Chapter 3 - The Frozen Fortune
Meanwhile, back in the Coyoacán house, Ricardo was pacing the length of the living room, a glass of scotch shaking in his hand. Vanessa, the woman in the red dress, was furiously typing on her phone, while Doña Elvira rocked the infant baby boy, her lips pressed into a thin, bitter line.
"Relax, Ricardo," Vanessa snapped, tossing her phone onto the glass table. "She’s been gone for five years. The courts have already accepted the preliminary abandonment filings. A expensive lawyer can twist her sudden reappearance into the actions of an unstable, volatile woman who abandoned her child and came back to terrorize a respectable family."
"You don't understand, Vanessa!" Ricardo yelled, slamming his glass down. "The construction company—the accounts are in her family’s trust name! I’ve been using a power of attorney that required her presumed absence or death to remain absolute. If she’s alive, if she’s here, she can revoke it with a single signature."
"Then we make sure she can't use her signature," Doña Elvira interjected, her eyes gleaming with malice. "She has no proof of what happened to that wild boy. We tell the police he was mentally disturbed, that he had to be restrained for his own safety because he was violent. Who will the neighborhood believe? Us, who have lived here for decades, or a woman who disappeared into thin air?"
Suddenly, Ricardo’s phone buzzed violently. It was a call from the chief financial officer of Vargas & Sons Construction, the multi-million-dollar legacy left by Mariana’s parents.
Ricardo picked it up quickly. "Hello? Marcus, did the wire transfer to the offshore account go through?"
"Ricardo, we have a catastrophic problem," Marcus’s voice was trembling. "All corporate accounts have just been completely frozen by the federal banking commission. A freeze order was issued under an international anti-money laundering and asset protection protocol. They are auditing every single transaction made over the last forty-eight months."
Ricardo felt the room spin. "What? On whose authority?!"
"On the authority of the majority shareholder," Marcus said, his voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "Mariana Vargas. She didn't just walk into a bank, Ricardo. She walked into the central headquarters with a federal mandate signed by the Ministry of Justice. And that’s not all. The audit is focusing on the millions you funneled into Vanessa’s boutique clothing line and your mother’s penthouse apartment in Cancun."
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Vanessa gasped, looking up as Ricardo’s phone slipped from his fingers, clattering onto the floor.
At that exact moment, the heavy wooden front doors of the house were violently rattled. Outside, the flashing red and blue lights of three police cruisers illuminated the courtyard, reflecting off the very orange tree where Mateo had been chained hours before.
