That’s all I ask.
The request went up the hierarchy until it reached Colonel Vargas, the prison director – no relation – a hardened 62-year-old who had seen countless men walk to their end.
Something in Mateo’s case had always bothered him.
The case seemed unassailable: fingerprints on the murder weapon, clothes soaked in blood, a neighbor who swore he saw Mateo fleeing the scene that night.
Yet those eyes… they weren’t the eyes of a killer. Colonel Vargas had spent thirty years learning to decipher them.
“Bring the child in,” he ordered calmly.
Three hours later, a simple white van pulled up in front of the prison gates.
A social worker came out, holding the small hand of a girl with a serious face, light brown hair and eyes far too old for her eight years.
Elena Vargas walked down the long corridor without shedding a single tear or trembling.
The men in the cells remained completely silent as he passed by.
She exuded a strange gravity, something indefinable.
In the visiting room, she saw her father for the first time in three years.
Mateo was sitting, chained to the steel table, his orange jumpsuit faded, his beard unkempt and neglected.
As soon as he saw her, tears streamed down his cheeks.
“My little girl,” he murmured. “My Elena…”
What happened next would change everything.
Elena let go of the social worker’s hand and walked straight towards him.
No running. No shouting.
Each step was deliberate, rehearsed, as if she had lived this moment a thousand times in her mind.
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