Chapter 54
CHAPTER 54 — The Three-Way Mirror
Valeria didn't stop walking until she was three feet away from her father. Victor kept his hand on his holster, his eyes locked on the dark corners of the server room.
"You staged your own arrest," Valeria said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, quiet register.
"I had to get out of the American grid, Val," Ernesto said, gesturing to the pulsing servers around them. "The moment you leaked the Marbella files, you didn't just expose the politicians. You activated the kill-switch inside the global banking core. The people who actually control the currency flow—the Zurich Syndicate—realized the Salgado family was becoming a liability."
"And where is she?" Valeria demanded. "Where is my mother?"
A soft, elegant laugh echoed from the balcony above them.
The woman in the slate-gray cashmere coat stepped into the light, leaning over the steel railing. "I'm right here, darling. And your father is telling the truth, for once in his pathetic life."
Valeria looked up, her gaze shifting between the father who had lied to protect an empire and the mother who had abandoned her to engineer it.
May you like
"The two of you used me as a shield for thirty years," Valeria said, her hands perfectly still by her sides.
"We used you to preserve the lineage, Valeria," her mother replied, descending the concrete stairs with fluid grace. "Your father handles the law. I handle the capital. But neither of us has the biometric encryption required to access the core terminal. The grandfather who built the foundation designed the system to skip a generation. The master key only responds to your pulse."
