Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There was something wrong with Sergio. For the past few days he’d been acting weird—he’d been avoiding eye contact, especially with her, he’d annoyed her mother with how much he’d wanted to help her with the simplest activities (“Sergio, I might have Alzheimer’s, but I’m not completely disabled, I can do it myself, thank you very much!” the older woman had snarled at some point), he’d barely reciprocated Paula’s gestures of affection, looking almost afraid to touch her each time she’d run towards him to hug him. This weird change in attitude made Raquel feel uneasy. It felt not just wrong, but also terrifying. It worried her, him being so startled all the time, but also it worried her how she was reacting to him being troubled by something and being suddenly so distant, so cold. Because she’d caught herself walking on eggshells around him, tiptoeing and avoiding confrontation, afraid that her one wrong move would prompt him to shout at her or…

But this was Sergio, she’d kept reminding herself. He was nothing like Alberto and she had no reason to fear him. He was not a monster.

Her mind didn’t want to listen to her, though. Her subconsciousness kept feeding her with ugly thoughts and her muscle memory transported her back into the early days of Alberto’s abuse, to the silence before the storm. That was what years of battering had done to her—made her weary of the man who was not her enemy. 

She knew she could technically try to choke the answers out of him. She knew he wouldn’t snap at her or yell at her to “drop it” the way Alberto had done. She could simply ask him—she would ask him, sooner rather than later, she noted to herself as she turned herself on the mattress from one side to another, as she was lying in bed late at night, struggling to fall asleep—and if she was lucky, he would tell her everything. She just needed to gather strength to brace herself to do so. The impact Sergio’s behaviour had on her caused her to feel a little uncertain of everything, even if she was more than aware that she was being irrational. Throughout the past months they’d built a safe relationship, one in which she felt comfortable and loved, and taken care of, possibly for the first time in her life, and there was no need to doubt it. She would talk to him and everything would be alright.

She wasn’t the only one who had a sleepless night. She felt Sergio twist and turn in his sheets and get up from bed only to return a couple of minutes later, and it seemed he was even more restless than she was.

A few hours before morning Raquel managed to drift away to sleep. When she woke up, the sun was hanging low in the sky, waking up slowly and bit after bit lighting up the beach in front of them. Their open-air bed, however, was still covered in shadow. She glanced behind from above her shoulder and saw Sergio, half-sitting and toying with his glasses. It reminded her of the only morning they’d woken up next to each other back in Madrid.

“What troubles you?” she asked, after she turned on a bed to face him. 

He looked at her, his bloodshot eyes wide open, his mouth crooked in a grimace, an expression of a tortured man.

“I— I’m not sure how to begin… But there’s a matter I need to discuss with you.” 

“So serious…” She sat up and moved closer, so that she could snuggle into his torso. She needed to show him that she was with him—willing to listen to him and to support him in anything. Whatever it was that kept him awake all night, they would solve it together. And perhaps if she was the one to initiate casual intimacy, he would embrace it, instead of keeping his distance.

He pulled away. He sat at the edge of the bed, his legs on the ground, his body turned away from her. She raised her brow, startled by this strange behaviour. It was even worse than yesterday.

“Sergio, what’s wrong?” She sat next to him.

He couldn’t even look at her.

“Do you remember, after you found me at the bar and told me you’d taken your daughter and mother with you, what I said to you?”

“Not word to word, but yes.”

She did remember. She remembered how horrified she’d been for a moment, seeing the look on his face, shock and anxiety painted all over it. She’d asked him if he’d been lying when he’d told her that he was willing to cross the ocean with a mother, a daughter and a grandmother. He’d quickly reassured her that he’d meant it, but was taken aback by the revelation, because there were things about him, things he’d done or considered doing to her and her close ones during the heist, that she should know about, before making such an important decision. One of taking her family and starting a new life here with him.

She’d told him that she didn’t care—that she wouldn’t ask him about the wrongs he’d committed as the Professor, because she came to Palawan to start a new life with Sergio. She’d managed to put everything that had happened, his lies, his manipulation, him damaging her career and reputation, behind her, because she’d learned that it was how she treated the injuries others caused her that determined the severity of the scars they left behind. Sergio had already atoned for his sins the best he could by releasing some of the recordings from Angel’s bugged glasses (despite having no time on his hands) right as he’d been escaping, and by orchestrating Alberto’s arrest. And while the pain of his deception had still followed her everywhere for a long while, she had eventually put it aside by forgiving him. When she’d found the postcards and booked the plane to Palawan, she had never been more certain of anything ever. She had wanted this life with Sergio. 

But judging by his tortured expression now, that hadn’t been a good answer. There must’ve been something she should’ve insisted on knowing—something he must’ve felt like he should’ve told her right there and then—before moving in with him.

“That part about me considering hurting your close ones during the heist… You need to know the truth. You deserve to know the truth—you deserve to not be fooled anymore. If it changes the way you feel about me, I’ll totally understand.”

She found herself breathless.

Sergio’s behaviour wasn’t one of someone who had only “considered the possibility of hurting you and your closed ones, while orchestrating the greatest heist in modern history.” Raquel knew how people guilty of something much more severe looked like, and her boyfriend had the exact same look on his face. Whatever his, originally theoretical and unlikely to be implemented, plans had been, at some point they must’ve turned into actions.

“What are you saying?” Her voice trembled. She knew he was capable of committing terrible things. He’d told her herself, after he’d cut off the flow of oxygen to her brain: I could’ve killed you, Raquel. She’d almost forgotten about those words, treated them like empty threats used to make a point, thinking that they couldn’t have been translated into reality. Because she didn’t care what he’d almost done to her. But it wasn’t just about her now. Her thoughts immediately went to her mother and daughter, the people he’d intended to hurt, the innocents who had almost fallen victim to the Professor’s deeds.

No, not the Professor’s. Sergio’s.

This thought shook her to her core.

She shouldn’t have ignored it when he’d almost confessed. She should’ve choked the answers out of him, made him tell her everything, before deciding upon such an important matter like allowing him as close as she could allow another human to get. But no—she’d been love-struck, blinded by her own feelings and desire to be with him, like she’d dreamt of the year they’d been apart, deaf to the quiet voice in her head that had been doubting her choices. She’d abandoned her senses at the airport, back in Madrid. She’d lost her instincts way earlier, as she’d resigned from the Force, or even before that, when she’d let him go the first time, even though he’d confessed to intentionally destroying her reputation and threatening her career.

She’d made a mistake by not wanting to hear the whole truth. And now she was here—dreading what else Sergio had to say to her—unable to escape their difficult past and the ugly truth behind it. It had finally caught up to them, despite her attempts at ignoring it, avoiding it, burying it deep.

“The day I waited for you in your home, as you returned from the tent…” he began, his voice shaking just as much as hers. “I wasn’t there just to surprise you. Angel— He— After he discovered who I was, he called your house, because he couldn’t reach you. Your voicemail was full. That’s why he recorded himself on the answering machine of your home landline phone right before he crashed. In the morning your mother, who also wasn’t able to contact you, called me and asked me to relay a message to you.”

Blood rushed from her cheeks. She felt dizzy. Light-headed. Her stomach twisted. Her throat was dry, but at the same time burning from the stomach bile that went up her oesophagus. She felt like throwing up.

“The message was…”

“Shut up.” She couldn’t listen to him anymore. She couldn’t. She wanted to scream.

He obeyed. 

She sat there, completely numb, her mind as if behind a fog. She was there, but she really wasn’t—by dissociating, her brain was trying to escape from reality, before the truth hit her.

But it was too late for that anyway. She’d realised what he was trying to tell her the second he opened his lying, treacherous mouth.

“You were there, because you wanted to kill her.” A statement, not a question.

Her jaw was trembling. The muscles in her neck tensed. It was a miracle she managed to squeeze those few words out of her. She didn’t remember when the last time she found herself so unable to speak was. And not just speak—the lump in her throat was so big she could barely breathe.

Sergio just nodded in confirmation.

Raquel nodded too. In acceptance, trying to get used to the thought that she let Sergio Marquina lead her on not just once, but twice. She’d invited a monster into her life again.

The silence between them felt deafening.

She shot him a single glance, but quickly turned her head away, unable to bear the sight of him. She felt sick. 

(She hoped she was making him feel just as much sick.)

“I need a moment,” she pronounced and proceeded to get up.

Her legs were wobbly. She felt so faint, as if she was about to lose her balance. Ignoring this, she made a step forward…

…And she immediately stumbled.

Sergio was immediately by her side, catching her with his strong arms and providing the support her body clearly needed to stand.

No!

She didn’t need him!

She jolted away, as if she got burnt by his touch. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.

“Don’t touch me!”

She knew he only pretended to care about her, that his generousness and empathy were only a façade. It was another one of his tricks, something that was supposed to make her lower her guard, make her trust him, so that she wouldn’t suspect that despite seeming awkward and humble, and timid, and all things unassuming, he’d secretly always had controlled everything. He’d done that before already. He’d fooled her again, and he’d done that the exact same way. How blind had she been to not see it, how fucking stupid…

She wouldn’t let him have an upper hand ever again.

