Lucas looked at Elena.
“Clean up this mess,” she ordered, pointing at the spilled food. “I don’t want to see rice on my plate.”
—Yes, sir— Elena said, with a slight smile of satisfaction that barely curved the corner of her lips.
Lucas looked at Maya again. The girl was trembling violently now, hugging herself, blood dripping from her hand onto her ruined uniform.
“And you…” Lucas hesitated. A part of him, a tiny, buried part, wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to lift her up, take her to the kitchen, and give her a dry towel.
But the anger over the broken vase, over the desecrated memory of his mother, won the battle. “Finish eating, if you can salvage anything from it. And then get out of here and go to your room. I don’t want to see your face until tomorrow. I’ll decide your future then.”
“But sir…” she tried.
“Not another word!” he shouted, turning away.
Lucas walked toward the front entrance of the house. The heavy wooden doors opened and the heat from inside hit him, a brutal contrast to the freezing hell outside.
Just before closing the door, he took one last look back.
Elena was already retreating toward the service entrance, dry and safe under her umbrella. And Maya… Maya was left all alone.
He watched her kneel in the mud. With her good hand, she was trying to pick up the rice from the ground, grain by grain, and put it back in the dirty Tupperware container. She wasn’t doing it to clean.
She was doing it because she was hungry. She was doing it because that was probably the only food she had.
Lucas felt a sharp, unpleasant pang in his stomach, something that had nothing to do with hunger. He slammed the door shut, blocking out the view, blocking out the sound of the rain, blocking out the truth his eyes refused to see.
He went to the study. He needed that drink. He needed to convince himself he’d done the right thing. He was the boss. He had to maintain order. If he allowed the staff to destroy the family heirlooms with impunity, the house would fall apart.
Elena was right. She was always right. Maya was too fragile, too distracted. Perhaps it was time to let her go.
He poured himself a glass of whiskey, the amber liquid shimmering in the firelight someone had already lit in the fireplace. He sank into his leather armchair, listening to the crackling of the wood.
Outside, the storm raged even louder, as if the sky were screaming at the injustice it had just witnessed.
But Lucas Sandoval didn’t know how to listen. Not yet.
He stared at the flames, unaware that just a few feet away, on his own desk, lay a small USB drive that Don Enrique had discreetly left there that morning, before all hell broke loose. A drive containing digital ghosts.
A few soft knocks on the studio door pulled him from his thoughts.