Page 27 of Born of Vengeance

He turned the pages slowly.

Offshore accounts.

Shell corporations.

Coordinated shipments from South America to Europe and Southeast Asia.

Photos of politicians shaking hands with cartel donors.

Flight logs.

Meeting dates in Brasília, Warsaw, Panama City.

Proof. Not just of a man’s crimes.

Of a system’s rot.

He flipped to the final page.

There, in neat handwriting:

“Valderrama’s death would change nothing. But revealing us… would change everything.”

Rafael stared at the page for a moment.

Then he tore it out. Folded it once. Slipped it into his jacket pocket.

________________________________________

Before leaving, he walked back to Valderrama’s body.

He looked down at the man who built an empire on the backs of stolen lives.

“You were wrong,” Rafael said quietly.

“You didn’t bury her.

You built her monument.”

He stepped over the corpse, closed the safe behind him, and disappeared into the dark.

Chapter 13 – The Fallout

The smoke was still rising when the sirens arrived.

Three black SUVs. No markings. No flashing lights. Just dark windows and the kind of men who didn’t wear uniforms but always had badges—somewhere, in some pocket, if necessary.

By the time they reached the study, Héctor Valderrama was long dead, his blood drying on the polished wood floor, one hand still clenched into a fist. There were no signs of forced entry. No usable fingerprints. No security footage.

The guards who survived said nothing.

Some claimed it was an inside job. Others whispered about a foreign assassin, maybe someone sent by rival cartels. Everyone agreed on one thing:

“It was clean. Precise. Like he knew the place better than we did.”

The man responsible had vanished.

No witnesses.

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