She stepped back. Her entire body was trembling, and her chest was rising and falling in a quick tempo from the micro-breaths she was taking. She was hyperventilating, and there was nothing she could do to stop it, despite her ability to recognise symptoms of a panic attack before it began. She’d thought that after years of enduring them because of Alberto’s abuse, she would be more adept at ridding herself of them, and yet the increasing hysteria already deprived her of any sort of control over her mind or body. She was falling apart into more pieces than ever before.

She just wanted to collapse to the ground and cry. But she couldn’t do that here, in front of him. She had to get away.

Using all of her strength to move, she rushed forward, without caring where her legs were bringing her. It’s not like it mattered. The only thing that was on her mind was to find herself as far from him as possible. 

At first, she moved with great difficulty. Her limbs felt heavy, and her every motion was made as if in slow motion. She threaded through warm sands and hoped she wouldn’t stumble and trip over, before she was away from Sergio’s sight. The farther she went, the easier it was for her to walk, despite the constant struggle in her muscles, and the way her brain screamed at her to let go and break down now; the farther she went, the faster she got, and after a while she was unable to halt. Even when her lungs started burning from exertion, and when she felt a piercing sting in her chest, she forced herself to keep going. She almost ran and she stopped only when all of her strength abandoned her. If she walked for minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure. She also wasn’t sure where exactly she landed—tears flooded her vision and turned the world around into a blurred mixture of colours that somehow seemed duller, despite the upcoming lovely, sunny weather.

She fell to her knees and sobbed.

This was the worst heartbreak she’d ever endured, the worst pain she’d ever been in. It was worse than the hurt she’d felt after Alberto had hit her for the first time (mostly because she’d found a thousand excuses for him in order to justify her staying with him), it was worse than the anguish of the realisation that Salva had actually been the Professor, and that he had fooled her from the start. Because now she hadn’t been wronged by the man everyone had warned her against, or by a stranger she’d trusted way too easily—now she had been wronged by someone who she believed to be the love of her life, her soulmate.

Months of her memories were a lie. The life they’d built together was a lie. Every single thing she’d cherished or cared about could be thrown away, because they weren’t real and had never been. 

She wanted to rip out her heart just to stop this torment.

Why the fuck had she been so stupid to fall for Sergio over and over again? To trust him again, to let her guard down, to throw her old life away for him and ruin herself a million little times in the eyes of those whose opinions she’d once cared about. She’d burned every bridge back in Madrid, destroyed every chance she had at backing out of the decision to start everything anew with him on Palawan, and now she was here—regretting every choice she’d made. Everything could’ve been so easily avoided, if she just hadn’t been so foolish to follow him across the globe.

Guilt started to overwhelm her. She failed to see the red flags in a man, despite promising herself after divorcing Alberto that she would never ignore the signs that she could put herself, and especially her daughter, in danger. She’d failed as a mother, as a family protector, and that had been the only thing she was supposed to care about now that she didn’t have to worry about money, work or custody. She’d entangled her daughter and mother in this mess, she’d exposed them to risk, she’d let a monster into their heads again. And the worst part was that she herself had encouraged him to bond with them, treat them as if they were his family too, and tearfully watched him become a part of the family. 

It’s not your fault, she reminded herself firmly, scoldingly. She forced herself to snap out of the never-ending spiral of self-reproach. She’d been in one of them once, because of Alberto—because of another man she’d allowed into her home, into her bed, into every sphere of her private life—and only months of therapy had managed to get her out of it. She couldn’t blame herself like that, when it was her who was a victim. It wasn’t her fault. Or at least it wasn’t entirely.

Sergio was a professional liar. Of course he’d managed to fool her again and again, and again… With his intelligence and cunning, he was extremely skilled at using manipulation or deception. So much so, that the first time they’d met, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that all she’d been seeing was a carefully created and then curated alter ego, and not a real person. 

Yet again Raquel found herself thinking about how she didn’t really know a person with whom she’d fallen in love with. For all she knew now was that every single fucking word that had come from Sergio’s mouth could’ve been a lie. She didn’t know what to trust anymore—because of Alberto, and because of Sergio himself. 

How could she know Sergio hadn’t manipulated everything in regard to his relationship with her? 

He always played a long game. He’d spent twenty years meticulously planning his heist. He’d devoted God-only-knew-how-many hours into thinking about how to best approach her, gain her trust, use her abuse against her, use her altogether, before he’d offered her his phone at Hanoi in the first place. Even when it had seemed like he hadn’t been prepared for something—even when he’d claimed he hadn’t planned on something to happen—he’d had almost total control. Whenever he’d lost an upper hand, he’d always regained it, because that’s how great of a player he was. She couldn’t know what part of their relationships had been genuine—provided that anything had ever been genuine at all.

What if he’d always intended to fuck her, claim her as a reward for all those years of living like an ascetic, and then take her with him to the other side of the world, as if she’d been another thing for him to steal? What if he’d destroyed her reputation, and then helped restore it by releasing some of the recordings from Angel’s glasses, so that she became indebted to him? What if he’d orchestrated Alberto’s arrest, so that she’d been freed of her struggles, and so grateful and eager to join him on Palawan? What if he’d planned all this?

What if he’d even lied about being in love with her?

His feelings for her had been the only thing she’d been certain about during their year apart. She’d never doubted the fact that he’d been in love with her. Even in her worse moments, when it had felt like she’d been some easy fuck to him, another testament of him winning against the Police, she’d quickly reminded herself that his love had been genuine. Now she wasn’t sure.

She couldn’t trust anything anymore.

She felt as if she’d just discovered a gun belonging to him underneath their bed just waiting to be used.

Tears streamed down her face.

How fucking sick, how deranged, did you have to be to lie to someone you claim to love like that? To conceal the truth on purpose and try to hide it forever, despite the fact that the other person deserved to know in order to make an informed choice about starting a life with you, and this deliberate avoidance deprived them of said choice? The only way you could do it was if you had never loved that person at all.

She started to doubt if Sergio was even capable of loving someone.

She knew his brother had been a diagnosed psychopath. It was possible that, considering their shared traumatic childhood experiences, Sergio could also be one. The core psychopathy symptoms were compulsive lying and manipulation, lack of remorse and empathy—Sergio could’ve been faking those after studying behaviours of normal people around him, just like he’d been faking loving her—and limited emotional responses. As a seemingly insecure, often awkward or reserved person, Sergio had shown that he struggled with talking about his feelings; he’d rather bury them deep. What Raquel had taken for social introversion, could be a sign of psychopathy. It probably was one.

Because only a psychopath could attempt to kill a person and then treat them as his mother-in-law for months. If he’d been capable of planning to murder the mother of the woman he’d slept with “because he’d desired it more than all the riches of the world”—as he’d told her, but that, again, could’ve been a lie—in cold blood, what else was he ready to do the moment things stopped going according to his plans? 

This realisation sent a chill down her spine, making her quiver like a leaf in the faintest wind.

She left a psychopath alone with her mother, whom he’d once tried to kill already, and with her daughter.

If he’d done anything to them, she wouldn’t have survived it.

She started wheezing. Her mind was racing, the ugly, scary thoughts were running through her head, and the memories of the worst morning of her life, of her lowest point ever, resurfaced. Her chest rose and fell in quick, short breaths, and her heart was beating so fast it felt as if it was ready to jump off her body. Despite feeling a chill come down her spine, and that freeing sensation all over her, her hands were covered in sweat, and so was her back.

She had to get rid of him. She couldn’t allow him to stay. She had to go back, and go back immediately, and do everything in her power to get him as far from her and Paula, and Marivi as it was possible.

Clarity overcame her mind, as she focused on her newly found purpose. Her breath slowed down, and her heart stopped racing. She composed herself.

She was done running away from him—she’d done that a few moments ago and look where that led her! Away from her family she was supposed to protect! She’d run from Alberto, too scared to simply throw him away the moment she’d known she’d be divorcing him, but she was different now. Stronger.

Sergio might be a monster, but she had hunted creatures like him for fifteen years. She was unafraid to face him.

She rushed home.

When she walked past him, sitting on their bed where she’d left him, she didn’t spare him another look, deciding that ignoring him made a stronger statement of her hatred and disgust, and resentment she felt for him, than lashing out. There will be a right time for it anyway. She wanted him to know how she felt, but she wanted to be able to kick him out immediately after that. She wanted the last thing for him to see on her face to be her fury.

He followed her inside.

Raquel stopped in front of their closet, and, having taken out a small bag, she started to throw clothes inside carelessly.

“Raquel, there’s no need to do all that,” Sergio broke the silence.

She wanted to laugh.

Well, perhaps she wouldn’t be able to hold off raging at him for as long as she’d originally intended.

“There’s no need to do all that?” she screamed, turning around to face him. She looked him straight in the eye. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you even realise how any of that makes me feel? How unsafe I feel right now? I had been raising my daughter around a monster once, and you let me do that again.”

She’d never hated anyone as much as she hated him right now. Not even Alberto.

“I’m so sorry…” he spoke, his voice cracking, his chin shaking. “I never intended to make you feel unsafe, to cause you more pain, especially after everything…”

She shook her head. She didn’t want to listen to his pathetic lies. She didn’t believe in his remorse, his guilt. She couldn’t believe in his remorse or his guilt—because the second she’d do, she’d be breaking down too.

