Chapter 2 - The Fall of Doña Regina
In the private waiting room of the 5th floor VIP wing, Doña Regina Santillán sat on a velvet armchair, her posture rigid, her hands trembling as she clutched her leather handbag.
Two armed officers from the Federal Prosecutor's Office stood by the double doors, their hands resting on their holsters. Across the room, the entire board of directors of the Santillán Group sat in tense, terrifying silence. None of them looked at her. The men who had bowed to her for twenty years, the executives who had sought her approval for every major acquisition, now treated her like a corpse in a morgue.
"This is an outrage!" Regina snapped, her voice shaking with a mix of fury and mounting panic. She stood up, smoothing down her designer Chanel coat. "I am Regina Vda. de Santillán! You have no right to detain me in a public hospital! Where is my attorney? Where is Licenciado Mendoza?!"
"Licenciado Mendoza was arrested twenty minutes ago at his office in Santa Fe, Doña Regina," a cold, smooth voice replied from the doorway.
The room went completely dead silent.
Mateo walked in.
His white shirt was splattered with blood across his chest and sleeves. His tie was undone, his dark hair messy, but his eyes were like two pieces of burning coal. Behind him walked Prosecutor Carlos Garza—the most feared federal prosecutor in the country, a man who had put three state governors behind bars.
"Mateo..." Regina breathed, taking an instinctive step back, her hands grasping at her pearl necklace. "My son... thank God you're here. These people are insane! They're treating me like a criminal! I told them it was an accident! The girl slipped! She's clumsy, Mateo, you know how she is with those cheap shoes—"
Smack!
The sound echoed through the private wing like a gunshot.
Regina stumbled back against the velvet armchair, her hand flying to her left cheek. The shock was so complete that for three seconds she couldn't even breathe. Her golden earring rattled against the floorboards.
"You hit me...?" she whispered, her eyes wide with horror, looking at her son as if he had turned into a stranger. "You hit your own mother?!"
"I didn't hit my mother," Mateo said, his voice dropping to a low, guttural rasp that made every executive in the room shudder. "My mother died ten years ago when she let her vanity turn her into a demon. You are just a parasite living in my father's house."
"Mateo!" she shrieked, tears of humiliation finally bursting from her eyes. "I did everything for you! I built your reputation! I kept that neighborhood trash from dragging our name through the mud! She doesn't belong in our world! She was stealing from you!"
"She didn't steal a single cent from me," Mateo said coldly. He stepped forward, pulling a thick stack of legal documents from Prosecutor Garza's leather briefcase and slamming them onto the mahogany table in front of her. "In fact, for the last three years, Valeria has been living on thirty thousand pesos a month from my salary as a logistics consultant. She thought I was a middle-manager, Regina. She loved me when she thought I was poor."
Regina blinked, her face contorting in confusion. "What... what are you talking about?"
"I hid my true identity from her when we met because I wanted to know if a woman could love me—not the Santillán fortune, not the mansions, not the yachts," Mateo said, leaning over the table until his blood-stained face was inches from hers. "And she did. She cooked for me in a tiny kitchen in Iztapalapa. She washed my clothes by hand when our washing machine broke. She took care of me when I was sick. She gave me the only real home I have ever known."
He pointed a long, trembling finger at the documents on the table.
"And while she was saving every peso to buy baby clothes, you were embezzling funds from the Santillán Foundation," Mateo continued, his voice cutting like a razor. "Two hundred million pesos transferred to offshore accounts in Panama to pay off your gambling debts at the Casino de Monte-Carlo. Mendoza helped you forge my father's signature before he died."
Regina’s face went entirely grey. "How... how did you..."
"I've known for two years," Mateo whispered. "I let you keep your illusion of power because I didn't care about the money. I was going to resign from the board next month, leave the entire fortune to my cousins, and move to Tepoztlán with my wife. But then you put your hands on her."
He turned to Prosecutor Garza.
"Prosecutor," Mateo said without looking back. "The charge is attempted aggravated homicide, domestic violence, and corporate fraud exceeding two hundred million pesos. Execute the warrant."
Garza stepped forward, pulling a pair of heavy steel handcuffs from his belt. "Doña Regina Santillán, you are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent—"
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"No! Get your hands off me!" Regina screamed, kicking and thrashing as the cold steel snapped around her manicured wrists. "Mateo! Tell them to stop! I am your mother! You can't do this to me! Think of the press! Think of the family name!"
"The family name died on the stairs tonight, Regina," Mateo said softly as two officers dragged her toward the private service elevator. "And you are going to rot in Santa Martha Acatitla."
