Chapter 8 - THE SHADOW OF THE PAST
"Alexander!" Eleanor cried out, her voice rising in panic. "Answer me! What have you brought to our daughter’s door?"
Alexander slowly lowered his gaze to the floor, his chest rising and falling in heavy, silent breaths. He reached up with a hand that was no longer entirely steady, rubbing his brow as decades of buried memories seemed to surface behind his eyes.
"Ten years ago..." Alexander said softly, his voice dropping into a raspy, distant register, "...before I resigned my commission... I led Special Operations Task Force 77 in South America."
Eleanor stared at him, bewildered. "What does South America have to do with Javier Robles?"
"The Robles empire isn't built on real estate, Eleanor," Alexander said, turning his head slowly toward his ex-wife. "Their real estate holdings in this city are just a laundry mat. Twenty years ago, Javier’s grandfather was the primary financial architect for the cartel networks we dismantled in Bogota."
Sofia gasped, pressing her back against her father’s chest. "Dad..."
"I signed the seizure warrants that frozen three hundred million dollars of their offshore assets in 2014," Alexander continued, his voice cold and terrifyingly clear. "It stripped their family of their international network. They spent the last decade rebuilding in the states... pretending to be legitimate corporate nobility."
Eleanor’s mouth opened in horror. "They... they used Sofia to get to you?"
"They didn't want the condo," Alexander realized, his eyes burning with a dark, terrible clarity. "The legal papers Carmen had... they weren't property deeds. They were power-of-attorney documents. If Sofia signed them, it gave the Robles family legal access to her trust fund... and the family name."
May you like
He looked down at Sofia’s wedding ring.
"They didn't just want revenge," Alexander whispered. "They wanted to leverage my daughter to force me out of retirement... to force me to access the classified registry files they need to recover their frozen assets."
