Chapter 4 - THE RACE AGAINST TIME
The air inside the private helicopter cabin tasted like ozone and cold leather.
Alejandro sat strapped into the jump seat beside Dr. Armando Reséndiz, one of Monterrey’s most elite trauma and obstetric surgeons, who had been yanked out of bed fifteen minutes prior with a five-hundred-thousand-peso transfer fee wired directly to his offshore account.
Dr. Reséndiz was frantically strapping a portable ultrasound unit and an advanced trauma kit into the seat restraints, his graying hair uncombed, his eyes wide with adrenaline as the twin turbine engines of the AgustaWestland chopper screamed overhead.
“Mr. Silva, you said she’s eight months pregnant and took a fall down a flight of marble stairs?” Dr. Reséndiz shouted over the deafening roar of the rotor blades.
“That’s what she said before the line went dead,” Alejandro shouted back, his knuckles white as he gripped the armrests. His jaw was locked so tight his teeth ached. His dark eyes stared fixedly out the reinforced glass window down at the sprawling, glittering grid of San Pedro Garza García below them. “Placental abruption, internal hemorrhage, skull fracture—take your pick, Doctor. If she dies, or if that child dies, I want to know every medical possibility we’re walking into.”
“At eight months, a severe blunt-force trauma to the abdomen combined with a fall from height is catastrophic,” Reséndiz yelled, his hands checking the syringes in his trauma bag. “If the placenta has sheared away from the uterine wall, she has less than twenty minutes before she bleeds out internally, and the baby will asphyxiated from lack of oxygen. We need to perform an emergency Caesarean section immediately if there’s any heartbeat left.”
“Then we kick the front doors in if we have to,” Alejandro said coldly.
“Mr. Silva, the Garza estate is a fortress,” Soto, the head of Alejandro’s security team who was piloting the chopper, called back through the headset intercom. “High concrete walls, electric gates, biometric locks. We can’t just land in the front yard without triggering their private security lockdown protocol.”
“Who said anything about landing in the front yard?” Alejandro snapped, his eyes locking onto a specific set of coordinates flashing on the digital map display. “Land on the roof helipad. Mateo had it reinforced two years ago when he was trying to play billionaire. Cut the engine power, drop the fast-rope team, and secure the perimeter before anyone in the neighborhood even realizes we’re here.”
“Copy that. Approaching target zone in forty seconds,” Soto replied.
Alejandro closed his eyes for a brief second, a cold memory flashing through his mind.
Five years ago.
He remembered walking into Mateo’s newly purchased mansion during a housewarming party—back when Camila was just a quiet, polite young woman standing shyly in the corner, wearing a simple blue dress, looking completely out of place among Mateo’s loud, obnoxious circle of real estate cronies. Alejandro remembered making eye contact with her across the room, sharing a quiet, conspiratorial smile over how ridiculous Mateo’s boasting was.
Later, after Mateo screwed him out of the Apodaca deal, Alejandro had tried to warn her. He had sent her a message on an encrypted burner phone: Get away from him, Camila. He’s hollow. He will destroy everything he touches, including you.
She never replied. She married Mateo six months later.
And now, here he was—breaking into the fortress of the man who hated him, not out of pity, but out of sheer, unyielding fury that an innocent woman and an unborn child were dying because Mateo Garza was too busy playing king in a strip-lit nightclub.
“Thirty seconds to roof touchdown!” Soto’s voice crackled over the headset.
Alejandro unbuckled his harness, grabbed a heavy tactical medical crate with one hand, and pulled down his night-vision goggles over his forehead.
“Doctor, stay right behind me,” Alejandro ordered, his voice dropping into a register that brook no argument. “If anyone gets in our way—guard, butler, or Mateo himself if he somehow showed up—you put them down or let me do it. We are getting inside that house.”
The helicopter’s skids touched down softly on the flat, gravel-paved rooftop of the Garza mansion with barely a whisper.
Before the landing gear even fully settled, Soto and two tactical operators kicked open the cabin doors, dropping onto the roof like black shadows, their suppressed carbines raised in a sweeping perimeter check.
Alejandro hit the roof pavement a second later, the cold night wind whipping his black wool coat around his legs like the wings of a predatory bird.
“Secure the skylight stairwell access!” Alejandro commanded, waving his hand toward the central glass dome that led directly down into the mansion’s upper landing.
One of the operators rushed forward with a glass-cutter and a thermal charge, applying it silently to the corner of the reinforced skylight frame.
Ffffft.
A silent hiss of blue flame melted through the industrial silicone sealant in less than four seconds. With a gentle push, the heavy glass panel lifted away, venting a wave of trapped, stale air from inside the mansion into the night sky.
Alejandro didn't wait. He dropped headfirst through the opening into the dark, silent hallway of the second floor, his boots hitting the hardwood floor with a muffled thud, his heart hammering against his ribs like a sledgehammer.
“Clear!” he barked back up to the team.
Dr. Reséndiz dropped down beside him, clutching his medical case like a shield.
“Where to, Mr. Silva?” the doctor asked, panting slightly.
Alejandro stood in the darkness of the second-floor landing, closing his eyes, listening intently to the massive, hollow acoustics of the silent house below.
Then, cutting through the heavy silence of the marble foyer far beneath them, came a sound so faint it almost sounded like a phantom echo.
May you like
A weak, rattling gasp.
Alejandro didn't hesitate. He turned toward the grand staircase and bolted down the steps three at a time, plunging headfirst into the darkness of the ground floor.
