Chapter 5 - The Confrontation
Time seemed to slow down to a crawl.
Victoria’s finger began to squeeze the trigger. Alejandro lunged forward with explosive speed, throwing his entire body between the barrel of the gun and Camila just as the weapon discharged.
Crack.
The silenced bullet grazed Alejandro’s left shoulder, tearing through his custom shirt and embedding itself in the walnut desk behind him. He hit the floor hard, grunting in pain, but used his momentum to sweep his leg outward, catching Victoria behind the knee.
She stumbled, her expensive red heel snapping off on the hardwood floor, sending her crashing down against the edge of the glass coffee table. Her pistol slipped from her grasp, sliding across the polished floorboards toward Camila’s feet.
Without a moment of hesitation, Camila dropped the brass paperweight, kicked the pistol under the heavy oak desk, and dove backward into the safety of the archive room, slamming the steel-reinforced door shut just as Victoria lunged forward with a furious scream.
Bang! Bang!
Victoria hammered her fists against the steel door, her corporate composure entirely shattered, revealing the desperate, cornered criminal underneath. “Open this door! You can’t hide in there forever!”
Alejandro pushed himself up from the floor, clutching his bleeding shoulder with one hand while leveling his service weapon directly at Victoria’s back.
“It’s over, Victoria,” Alejandro panted, blood staining his sleeve. “Look at the monitors.”
Victoria stopped hammering the door. She slowly turned around.
Across the office, the main security wall—which had just finished uploading the analog backup files—was flashing bright green. But more importantly, the ground-floor lobby cameras showed something that made all the color drain from her face.
Dozens of federal police vehicles, sirens flashing blue and red, had completely surrounded Salvatierra Tower. Riot shields, tactical units, and federal investigators were pouring through the glass revolving doors.
Daniel Cruz was already being escorted out of the sub-basement in handcuffs on the live camera feed, flanked by federal marshals holding digital printouts of the fraudulent trust documents.
Victoria dropped to her knees amidst the broken glass of her snapped heel, staring blankly at the monitors as her billion-dollar empire dissolved into smoke and handcuffs.
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“You... you planned this,” she whispered, looking up at Alejandro with hollow eyes.
“No,” Alejandro said coldly as building security officers stepped out of the private elevator to secure her. “My father planned it. I just followed the list.”