She had to strike a blow. She had to let him know what he’d almost done to her; what the scale of his damage had been, and how worse it could’ve been. 

“Tell me. When you arrived at my house to push my mother down the stairs, or to shoot her in cold blood, or God knows what you had actually planned, was it before or after I called you from the tent, begging you to take me as far as possible from there, asking you, the only person I had felt safe and comfortable with, at least at that moment, for help?”

He looked at her, flabbergasted.

“It was after your call.”

A weird sound escaped her throat—something between a cry and a chuckle.

Of course. Of course it had been after her call. Perhaps that was why he’d seemed so weird over the phone. He’d been preparing herself to commit a heartless murder, and she called him, hoping he’d help her like a naive, way too hung up on someone who’d been nice to her, creature, poured her heart out—again!—without suspecting a thing. He’d gone to her house, even though he’d known she would be returning there soon and that she’d been in a bad state. Perhaps it had been the knowledge that he’d had little time that had pushed him to go. Perhaps it had been her arrival that had stopped him from committing that unforgivable deed! Perhaps if they had gone the normal way, but rather a shortcut that the taxi driver had known, Sergio would’ve managed to finish off what he’d been there to do.

That fucking bastard… 

Her head was spinning from the quantity of questions and doubts that piled up inside her mind. She felt like an idiot. She’d trusted him so much that when she’d heard the coldness in his voice, she hadn’t seen through it, but simply believed in what he’d told her—that he’d been busy—even though it should have been obvious that he’d been hiding something, and when she’d seen him in her own home, which she was now certain she’d never given him an address to, she hadn’t once thought about how odd all of this had been.

“Look,” she approached him, “I never wanted to mention anything in regard to this, because all I wanted was to forget that it ever happened, but I want you to know. I want you to be haunted by this knowledge for the rest of your pathetic, dishonest life.”

She took a deep breath, bracing herself to relive one of her most painful, if not the most painful, memory. But she needed him to know, needed him to hurt just as much as she was hurting—because of what he’d told her and because she was about to go through remembering the event she wished she could erase.

“The reason I arrived home sedated and had wanted you to come get me and give me a ride, was because I had tried to take my own life that day.”

Sergio looked as if he’d been punched. He stared at her with eyes wide open in shock and in terror.

Good.

That’s the least he fucking deserved.

Her chin trembled. She was at the brink of falling apart again.

“I want you to imagine what it would’ve done to me if I had found my mother’s dead body on the already worst day of my life, after a failed suicide attempt,” she almost whispered. Her voice failed her.

That was the moment her dam of tears broke again. She cracked beneath the gravity of what had happened or almost happened. The anguish of that moment returned to her with twice the force—the memory of the finality of her decision to step in front of the Mint, ready to be shot dead on the spot, of the distress and the urge to stop feeling anything hitting her way harder than she’d expected.

She quickly wiped off the tears. She couldn’t let him see them; she had to be strong for a little while longer. She could do it.

“I wouldn’t have gone through with this…” Sergio stuttered. “I couldn’t have gone through with this.” 

She couldn’t believe that he still tried to bullshit her.

“I thought it was necessary to save the plan that was starting to fall apart…”

“Good fucking riddance!”

“...but I understood that that had been the line I wouldn’t ever cross. I wouldn’t have been able to hurt anybody, especially not your mother, even if that meant I was forsaking the plan. Sitting across the table with her, I realised I was falling in love with you…”

“Fuck you, Sergio.” She took a deep breath, trying not to burst into uncontrolled screams or tears. “I know what you’re doing. You’re lying, trying to manipulate me again with your elaborate love confession and almost–believable remorse, just like in Toledo and in your hangar, but let me tell you, this won’t work on me anymore.” 

She was smarter than to fall for this again.

“We’re done.”

He shook his head slightly, as if he wasn’t ready to believe it yet.

Well, she didn’t really care about what he was, or he wasn’t ready to believe.

She returned to packing. She created a short mental list of things she should remember about. She needed to pack everything he needed, so that he wouldn’t have to return here, in case she missed something important.

“Raquel, please…” she heard his pitiable begging, and rolled her eyes, suddenly full of anger again. He was distracting her. “You don’t need to pack. It is me who should be going.”

“And who said I was packing my things?” she hissed through her teeth.

She finished after throwing a few more things inside. She zipped the bag and handed it to him.

“The only reason I let you go free without turning you in to Interpol, is because I don’t want them to tie you to me and my family. But believe me when I say this: if I ever see you anywhere close to me or to them, I won’t hesitate. I will call the authorities on you, and I’ll do everything so that you would never see the light of the day. I don’t want to ever see you or hear from you again. And now, get the fuck out of this house, before I change my mind.”

Hesitantly, almost reluctantly, but at the same time carefully not to touch her in the process, Sergio took the bag from her. 

She walked him outside, making sure that he boarded the boat. She didn’t say a thing to him.

“I’m sorry, Raquel. I’m so sorry,” he whispered, right before he set foot on the boat’s deck. “I’m not telling you that because I want anything. I don’t want your exoneration, I don’t believe in exoneration—I’m unforgivable, and what I’ve done deserves your contempt. I just wanted to apologise. For everything.”

Her muscles tensed. She just nodded, not trusting her voice anymore.

Only when she saw him fade in the distance, did she return inside. She hid in their—now belonging to her alone—bedroom and pressed her face into the pillow. She wailed like a tortured animal, having ceased to keep her agony at distance. It finally caught up with her, and she didn’t have enough resilience to fight it anymore. She set her emotions free and allowed them to overcome her.

She howled until she was out of breath.

She cried until there were no tears in her left.

Until she was all but an empty shell of a human.

Exhausted, she drifted away into dreamless slumber.

Chapter Text

She woke up to the sound of clank and clatter made by her mother and daughter in the kitchen. She opened her eyes—her eyelids were so swollen from all the tears she’d shed, it felt as if she was squinting when she looked around, still only half-awake and confused as hell, with what she believed to be eyes wide open—and blinked a few times, trying to sharpen her vision. She felt disoriented, as if she was unsure whether she wasn’t still dreaming. The oddness of waking up alone in a bed she’d shared for months with someone, with whom she’d wanted to spend the rest of her life, hit her immediately. Everything about it seemed wrong.

But then she remembered everything that had happened at sunrise, and she clasped her fingers around the bedsheets, ‘til her knuckles whitened, and her clenched fists trembled. She sat up and took a few breaths to compose herself.

It was time to face the day. She’d delayed it long enough. (Though, in her defence, she’d really been exhausted before that nap, after a barely slept night and the emotional turmoil of her early morning hours. And, truth be told, she felt tired, still, but not enough to fall asleep again. Besides, she was worried some things would haunt her in her dreams now, so pressing her head to the pillow and closing her eyes again wasn’t an option.)

She’d managed a year without him, after he’d turned her world upside down and made her dream of him or see him everywhere.

She’d managed forty years, too, prior to meeting him.

She could do it.

Raquel got up from her bed, deciding to join her family in the kitchen. As she walked down the hallway, she smelled the delicious aroma of fried garlic, onions and tomatoes, and of basil and oregano, that made her stomach growl. She swallowed with difficulty, suddenly uneasy. She wasn’t sure if her hunger was enough to force herself to put anything in her mouth—she still felt like vomiting.

Perhaps if she played it well enough—meaning she would quietly slither into the kitchen, take her usual spot, start sipping her coffee without actually drinking much, and take a few bites of something that was easy to nibble on without it looking suspicious—no one would notice her distress. Perhaps she could avoid the conversation about Sergio’s disappearance entirely, if she just acted as if it was just another normal morning.

(Oh, who was she trying to kid? Of course she couldn’t keep it a secret!)

To little surprise, but much disappointment nonetheless, her arrival in the kitchen didn’t go unnoticed, and was quickly spotted by her mother.

“Oh, you’re finally up!”

Raquel forced a smile and waved back at her daughter who was already tucking in her tortilla de patatas and, with her mouth full, mumbled something that should’ve been “morning, mama!” 

“Took you two long enough today,” her mother continued, “considering I’m almost certain I heard your voices early in the morning. I’ve made coffee. Breakfast’s almost ready.”

“Thanks, mom,” she answered hoarsely, deciding not to comment on that first part. 

She glanced in the direction her mother pointed out when she mentioned coffee. On the table there were two cups, as if it was a normal morning of a normal Saturday…

She almost choked on her own, sharp inhale.

“I hope Sergio doesn’t mind that I took his job from him, I know he loves preparing breakfasts on weekends…” Marivi’s voice became muffled, as a pitched noise rang in Raquel’s ears.

She stared at the second mug. A sharp sting pierced her heart, a dull ache in her pulsed in her lungs, and a tight grasp of despair’s invisible hand squeezed her throat. She felt… hollow… empty… As if there was a part of her that was missing. As if she lost something important—a part of her soul perhaps?—when she’d thrown Sergio out of the house. 

No, that was enough. She couldn’t think like that.

