Chapter 6 - THE MIDNIGHT CONFESSION AT THE PRECINCTThe municipal holding cells smelled of damp concrete and old iron.
Teresa sat on a wooden bench, her red dress stained with dust, her hair slightly disheveled. Yet, her posture remained rigid, her eyes burning with an unholy, defiant fire as Diego walked down the corridor and stopped outside her cell.
“You look terrible, Mother,” Diego said softly.
Teresa stood up, walking right up to the steel bars. She didn’t look like a grieving, misunderstood matriarch anymore. She looked like a predator cornered in its den.
“You think you’ve won, don't you?” she hissed, a cruel smile stretching across her lips. “You think locking me up stops the wheel from turning?”
“It stops you from murdering my son, forging my signature, and holding my sister-in-law in a well for eight months.”
Teresa laughed—a dry, rattling sound that sent chills down his spine.
“Do you really think I built this empire by myself, Diego? Do you think a poor seamstress from the provinces knows how to launder millions through offshore accounts in Belize?”
Diego narrowed his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“The 30,000 pesos you sent every month?” Teresa mocked, shaking her head. “That was pocket change. Loose change for the syndicate your father left behind before I had to ‘dispose’ of him.”
The air in the hallway seemed to freeze.
“My father died of a heart attack,” Diego whispered.
“Your father wanted to turn himself in for property fraud thirty years ago,” Teresa whispered back, her face pressing against the cold steel. “So I helped his heart stop. Just like I was going to help yours stop on that construction crane tomorrow morning.”
Diego gripped the iron bars so hard his fingers turned white. Every instinct screamed at him to shatter the glass, to drag her out of the cell and demand answers. But he forced himself to breathe. He pulled out his phone, holding the active recording interface right up to the bars.
“Go on,” Diego said evenly. “Tell the judge. Tell the microphone about my father.”
Teresa’s eyes flicked down to the phone. The realization hit her all at once—she had been baited by her own arrogance.
Her face contorted into a mask of pure hatred. She lunged forward, her fingernails clawing at the bars, missing his face by inches.
“You ungrateful bastard!” she screamed, her voice echoing down the stone corridors. “I gave you life! I built your future! Without me, you are nothing! NOTHING!”
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Diego turned his back on her, walking away as her furious, echoing shrieks bounced off the walls.
He had what he needed. The confession was locked in.
