Chapter 44 - The Broken Patriarch
"Get away from us, Álvaro," Lucía warned, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper as she stepped between the disgraced tycoon and her remaining son. "You've taken enough from this family."
Álvaro stopped three paces away, sinking heavily to his knees on the wet concrete. His hands were scraped raw, his silver cuff links missing, his eyes bloodshot and rimmed with hollow despair.
"I didn't know," Álvaro choked out, his voice cracking like brittle ice. "Lucía... on everything I ever owned, I swear to you, I didn't know Cassian did that to the boy."
"You didn't care!" Lucía snapped, fury blazing in her eyes. "All you cared about was securing the defense contracts for Apex Dynamics! You treated our children like collateral, snubbed them as if they were stains on your elite reputation, and left us in the gutter so you could sip champagne with board members!"
"And look where it brought me!" Álvaro cried out, burying his face in his trembling hands. "The board liquidated my shares an hour ago! Vance traded my warrants on the black market! The SEC has frozen every account tied to my name, and the federal task force is issuing a warrant for my arrest as an accomplice to Cassian's coup!"
He looked up at Mateo, his eyes begging for mercy from the ten-year-old boy he had spent a lifetime ignoring.
"I am ruined. I have nothing left. No company, no name, no legacy," Álvaro whispered. "But beneath the central laboratory of Apex Tower... three levels below the sub-basement... there is an off-grid dark-fiber quantum transmitter. I had it built illegally five years ago to skim Coalition data streams."
Mateo stared at the man who shared his blood, feeling neither anger nor warmth—only the cold, surgical detachment of a mind that had outgrown its maker.
"The encryption key," Mateo demanded flatly. "Give it to me."
Álvaro reached into his coat and pulled out a heavy titanium thumb drive shaped like an obelisk. "The root code is the date you two were born. The only date I ever deleted from my public calendar."
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Mateo snatched the drive from Álvaro's trembling fingers without a word of thanks.
"Let's go, Mom," Mateo said, turning his back on his father without a second glance. "We have a warship to shoot down."