She didn’t lose anything when she’d broken things off with him. He meant nothing to her. He was nothing to her. He wasn’t her soulmate—she’d been wrong about that—or the love of her life. He was a parasite which tangled around her body, or a cancer, something that she’d had to get rid of, or else it would feed off her, and kill her slowly. 

“No, Sergio won’t mind,” she cut her mother off. The sharpness in her voice made everyone startle. She immediately cursed herself reproachingly. She couldn’t let her anger at Sergio impact her mother and daughter. They’d done nothing wrong after all. “I— I broke up with him,” she added in a bit calmer manner. She walked over to the table, and, having grabbed what had once been Sergio’s cup, she then approached the kitchen sink, ready to pour it down the drain. “Those were the noises you’d heard at dawn, mom.”

“Oh… That’s a shame.” Marivi took the mug from Raquel’s hand. “No, gimme that, we won’t be wasting good coffee. What happened?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it. And please, we don’t need to worry so much about not wasting stuff anymore.”

“In my home nothing will go to waste. And you sit down, and stop getting in my way.”

Raquel sat at the table without uttering a word further.

“Can Sergio still give me piano lessons?” Paula asked with so much hope in her voice that it made Raquel’s stomach turn.

“No.”

“But why?”

“Because I say so.” God, she was really short on patience. She wished she was calm enough, composed enough, to find a good reason, but trying not to break down was taking all of her strength and normal calmness. 

“But I loved my piano lessons! Why are you always like this?” There was that insolent tone in Paula’s voice that she’d learnt to use on Raquel back in Madrid, mostly during the divorce proceedings and shortly after, whenever she’d wanted something that Raquel hadn’t agreed to, or expressed her discontent with being tossed between her mother’s and father’s house. Raquel had tried to get rid of it, but the last two years hadn’t been easy on Paula, who had become moody and touchy as a response to the lack of stability and attention in her life. “Why are you always so mean?”

It was Raquel’s fault. She’d made her daughter act out like this.

“Paula’s right, Raquel. She really liked those lessons. There’s no reason to deny her that just because he and you seem to not be on speaking terms. You don’t even have to cross paths with him when he comes. Or you can set the lessons up wherever he’s staying now.”

“That’s out of the question.” She’d endured leaving her daughter under a monster’s care unsupervised once before, and every minute Paula had been spending at her father’s had been torture to Raquel, and she would never do that again.

“Raquel…”

“You’re being so unfair!” Paula shouted. “First you don’t let me talk to dad, then after we moved here you don’t let me call aunt Laura, or grandma and grandpa, or my friends from my old school, and now you don’t let me see Sergio just because you are angry with him!”

Raquel took a deep breath. She hated it when she and her daughter were on opposite sides of a conflict. She hated that she had to conceal parts of the truth for Paula’s own good.

“Paula, I understand that you’re upset, but I’m not prohibiting you from seeing Sergio to spite you. All I’ve ever done was to protect you. And Sergio…” 

She hesitated. One word too much and Paula wouldn’t stop asking about what she meant by saying things like “Sergio isn’t who he said he was” or “Sergio lied to me.” The girl had done that in regard to her father, first when Raquel had left Alberto, then after he’d lost part of his custody, and later, obviously, after he’d been arrested. Paula was curious by nature, and she was relentless in her inquiries.

“Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I cannot allow him anywhere close.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! We moved here, because you wanted to be with him, and now you don’t want to be anywhere near him anymore?!”

Raquel knew she was losing this battle. There was no way to get those two on her side without revealing the whole story. And that was something she would never do. She’d lost so much in their eyes already, and she’d be damned if she told them the truth about how she’d disrupted their life and turned it upside down in a way that was impossible to reverse, as she herself was now a wanted criminal, only to endanger it.

“You only care about what you want!” Paula raved. “You don’t care about me or grandma.”

Oh, if only Paula knew how much Raquel cared…

She couldn’t find the words to keep trying to reason with her daughter. Her head was spinning. Her thoughts, each worse than the previous one, overlapped, turning into a tangled mess of anxiety, guilt and self-loathing.

She got so lost in this labyrinth, she barely noticed that her mother placed a plate in front of her.

“Thank you, mom, but I’m not hungry. I’ve lost all my appetite.” She stood up from her chair, and walked out of the kitchen, without waiting for reaction.

Having locked herself up in the bedroom, she threw herself on a bed. She guessed rotting in it all day was the only thing she was good for today. It’s not like there was much for her to do—she didn’t have enough energy for anything productive, and crossing paths with her daughter and mother wasn’t an option, if she wanted to avoid a fight. She felt like a cornered chess piece.

(She felt another sting in her heart. Chess reminded her of him.)

It reminded her of the time she’d spent in the Police tent outside of the Mint, after she’d been confronted by her colleagues about whether she’d known Salva had actually been the Professor. And she found herself having almost exactly the same thoughts now.

How Sergio was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, disguised as the best one—a believable lie that she could experience happiness in her life after a never-ending series of misfortunes and battles, or a cruel illusion that she could see colours again, after months of perceiving the world as dull and grey. But then the façade had fallen, and her life was again miserable and hollow.

She, once more, cursed the day they’d met. She cursed every little thing that had occurred that had pushed her into Sergio’s arms, from borrowing a phone to a stranger, through confiding in him in a moment of weakness, to asking him on a date. If none of it had happened, she wouldn’t be so heartbroken now.

She should’ve left his make-believe cider factory, before she’d made the biggest mistake. Before she’d kissed him, or at least before she’d let him take her on his leather couch.

She should’ve left, before he’d hurt her for the first time.

He was her ruination—he’d fucked up her reputation, her career, and now her life. She paid the brutal price for not listening to reason and following her foolish heart instead.

Perhaps she should ruin him in return—fuck him up all the same, make good use on the power she wielded over him. Because she did wield it. 

She’d been thinking about it while they’d held her in that tent, not quite arrested, but not free to go either. 

Around an hour had passed, since the police officers had returned to the Tent only to announce that they’d found nothing at the address Raquel had pointed them to. During those excruciating sixty minutes she’d answered hundreds of questions and explained herself like a stupid little girl, which hadn’t actually helped her at all. But they’d finally left her alone, for now at least. And now she was sitting in a corner, waiting for them to decide what to do with her.

That gave her more than enough time to reevaluate her relationship with Sergio Marquina.

Was any of it true? Him gazing at her starry eyed, with delirious desire, the rawest form of lust? Him suggesting starting a new life on a sunny beach, dreaming with her about their joint future? Him telling her that he loved her, that her discovering his true identity had been a relief, as it meant he didn’t have to lie to her anymore? Or was it just a power play on his part, another way for him to manipulate her and use her like a puppet?

God, she’d never felt so exploited before. 

She’d been in a relationship with a man who’d abused her, whose emotional deception had made her believe she’d gone insane, but never in her life had she felt so powerless.

And the worst part was that for a moment she’d believed that both of them had had the power over the other. He might’ve still got better of her, even though she’d held him in chains, and made him confess his secrets, but then, after he’d incapacitated her, whatever he’d felt for her had made him commit a mistake after a mistake. Not killing her had been one of them. Because she was able to take him down. Find his hideout, arrest him there and then herself, or sell him out and just watch it go down. There was a weird equilibrium in that power imbalance—neither of them could have total control over their situation or get the upper hand at all times, as the tables turned constantly. 

(Or at least that’s what she was been telling herself to feel better about her shitty position.)

To any other person—an outsider, someone who didn’t know either one of them, but who could, for some reason, watch their story unfold as if on a TV screen—perhaps it was thrilling, to observe first their banter over the phone, this provocative exchange between two intellectuals (talking to the Professor had been the first time in years that she’d felt stimulated intellectually, and it had been as much exciting as it had been challenging), then their meetings and conversations in person, that made her feel understood and cared for, and then finally how they took the gun from each other, only to point it at the other person’s heart. Heart, which had once been filled with endearment, instead of the bitter feeling of betrayal. Perhaps someone would look at them and see only the passion between them: the intensity of their glances; how their eyes glossed with tears and chests rose and fell heavily, as they struggled to breathe. How they itched to touch each other, to fall into each other’s arms or even kiss, despite the hurt that lingered in the air so densely you could cut it with a knife.

To any other person it could’ve even looked like sexual tension. Lovers turned enemies had that sort of appeal that drew people’s attention. Maybe someone would consider it sexy—how Raquel had chained Marquina to a ceiling, how she had slapped him, while he’d pronounced his love for her, and stared at her with fondness, with adoration, even though she’d been so close to becoming his executioner. How she hadn’t immediately turned him in, and instead had kept his true identity a secret, turning whatever had been left of their ephemeral relationship into an illicit affair of sorts.

(She’d wondered if that’s what their relationship had been to him this entire time—an illicit affair; a forbidden romance between a man in charge of the greatest heist in history and a woman who was supposed to catch him. Perhaps it had been this dynamic and all the clandestineness that had been alluring to him and had galvanised the Professor himself into stepping out of his lair. But once it had been no more a secret, once his cover had been blown up, and once he couldn’t continue this liaison, it had lost all its enticement. Once it was no longer forbidden, it wasn’t sexy anymore, too.)

