Chapter 20 - The Deal Jorge Offered
Jorge asked to speak with me on the twelfth day of trial.
The request came through his attorney, wrapped in legal language and false civility. He claimed there was “a personal matter relating to family history” that could spare everyone further pain.
Patricia said no before I finished reading.
Fuentes also said no.
My mother said absolutely not.
So of course I considered it.
Not because I trusted him. Not because I wanted closure. Closure, I had learned, was often just a word people used when they wanted grief to behave.
I wanted to know what weapon he thought he still had.
The meeting was arranged under strict supervision in a courthouse interview room. Glass wall. Recording equipment. Two officers. Patricia beside me. Jorge seated across the table in handcuffs for the first time in my presence.
He looked older up close.
Not weak.
Never weak.
But diminished in the way mountains look smaller when you finally stand above the fog.
“Daniel,” he said.
“Mr. Mendoza.”
He smiled faintly.
“So formal. After all, we are almost family.”
“No. We were almost honest. That failed.”
Patricia’s mouth twitched.
Jorge leaned back.
“You have developed sharper edges.”
“My family sharpened them posthumously.”
For one second, his smile thinned.
Good.
“What do you want?” I asked.
He folded his cuffed hands.
“To offer you peace.”
Patricia laughed.
Actually laughed.
Jorge ignored her.
“The trial is ugly. Your mother is suffering. My daughter is destroying herself. The company is bleeding. Families are crawling out of history with hands open. None of this brings back Rodrigo or Ana.”
Hearing their names in his mouth made my pulse spike.
“Don’t.”
He tilted his head.
“Still sentimental.”
“No. Specific.”
He studied me.
“I can end it.”
“You can confess.”
“I can give you something better than confession.”
“There is nothing better.”
“Ownership.”
Patricia went still.
Jorge saw it.
There he was again—the negotiator beneath the criminal, always searching for appetite.
“I will transfer contested development rights tied to three disputed parcels into a restitution trust. Ruiz land remains untouched. Families receive settlements. My company survives in reduced form. I plead to financial misconduct, not murder. Your mother gets public vindication. You get wealth beyond what your father imagined.”
I stared at him.
“That’s your peace?”
“That is reality.”
“No. That is you trying to buy the exit door.”
His eyes hardened.
“Careful. Trials are uncertain.”
“So are kidnappings. Yours failed.”
A flash of rage crossed his face.
Then vanished.
“My father built an empire from nothing.”
“Your father built a graveyard with paperwork.”
“And your father?” Jorge leaned forward. “Do you know why Rodrigo refused every offer? Pride. Not justice. Pride. He could have sold, become rich, kept his family safe. Instead, he played martyr and left your mother with corpses.”
Patricia put a hand on my arm beneath the table.
I kept my voice steady.
“My father didn’t kill them.”
“No,” Jorge said softly. “He merely underestimated men who would.”
The room chilled.
That was as close to naked truth as he had ever come.
“You think that excuses you?”
“I think morality is a story told by people who already lost.”
I looked at him then, really looked.
For years, I had imagined monsters as people without love, without family, without tenderness. But Jorge had loved something. His company. His father’s approval. His name carved into buildings. Maybe even Karina in the twisted way ownership pretends to be love.
The absence in him was not emotion.
It was limits.
“You wanted Karina to take the blame,” I said.
“She chose weakness.”
“She chose truth.”
His mouth tightened.
“She chose you.”
“No,” I said. “That’s the part you still don’t understand. She chose herself for the first time. I just happened to be standing near the wreckage.”
For the first time, Jorge looked uncertain.
Briefly.
Then he smiled.
“You sound like Lucia.”
“Thank you.”
His eyes darkened.
“That was not praise.”
“It is to me.”
He sat back.
“Reject the deal, then. But understand this-if I fall, many fall with me. Judges. ministers. police commanders. foreign investors. Families you think are innocent. Some of them will make sure the evidence becomes inconvenient.”
“The evidence is already copied.”
“Evidence can be buried beneath doubt.”
“Not all of it.”
Jorge looked toward the recording device in the corner.
Then back at me.
“Do you know what your wife begged me for on your wedding day?”
My jaw tightened.
“Ex-wife.”
He smiled.
“She asked me to let you go after the transfer. She said once the land was ours, you should be left with enough money to start over. She thought that was mercy.”
I said nothing.
“She loved you early, Daniel. Earlier than she admits. And still she woke each day and chose the plan.”
There it was.
The knife hidden inside the offer.
Not legal.
Personal.
He wanted to make sure every memory remained infected.
Patricia stood.
“We’re done.”
Jorge’s voice followed me to the door.
“Ask yourself how different you are from me when you use her testimony and discard her.”
I stopped.
Turned.
“She will face what she did. So will you.”
His smile returned.
“And you?”
I held his gaze.
“I already am.”
That evening, prosecutors rejected the deal formally.
The next day, three new witnesses came forward after clips from Jorge’s meeting leaked—not from us, not from the prosecution, but from someone inside his own circle who apparently decided the empire was sinking and wanted distance from the deepest water.
One witness was a former Mendoza accountant.
She brought ledgers connecting Jorge directly to payments made after my mother’s poisoning began.
Another was a retired security contractor who identified the man from the hospital van and tied him to instructions from Vega.
The third was a priest.
Old. Frail. Thought dead by many.
He had served at Santa Aurelia decades earlier.
He testified that Hector Mendoza confessed not to God but to power, standing in the chapel and saying, “Every city is built on bodies. Mine will simply have better foundations.”
The jury listened.
Jorge stared straight ahead.
On the fifteenth day, the prosecution rested.
The defense called no further witnesses.
Closing arguments were scheduled for Monday.
On Sunday night, I visited my mother.
She was looking at a photograph of Ana.
Not the one Jorge sent.
A different one, found in the basement tin-Ana in my mother’s arms, round-cheeked and laughing at something beyond the frame.
Mom touched the baby’s face.
“I forgot the sound,” she whispered.
“What sound?”
“Her laugh. For years, I punished myself because I could remember the silence but not the laugh.”
I sat beside her.
“Do you remember now?”
She nodded, tears shining.
“Yes.”
Then she handed me the photograph.
“Tomorrow, do not look at Jorge when the verdict comes.”
“Why?”
“Because men like him want to be the center of even their own judgment.”
May you like
She closed my fingers around Ana’s picture.
“Look at who survived him instead.”
