she said, the admission tasting like ash. "I wished I never got to see you with my own eyes. I wish I didn't know you were my mother and you made me kill my own father — why, why?"
Camila's laugh came, small and hollow. She folded her hands as if smoothing the argument, as if the whole world could be pressed flat with a well-chosen turn of phrase.
"Oh, stop it, Elena — you think that man is your father?" The question was casual and cruel all at once.
Elena's body lurched. "What are you even saying?" she shouted, the gun trembling in her hand now from the suddenness of the revelation as much as from rage.
Camila's face tilted, eyes glittering. She stepped forward in a movement that was measured, sure. "Well, you don't know who your father is yet, and I have to kill you before he comes looking for you, dear. Because if he finds you, you will have so much power you have so many enemies, Elena — because of who you really are. Think about yourself: you keep having new enemies every day. You are with the most fearless and powerful person in Italy and your father is the most famous fearless and powerful man in Mexico."
The sentence landed like a thrown stone. For a slipping second the world lost its vertical: betrayed lines of loyalty, half-truths, the blood-stained ledger of their lives — all of it spun toward a new center Elena had never suspected.
Her hands shook with more than rage now: the gun felt suddenly heavy with new stakes. "You're lying," she said, but the word felt thin. A thousand questions crowded her head, each one more jagged than the last. "Who? Who is he?"
Camila watched her as if she were finally allowing her child to see the chessboard. "You were born into a history you were never meant to understand," she said. "I was young. I ran. I thought distance could keep you small enough to hide. I lied to keep you safe from him. But you grew. You became dangerous merely by surviving. Men like your father do not love weakness. They take what they can command. If he sees you — with Lorenzo at your side — you will be a prize and a weapon rolled into one. They will come. They will want what you are, and they will not be kind about it."
Elena's brain tried to stack the information into meaning and failed. Each piece — the poison, the payments, the way her father had been framed — reframed itself in a new light. The man she had killed, the man she had avenged, the man who had trained her, had been a part of a lie constructed not just for power in Italy but against the shadow of an empire a continent away.
"You mean to tell me my whole life was sold to protect what?" Elena's voice cracked. "To spare me from a father I've never known? To hand me over like currency?"
"Not to spare you," Camila answered. "To survive. To buy a seat. To make a bargain that might have kept a heart beating at the price of other hearts. I made choices I cannot take back. I thought I could keep you invisible until it was safe. I failed."
The confession sounded like admission and like justification at once. Elena felt something sour and old unwind behind her ribs: grief, fury, the memory of a child's hunger that had turned into a woman's arsenal.
"Then kill me," Elena said, the gun's muzzle a punctuation between them. "If you think I am a prize to be traded, if you think I am dangerous, take the chance and end it."
Camila's eyes flared with something like pity. "If I end you I rob the world of a storm. Your father will come. He will find the trail I started and he will not be merciful to those who stood in his way. I cannot allow you to become a beacon for the men who will come for you."
Her words were paradox — threat wrapped in an argument for survival. Elena's finger curled on the trigger. For a heartbeat she imagined pulling it, imagining a world where the line closed and the ledger completed. But the idea of ending herself, of closing the only window to the truth she had clawed her way toward, felt like cowardice of a different kind.
"Why tell me this now?" Elena asked, voice raw. "Why not tell me the truth before I bled and killed for the wrong reasons?"
Camila's shoulders sagged as if a century had landed on them. "Because I was afraid. Because I told myself the safest thing was silence. Because I am a coward in ways you will never forgive. And because now — with men moving and power shifting — you will need to know who is coming. I can save you from nothing; I can only tell you."
There was a distant sound then: the low rumble of engines along the drive, a different kind of arrival. Camila's head tilted, her face losing some of its practiced calm.
Elena's heart hammered not from anger now but from that fresh, hot fear. Her throat went dry. Men's boots, the slap of a truck on gravel — the world had folded twice now: first into a lie, then into the revelation of a father whose reach spanned borders.
She did not lower the gun. She raised it, because keeping it raised felt like control. She had a thousand reasons to shoot, to punish, to end this chapter with decisive cruelty. She also had a thousand reasons to live — to learn, to turn that impossible blood into a weapon of her own choosing.
The gate swung open. Heavy steps hit the path. Voices barked commands. Dust rose like a premonition.
Camila did not try to hide. She met Elena's gaze — for once not as a woman rearranging blame but as someone who had made a choice and had to answer to it.
"Elena," she said, small and brittle, "he will come. Be ready."
The choice hung between them like an explosion about to break. Elena's hand did not move. She could kill a mother and make the world smaller by one despicable heart, or she could live and learn how to fight an empire. Outside, men closed in. Inside, truths rearranged a family's bones.
She swallowed hard and whispered, not to Camila but to herself, "Then let him come."