Ever since he’d left her at the Toledo house, she asked herself time and time again why she hadn’t turned him in immediately. Why she had so blatantly risked her career for him. She’d held a grudge, yes, she’d wanted revenge, too. But all that… she would’ve gotten her vengeance after Marquina would’ve ended up behind bars. She could’ve asked him why he’d done everything that he had during a vis-a-vis meeting, she hadn’t needed to kidnap him.

Had rancour clouded all her judgement? Had love done it?

Or had it been something else?

Perhaps it had been the painful awareness of the fact that he was better, smarter than her. Always prepared, always two steps ahead. He’d tricked the entire Police Force, outwitted the GEO, and ridiculed the Intelligence. He’d kept them all in check, as if it was the easiest thing to do. Beating him was almost impossible. He still could win this with ease, even though he’d been discovered—print thousands more banknotes, which were impossible to trace, escape and then vanish into the thin air, and make a laughing stock out of the authorities who’d failed to capture him. And Raquel would watch, knowing that he bested her.

Perhaps even, on a subconscious level, she’d hoped that he’d really meant what he’d told her—that he’d loved her and that he’d actually wanted to cross an ocean with her and her family. Because it meant, hypothetically, that he could take her with him and his money to some beautiful, warm place he’d promised her, if she’d decided against turning him in.

She was coping. All those explanations were just her brain’s way of creating a psychological defence of a lighter belief to deal with a harsh truth. And it was this: when she’d made all those awfully wrong decisions, she hadn’t thought about any of these things she’d just recalled. She hadn’t thought about the consequences of not turning him in immediately at all. At that moment she’d been just a hurt woman in the search of verity. Someone unwilling to believe that she’d been powerless the entire time she’d spent with him—that she could lose everything without even an ounce of possibility to benefit from a love affair that she’d foolishly believed would solve her problems. All that trouble had been caused because in the end she’d followed her feelings, instead of her instincts of a Police officer.

All this time that she’d held him captive like the crazy woman from “Misery,” as Marquina had called her, her mind and her heart had been fighting. Her mind had kept telling her to just bring him into Police’s custody, her heart, however, had been breaking at the thought. Sergio (provided that he’d been telling her the truth) had been right: it had happened to them both. That’s why she hadn’t been able to bring herself to give him up. That’s why she’d needed all those questions and a fucking polygraph too—to convince herself to do so. But despite her greatest attempts at discrediting him in her eyes and not believing him, her feelings for him had been just as strong.

Not anymore, though. She could still turn her situation around. She could still get some of her power back from him.

In a way, she’d managed to tip the balance at her benefit, or so she’d naively thought. When he’d freed her, it had been her who’d been in control over the situation—she had been able to fuck him over twice as much as he’d fucked her. She had been able to sell him out.

She had chosen not to do that, though, and she’d paid for it with her job. The scales had returned to the previous position, with her scale almost hitting rock bottom. That had been the risk she’d accepted when she’d proposed to help him. Though she would be lying if she said that it hadn’t hurt like hell to be smashed directly into her face with the consequences of that single decision. She’d ended up unemployed, almost penniless, with her reputation in shambles, and had been threatened with losing the custody over her daughter.

His attempts at fixing what he’d ruined had only deepened the power imbalance between them. Because he’d got time and resources to influence her life even while living on the other side of the globe, while she had no might to influence him. But she’d idiotically believed that his actions had evened their positions. She’d crossed an ocean for him only because she’d been certain that he hadn’t got enough power over her to overcome her. Nay, she’d even had the audacity to think it had been her who’d been stronger this time. She hadn’t needed to join him, she’d wanted to, and she’d had the leverage of being able to throw him in jail by calling the Police or tip Interpol off about his whereabouts. Not that she’d wanted to use it.

How foolish of her.

She still could do it now, though. Find out where he’d gone and give him up. The way she’d almost done back in Madrid. But this time she would persist—and she really would regain some of the power he’d stolen from her. There would be no faltering, no tearful monologues, no passionate kisses, no sexual tension between them that would make her lose her goddamn mind.

God, the way that he’d looked at her in his hangar… It still sent a shiver down her spine.

Could he have faked that look? Or the way he responded to her slamming her mouth into his, as if his life depended on it, and as if that was the last thing they’d both do before the world ended? No wonder she’d fallen for this. Even now, when she was almost certain that none of whatever had been between them was true, she still considered this one moment to be genuine. It had felt genuine then, and the lingering memory felt genuine now, right as the memory struck her with the force of a thunder.

But then she probably just clung onto that tiniest bit of his real affection, as what she still felt for him, deep down, way beneath the resentment and heartbreak, didn’t allow her to completely discredit their shared moments. She wanted that moment to be true, because she loved him.

Would she ever free herself from it?

Love was the strongest force in the entire universe—it drove people mad or made them find a new reason to live. Once it caught you in its web, you couldn’t free yourself from it, at least not easily. The love that she felt for Sergio was like a beautiful curse. Or an abhorrent blessing. She wasn’t sure. It was a constant contrast now that both affection and hatred flowed through her veins.

She hated the person she loved—she loved the person she hated.

She wouldn’t be able to call the authorities on him. Because even when she had rid herself of him, even when he was supposed to not have any power over her, he still had it. (Power is a curious thing in that way—sometimes the one who seems to have it, doesn’t wield it in reality, while the one who looks weak and vulnerable, is the puppet master who controls everything behind the scenes.) Perhaps a different version of her would’ve enjoyed the vision of him getting arrested, but this version of her right now couldn’t. 

She was broken now, just like her heart was. She wouldn’t find the strength in herself to channel her inner anger into vengeance. She let him go free, because even finding out that Sergio had tried to kill her mother still hadn’t been enough to push her to give him up. Nothing had ever seemed to be enough to completely give him up.

Is it because there is still a part of you that wants to forgive him and take him back?, a tiny voice in her head asked. She told it to shut up.

She would never take Sergio back. What he’d considered to do, what he’d done, was unforgivable. He’d lied to her, he’d messed her head up, he’d let her believe he loved her. He’d charmed her mother with self-effacing jokes; he’d hoaxed them all to fall for him being a right person who could take Alberto’s place in Paula’s heart—as a father, as a mentor. He’d broken Raquel’s trust once, and then had done it again, even though he’d known that it hadn’t been easy for her to forgive him and allow herself to trust him again. There were only enough times that she could put faith in someone who had already tarnished it, before she’d hit her limit. What had happened at dawn had been her last straw. The next push she would’ve received, would drive her over the edge and cause her to do something rash.

But there wouldn’t be a next push.

Sergio was gone from her life, hopefully for good. Now she had to pull herself together and put her life back to what it had been like before him. She’d never suspected there would be a time after him—she hadn’t looked that far into the future. But she had managed to get through the day without him during the year they’d spent apart, and forty years before that as well, she would manage it now.

She repeated this like a mantra, hoping it would help her pull herself together.

She didn’t move a finger.

Chapter Text

Love made her sick—it made her unable to get out of bed and live her day like she normally would.

Only after she reminded herself that rotting in bed wasn’t the way to put herself together after a terrible breakup (okay, fine, after her physiological needs pushed her to crawl out of the sheets around three hours later) did she force herself to get up on her feet again.

Throughout the day she did her best to keep holding on. She forced herself to eat and drink something, she went for a run and a quick swim in the ocean, she prepared dinner, she picked up a book she’d meant to start for weeks—and put it back down almost immediately, so she got a different one from her shelf, and tried to focus on anything that wasn’t Sergio—she took a long relaxing bath. She avoided questions from her mother by repeating that she wasn’t ready to talk about it yet (not that she was willing to ever talk about it), and she managed to apologise to Paula for snapping at her at breakfast. The silence on her daughter’s part didn’t really tell her if she was forgiven, though. Throughout the day Paula refused to speak to her, holding her chin high in a supercilious manner, making sure Raquel knew she was mad at the “unfair treatment” she received.

Behaviour like this ran in the family, really. Raquel remembered how she’d been acting whenever her mother had forbidden her to do something (not that it had ever stopped her from doing what she’d wanted—from sneaking out to a protest to staying out with her friends or a high-school boyfriend past curfew.) In many ways, Paula was like her aunt, but that attitude of hers… That she took over from her mother. And just like Paula refused to speak to her, Raquel refused to properly converse with her own mother, besides having a reluctant small talk over dinner about how the nephew of their friend Kanda from the mainland, Lakan, returned the boat Sergio had taken and, on his aunt’s behalf, invited them all tomorrow to pay them a visit.

With none of them being in a mood to talk to each other, no wonder the house was so quiet.

The silence felt weird, since the house used to always be so full of laughter and chatting. It had been a constant: her and Sergio discussing things for hours, her mother sometimes tagging in, sharing stories from the past, Paula asking questions that they all gladly provided answers for. The music (mostly of Raquel’s or Marivi’s choosing) had always played in the background, sometimes with their voices accompanying the singers’. On occasions, Sergio had even sat down at his piano to play them all some lovely tune. And then most evenings they’d been all sitting together watching a movie from a tape Sergio had rented on the mainland. It was never boring. But now… Now Paula locked herself in her room, and Marivi’s attempts at keeping the lively, warm atmosphere of the previous days went for naught, as Raquel was in no humour to act as if it was an ordinary Saturday. The running, the swimming, the cooking might’ve been a part of her routine, but routine wasn’t the reason why she forced herself to follow her schedule. Staying busy was.

Because when she was busy, she didn’t think about how dead inside she felt without him.

Despite everything, the silence in the house was bearable.

Until it wasn’t.

After her daughter and mother went to their bedrooms, Raquel was left alone. Suddenly, she felt utterly, overwhelmingly lonely. It’s not like she couldn’t manage processing her emotions or solving her conundrums on her own and desperately needed someone to talk to, but the fact that she had no one to turn to—no one who would take her side without second-guessing her or asking questions, not even her mother; no one who would understand her struggles without forcing her to explain their reasons—pained her deeply, even if she’d got used to keeping her mouth shut and bottling up everything. It’s not the first instance she was feeling desolate like that, but it hurt the same way as it had all the previous times.

She looked at her bed with heart-piercing sadness. She wasn’t sure if she wanted more to burn the sheets they’d made love in nightly or to pull them close to her face in search of his scent. She hated how every inch of her body felt torn, how she felt so lost. During the day she’d been able to occupy her mind, so that she wouldn’t think about him, but now everything was coming back to her. The nights of endless pleasure, the deep, heart-felt conversation ‘till early morning hours, the tenderness with which he’d held her in his arms, as she’d talked about her trauma from spending years in an abusive marriage, or the delicacy of the way she’d cupped his face to bring him back to the reality after a particularly nasty nightmare about his brother. All those months of love and care didn’t matter anymore. They were a lie. Everything these covers witnessed had been false.

She wouldn’t be able to fall asleep underneath them anymore, that she was sure about.

Her muscles were tensed and stiffened. Her breath became shallower with each inhale. She struggled to swallow, that’s how squeezed her throat was. Longing overcame her. Pain of her heartbreak radiated through her veins, through the capillaries, making even the tiniest blood vessel throb from how much she wanted to tear her hair out or rip her heart out to stop it from hurting.

She needed someone—and not just anyone, him, on whom she’d learnt to rely upon in moments like these—to wrap their arms around her body and pull her closer; she needed him to comfort her, reassure her that she was going to be okay, that the pain would end.

She hated it. She hated she’d got used to depending on him so much.

Most of those feelings were all too familiar to her—she’d felt them all after Sergio had left her, back in Madrid.

Then, she’d fought the urge to pour herself a glass (or two, or three) of wine to help her sleep. She couldn’t have let Alberto know that she was drowning her sorrows from a three-day-long long affair in alcohol, and knowing that fucker, he would’ve found out eventually, and he would’ve used that against her during custody proceedings. Despite her life shattering, she’d had to keep appearances of a perfect mother, so that he wouldn’t take Paula. But now… she didn’t have to play pretend anymore.

Having forcefully wiped the tears away from her face, she went to the kitchen to take the bottle out of their pantry.

She slept on a couch that night, lulled to sleep by an entire bottle of merlot—God, why was it the only wine they had at home?—that reminded her of the kisses they’d shared after indulging themselves in a glass of it the only night they’d spent together in Madrid.

She woke up with a headache.

It’s been a long time since she’d felt equally terrible after drinking. Normally, washing her face in cold water helped a lot, but this time it seemed like no natural method would get her through a hangover like the one she was having now. It was either pain killers or more alcohol now. She opted for the second option—hair of the dog that bit you, as the people say.

The only good thing that came out of her not feeling well was that she could excuse herself from going to the mainland to pay Kanda and her family a visit without feeling guilty.

“Do you want me to tell Kanda that you got food poisoning?” her mother asked her, as she and Paula started to get ready to leave. Lakan was to arrive on his boat in less than half an hour to fetch them. Raquel couldn’t be more grateful that she didn’t have to take them to the mainland herself, since she already emptied a glass of wine in an attempt to cure her headache.

“Mom, I don’t care what you’ll tell her,” she answered, hoping she was hiding her tipsiness well. “They all will probably ask why he’s not here, so you may as well tell them the truth: that I broke up with him, and that’s the reason I decided to not come.”

“But… I don’t know, Raquel, what if you decide to take him back? He was making you so happy, what could’ve possibly happened that made you hate him so much? And look at you, you’re clearly not holding up well.”

“Stop it. I am not taking him back, you can forget about it. And I thought that after Alberto you’d know better than to second-guess me about my decisions in regard to ending my relationships.”

Marivi sighed.

“I only want what’s best for you.”

“And the best thing for me is to have him as far away as possible.”

After they were gone, Raquel poured herself another glass of wine. And then another. And another.

With each gulp the indignation inside her increased. She was furious that she was feeling like this—broken-hearted, livid, aggrieved—because of him, because of how much she still loved him, and because of how much it all hurt her. Him lying to her like that all over again carved a hole in her heart that was now filled with rage.

How could he do that to her? How could he stand looking her in the eye after he’d tried to do such a horrific thing? Where had he found the audacity to pretend like nothing had happened in front of the woman whose mother’s life he’d attempted to take?

Her head was spinning from all those questions, from all that anger.

She hated that she had once defended him in her head; that she’d found a thousand excuses and millions of explanations for his actions. During the year they’d spent apart she would’ve died upholding her belief that he’d loved her, that despite lying to her about his identity and concealing his real reasons why he’d approached her in the first place, everything else had been true. And now, she just died inside.

She hated that he had led her on this entire time and made her believe she’d been reunited with the one she’d been meant to be and grow old with.

She wished he’d told her the truth immediately after she’d joined him in Palawan. This way she could’ve avoided this heartbreak. Of course, she would be mad as hell that she’d crossed an ocean for him only to find out he wasn’t the person she’d deluded herself into believing that he was. She would most probably have him arrested, as the love that she felt for him now—after nurturing the burning flame of their affection into becoming a steady hearth of the home they’d built together in the past months—wouldn’t declaw her and make her go numb back then.

(She’d never been able to fight in moments like these, she’d always been weak, soft, and she, once again, had preferred to lose sight of the man who’d hurt her, instead of making him pay for it)

She’d be furious if she’d left her old life for someone, only to immediately find out he wasn’t worth it, but at least she wouldn’t be this miserable now. She’d rather those months they’d been happy together had never happened, instead of knowing that they’d been a lie.

But would you really have been able to go back to your old life, if he’d told you everything immediately? the tiny voice in her head, doubting all the things she’d ever been certain about struck again.

Raquel wasn’t able to find an answer. She didn’t know for certain what she would’ve done if Sergio had told her the truth then. She probably would’ve been forced to return to Madrid, as she wouldn’t have been able to build a life in a foreign country from scratch, and she would be just as miserable there as she was here at this very moment.

At least now she had a good life, unburdened by worrying about money and future.

The life she had here—the life that she could keep—she had because of Sergio. It had been yet another proof of the imbalance between them. Everything he’d given her had been his to give in the first place. When he’d asked her if she was willing to stay with him, is she would take what he was offering her, she’d wanted to accept it all, as she’d been tired of overworking herself to provide for her family and of getting stressed up from the most minor things. She had taken it, then, because even if she’d been able to rebuild her life back in Madrid, she’d needed him. She’d needed to have him in her life; to have someone who could take even the smallest weight off her shoulders and with whom she could share her responsibilities. But it had left a bitter taste in her mouth—depending on another man like that and accepting this new state of things.

Having a bank account set in her name and filled with millions of euros (“her share of money for helping them out during the heist,” he’d told her) that she’d been the only one to access (“an assertion for her to feel secure in this partnership, a way for her to feel comfortable,” he’d called it) had helped. And so had having her name—her fake name—written on their house’s ownership act next to his or being able to use Sergio’s own accounts. He hadn’t just given her a new life; with gestures like these he’d given her openness and transparency that she’d needed to build a future with him.

Openness and transparency, my ass, she snorted.

She chugged another glass of wine—she’d already lost count how many she’d already drank.

Her chest was surging from the anger that boiled in her veins. Her cheeks probably matched the wine’s colour, that’s how inflamed she was. Yet again, she found herself screaming in her head into the ether, wondering how Sergio could do this to her.

He’d blinded her with these grand gestures, lulled her into fake sense of security, so that she wouldn’t suspect that he’d selfishly brought her home—as if she’d been his prize, something he’d won, another thing he’d stolen along with the billion euros—under false pretences, or that she wouldn’t suspect that he was, in reality, a dangerous person with whom she had no future with. All this time, he’d been leading her by the nose.

But what if those gestures weren’t a sham? What if he really meant to make her feel comfortable?

What if him not telling her the truth immediately wasn’t something he’d done out of malice or as an act of manipulation, but simply as an act of cowardice? Eventually, he’d crumbled under the weight of his own conscience and revealed his deepest, darkest secret, even though he must’ve known it would lead to her calling it quits.

What if he wasn’t a monster or selfish. What if everything had been real after all, and he’d selflessly decided that telling her the truth was more important than his dream life with her?

No. Enough.

It must be the wine talking.

Sergio was a monster. He’d tried to kill her mother. He’d fucked up her life and manipulated her into believing that she was joining him on her own accord, whereas everything he’d done was meant to make her either indebted to him or so grateful that she would be dying to join him the second he’d offer her a way out of her mundane life filled with struggle and worry. He’d lied to her for months, because he’d known how she would react, and he had concealed the truth from her anyway. He’d rather have an unaware doll by his side than let her make her own decisions.

He’d probably lied to her about those passwords, too. Maybe he’d had access to her account all along; maybe he’d never transferred money onto it and only faked the confirmation documents—he’d done that before, hadn’t he? When he’d put Alberto in jail.

She rushed to the office. She had to check that everything was okay, that he hadn’t left her with nothing.

She’d used to believe he wouldn’t do anything like this, but now she wasn’t so sure.

She staggered on her way there, way more drunk than she expected to be. Gods, what mess had he made of her?

She opened the computer and opened her bank’s website. She tried to focus on the screen, which was suddenly extremely blurry, by closing one eye and grimacing, as if making a strange face would magically sharpen her vision or sober her up, but the case was utterly hopeless. With difficulty, she typed in her login and password. The browser directed her to her account, where… everything was as it had been before. Relief didn’t overcome her, though. This outcome actually unnerved her instead. She couldn’t believe that everything was exactly how it was supposed to be.

Well, if it really was, it didn’t have to mean that what he’d told her hadn’t been a lie. It could’ve easily been another part of his manipulation—just like him leaking the recordings from Angel’s glasses and Alberto’s arrest.

She quickly logged out and started typing the login to their shared account (well, technically to his own account.) As soon as she pressed enter on the keyboard, an error popped up. Of fucking course. She knew it! It was all a sham! He’d never given her access to his account, he’d just said that, and she’d been dumb enough to believe him on his word and hadn’t checked it before, as she hadn’t found the need to. So stupid…

She typed the password again, with her heart high up in her throat, just to be sure. And when that didn’t work out, she did it again, this time more carefully, to make sure she pressed the right keys on the keyboard.

The third time the password was correct. She must’ve made a typo earlier. She cursed the alcohol. She shouldn’t have drunk this much on an empty stomach.

Here as well everything was as it should—the money hadn’t been moved, nor was the access to it blocked. She shook her head, not understanding. After she’d given Alberto divorce papers, he’d frozen their shared account. Alberto had put much effort into making it difficult for her to leave. (Fortunately, Raquel had been smarter and had withdrawn money beforehand, so she’d been able to get out of the house, and leave her old life with him, with relative ease.) Unlike Sergio. Sergio hadn’t made their split difficult.

Maybe he really wasn’t like Alberto after all.

Stop.

Where were her thoughts wandering? She couldn’t let her thoughts wander like that! She knew herself enough; she knew that she tended to idealise the jerks she was with, and that she was prone to disregard the bad things they’d done to justify her forgiving them time and time again. She couldn’t allow herself to do that now—to whitewash him despite everything he’d done.

She needed to hate him. She needed to see him as the smallest man who ever lived, or else she would forgive him, just like she’d done after he’d escaped with his gang (after he’d left her, almost as if deliberately, for the wolves to devour.)

She could never forgive him. His deeds were inexorable.

She needed to find proof that she’d been right—that he’d really lied to her about the transparency he’d claimed he’d been willing to provide her. There must be an account she didn’t know about.

She started to rummage through the drawers in search of any document, any folder with something he hadn’t told her about.

There were tons of papers filled with plans, calculations or technical drawings. Copies of instructions he must’ve given to his crew after their escape including phone numbers correlating with each handler. A few remaining notes containing details about the Bank of Spain heist—the rest of the plans were safe hidden in their shared vault. After Sergio had told her about his brother’s ambitions to steal the Spanish national reserve and had revealed that he’d been going through Andres’ plans during the year they’d spent apart, he’d put them all inside a box and brought them into a rented deposit. Raquel was to be alerted if anyone tried to open it. That was another assertion on his part: that he wouldn’t be working on those plans anymore, wouldn’t dare to embark on another robbery, now that she was here with him. He’d had a new purpose now—to build a relationship with her.

She tossed the notes aside.

She was way too drunk to think about putting everything back in their places, and soon enough, the entire office was messy with documents and other paper sheets lying around. All that and nothing proving her darkest doubts.

She kept searching. She had to find evidence, anything that would validate her paranoia.

And when she was going to finally give up, something unfamiliar fell into her hands. It was a stash of neatly bent in half sheets, tied with a narrow ribbon. They looked like letters.

Raquel pulled one of them out and started reading.

Raquel

I hope you’re doing well, despite the hell that the media and your superiors must’ve unleashed upon you. I hope that the recordings eased the blow of the backlash that you’re most probably receiving from all sides. I also pray that you helping us out didn’t cost you the custody of your daughter. I’ll be able to check on you only after I arrive at my location, and I’m worried sick. I wish I could do more to help you.

I wish none of that happened, and that you’d never have to face consequences as terrible as these.

No, that is a lie, actually. Ever since that day in Toledo, I promised myself that I wouldn’t lie to you again. I want to be honest with you, even if you’ll never read this letter. Knowing you’ll never read this letter is what makes me more open than I usually am; almost just as open as I’ve been with you. I haven’t been this candid with anyone, not even my brother.

So, here’s the truth: I don’t regret anything that happened between us. Meeting you was the best thing that’s ever happened to me, even if I’ve had you for just a few days.

Knowing that when I watched you leave my hangar was the last time I’d most probably see you in person makes me feel overwhelmingly, utterly lonely. I used to not believe in loneliness—I’ve spent most of my life alone, and I got used to this feeling, so much so that anything that wasn’t complete silence (or a classical record playing in the background) made me almost uncomfortable. Now I can’t find a different word that would describe what I feel better. I’m surrounded by my crew, but ever since I discovered the joy of being with someone, all I feel is this terrible loneliness. I haven’t felt so lonely in a very long time.

Tokyo asked me earlier today where I would be going. I told her that I hoped she would never have to find out. Mostly due to safety reasons, but also because… I don’t want anyone from my crew see me without a plan—it seems ridiculous even to me, to have all those plans and not be able to see myself enjoying what’s coming after (especially because I saw the vision of us building a life together on a sunny beach so clearly just merely two days ago, and now… now I don’t have a plan anymore, or should I say again) or for them to know how sad of a life may be awaiting me. It doesn’t matter where I’ll go, as I’m painfully aware that this place won’t feel like home without you in it.

It’s enough that Andres won’t be here.

I selfishly hope you remember about the postcards that I gave you, and that you’ll decide to forgive me and join me. I don’t won’t to grieve you as well as I’m grieving Andres. It feels weird to grieve someone who’s still alive—even if I can call myself somewhat of an expert at that, after grieving my mother and brother in this way. But you can’t move on from something unfinished, and I very much feel like our story hasn’t come to an end yet. I’ll cling on to that hope, or else I’ll completely lose myself in this limbo I’m currently stuck.

Without you, paradise doesn’t hold as much appeal.

Forever yours

Sergio

Raquel

It’s been a week since I arrived on Palawan, and I’ve been coming to the bar I had given you coordinates to every single day. My breath catches any time someone barring even the tiniest resemblance to you appears in my peripheral vision, that’s how much I’m hoping you decided to come. I wish I could see you; I wish I could talk to you.

I understand that the mess you’re dealing with makes it difficult to dwell on our time together, and that you might’ve simply not had the time to take a look on the postcards. I hope this is the reason. Because the alternative would be much scarier to accept. I’ve never suspected falling out of love would be so difficult. I don’t think I’ll ever move on.

However, as much as I want you to come, it kind of terrifies me, too. Would truly you accept me for who and what I really am? And what if I told you about the worst thing I’ve ever considered doing, the worst thing I’ve ever done?

No, I don’t think you would. I can’t blame you for it. What I attempted to do is unforgiveable. There’s no excuse, no explanation.

Maybe it’s best if you stayed away from me. If you were to do that, if you were to stay in Madrid, then I’ll do everything in my power to help you rebuild the life I destroyed. I assure you, I’m working on a plan to get rid of some of your problems. At least with custody and, hopefully, with the proceedings held against you as well. I’ll make sure nothing will touch you. It’s my way of apologising. Because I am sorry, Raquel, truly.

I am so sorry for every harm I’ve caused you.

But I’ll make it up to you, I promise.

Yours

Sergio

Raquel

The plan is in motion. I expect you’ll hear of this in less than an hour. I hope it will satisfy you—to see Vicuña behind bars. His sentence probably won’t be long (yet longer than whatever he’d get for domestic violence, provided he’d get anything), knowing the system and how it protects men like your ex-husband, but I hope his conviction would rid you of custody issues, or even help you win your case against him.

My blood still boils at the thought that he’d put a hand on you. I admit with shame, when I first learnt of the complaint, I only thought about how it could impact my plans. I considered using it against you, during our negotiations—my brother would definitely suggest it, just like he would suggest using Cercedilla, had he known about it—just like I thought about using it to my advantage, were we to bump into each other in person. You had grounds of suspecting me of considering you “an easy prey,” because that’s what had been at the back of my head, when I first approached you. It crossed my mind, that you could use a friend, someone you’d confide in, because there really wasn’t anyone by your side at the time. But then you actually did confide in me, and I cursed myself for my ulterior motives, for not being able to be honest with you. I remember thinking that you deserved to be heard by a genuine person. I wished I was this person, but it was already too late for that. So, I tried giving you as much sincerity as I could, given the circumstances—I guess that was the moment I stopped treating ‘Salva’ as an extension of my Professor persona, but rather an extension of myself, of Sergio. What I’m trying to say is that I meant what I told you then: I truly believed you and I truly meant to help you.

That day in Hanoi… That was the first time I saw a person—not an opponent, not a piece in a chess game.

I still wish I could do more: support you, take care of you, take the burden off your shoulders. But I hope for now incarcerating Vicuña will be enough. I hope it will please you.

Sergio

Raquel

It’s been a long time that I haven’t written to you. Truth be told, I haven’t been holding up well. After orchestrating the leak and Vicuña’s arrest, I didn’t know what to do with myself. That’s when grief caught up to me. I’ve spent weeks escaping it, keeping my mind busy by plotting to take down Vicuña, but when it was done, the loss of my brother hit me like a tidal wave. I’ve never spiralled like this. I couldn’t sleep. I was living off canned food, as I weren’t able to pull myself together, that’s how overcome I was by the desire to avenge Andres. I started working on a plan of his, a suicidal plan to steal the national reserve of the Bank of Spain, hoping I could crack it and maybe implement it. But after weeks of obsessing over it, there are still cracks I am unable to fix.

I’ve been spending much less time at the bar lately, as working on Andres’s plans took most of my days and nights. The bartender, an older gentleman called Bayani, noticed this (and my state: overgrown hair and beard that I didn’t care to trim) and asked me about it. It was a wakeup call for me, of sorts, as I realised that I’ve got lost in my grief and obsession. The plan is unfixable, at least without you and your intelligence. So, I decided to put it away, and to write this letter.

I miss you terribly, Raquel. I wish you were here with me. I wish I could talk to you, get it all out of my chest, turn to you whenever my thoughts are pulling me down.

I keep hoping you’ll show up at the bar, one day.

I’ll have to pull myself together, just in case.

Sergio

Raquel

Months passed since I last saw you, and I don’t think I’m any less in love with you than I was back then. I keep thinking of you. I keep dreaming of you. I replay the moments we’ve been together and overanalyse every detail, hoping to find any indication to whether there’s still hope of you appearing at the bar I wait every single day.

Sometimes, when I feel particularly down due to the decreasing chances of seeing you again, I consider sending you a message. I wish I knew if you haven’t come because you’ve never looked at the postcards, or because you still hate me and want nothing to do with me anymore. Contacting you would be risky, but it’s not what stops me from doing it—it’s my fear of imposing.

I try my best to not assume anything: how you feel, whether you’re thinking about me at all, whether you curse my name or daydream about me with the same intensity as I daydream about you. It feels wrong to imagine you joining me here, accepting me, who I am and what I’ve done, and deciding to stay with me anyway, so I mostly stick to reliving the memories of the two of us.

I also try not to monitor you too much—some days it proves itself extremely difficult, as the need to know whether you’re safe and happy at times wins against my resolution to keep my distance—try not to invade your privacy again. I read the articles (fortunately, there’s less of them each week), keep an eye on the Police systems to make sure they aren’t suspecting you again, sometimes send someone to check on you, but that’s all.

I’m not sure how you’d react if you knew I watch over you. I hope you wouldn’t hate me for it.

Sergio

Raquel

I miss you more with each passing day. My usual distractions don’t work on me anymore. I sleep late, for the first time in what seems like forever. I see you everywhere—in the crowd as I walk to the bar where I keep waiting for you, on the beach or in a shop, and then finally when I close my eyes. My loneliness is killing me. I’m losing my mind, because I’m not with you.

I wake up aching for you, wishing I could hold you, pull you close and fall back asleep with you in my arms.

I started considering going back to Spain. I have nothing to lose, after all. I need to see you again, even if it’s the last thing I’ll do, before they arrest me. But I don’t know if you would like to see me, not to mention to talk to me. I think I’ll have to finally accept that you might’ve found the postcards and decided not to see me—you decided not to give the coordinates to the authorities, but that would be the kindest thing you’d bring yourself to do. You don’t owe me anything after all, so even that would be an act of benevolence I do not deserve.

My return remains a fantasy for now. I’d rather wait a thousand days for you to arrive on your own accord, than to impose on you. That’s another reason why I did everything I could to rid you of your problems and help you rebuild your life—so that it was your choice to come. By arriving at your doorstep, or even by sending you a message, I would be depriving you of that choice.

And besides, it’s not like I would know what to say to you to try to win you over; make you forgive me—I doubt you would after everything I did or considered doing—and convince you to pack your bags so that you could leave with me. Everything I come up with feels flat, inadequate. Everything, besides maybe one thing: “I love you.”

Because I do—I am still hopelessly and irrevocably in love with you. I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Even if it turns out you don’t reciprocate those feelings.

Forever yours

Sergio

Raquel put down the letters, seething. Her chin was trembling, and her heart was pounding. Her chest heaved shakily, as she choked back a new wave of sobs. With trembling hands, she wiped away the tears that already flooded her face.

She bit on her fist in an attempt to hold back an agonising scream.

Chapter Text

Tears streaming down her face, Raquel stared at the letters blankly, as she choked on her own sobs. A few drops fell down onto the paper, smudging the ink around the letters and leaving a permanent testament of her anguish.

She hated everything about this. She hated that Sergio held her in such clench that just finding letters from him almost dismantled the repugnance she felt for him with far more ease than it should’ve taken to do so. She hated how much his words touched her to her core and made her feel almost sorry for how utterly lonely he must’ve felt during that difficult year. Because she was intended on being angry with him; him, who was supposed to be a heartless monster incapable of experiencing human emotions like loss, guilt or longing. And how could she keep disdaining him, if she knew the depths in which his love for her ran—if she knew he hadn’t been lying about it after all?

She hated Sergio for making her feel this way, for causing such turmoil inside her already conflicted mind.

And, most importantly, she hated herself for not hating him anymore, for considering, even if it was just for a short minute, whether she should forgive him.

She felt torn, beyond unsure what to do now—she knew she couldn’t take him back, but was she really ready to accept that she was to live the rest of her life without him, the only person who truly got her and who truly loved her to the point that he was ready to put his fate in her hands on multiple occasions?

She wanted to pick up her phone and call him, if only to shout at him and get rid of some of the anger that was bottling up inside her and burning her veins. Maybe that would give her the clarity, the katharsis, that she so desperately needed right now. Maybe she would feel better afterwards.

Or maybe hearing his voice would only destabilise her further, make her want to take him back even more than she wanted to right now.

No, she had to find an actually reasonable solution, a rational way to deal with the conundrum inside her head. She had to approach it objectively, with a clear head, as if it was a criminal case. Gather data, analyse it, weigh evidence, draw logical, not emotional, conclusions. She could do it now, even drunk—she’d been trained to work under any circumstances, the worst, most stressful conditions; what were a few glasses of wine compared to working against armed robbers, with old misogynistic men seething in her ear, undermining her every decision? She was Raquel fucking Murillo, and she was more than capable to handle this.

Raquel cleaned a little bit of room around her to make more space for the pieces of paper she put in front of her. She then found a pencil to tie her hair with to help her focus and a pen to write, and she sat down to work.

She had done something similar to this before—after Sergio’s disappearance, she’d drawn up a timeline of the events from the past days, trying to notice changes in his behaviour in order to spot moments in which his feelings for her had influenced his decision-making. Since he hadn’t been able to answer her questions, she’d had to figure it all out on her own. Back then, it had helped her reassure herself in his feelings for her and convince her ever-doubting brain that despite the entire affair lasting for such short time, it had been real. Everything to cope with regret caused by the messes they’d made.

Now she possessed more information to help her put his perspective together and solve this puzzle for good. Find out how much of their time together had been real, and if it was enough to allow her to forgive him for lying to her. To take him back.

She started noting.

Oct. 22^nd, 6:00 a.m. — Sergio waits at Hanoi after the fiasco of the operation to break out Alison Parker, hoping to gather information on our tactic; he lends me his phone after the battery in mine dies.

His motivation: gathering information from me and my trust by an act of kindness.

Oct. 22^nd, around noon — Sergio arrives at Hanoi a few minutes after me (which definitely wasn’t a coincidence); he asks a few questions, I frisk him. Assuming the best-case scenario, he arrived there only to ask me questions about the case (since it was around the time we discovered Rio’s and Tokyo’s identities), not expecting to be forced to use his cover-up story (but having a plan B, nonetheless); assuming worst-case scenario, he actively wanted to manipulate the circumstances, so that I was forced to believe him that he wasn’t prying on me.

His motivation: gathering information from me and further gathering my trust.

Sergio had explained to her once—after she’d arrived on Palawan and started demanding answers—that at the very beginning all his actions towards her were meant to establish his trustworthiness. He’d wanted to form a connection with her, hoping that her past as a battered woman would work to his advantage, and that she would easily fall into his web, like she’d fallen into her abusive ex’s.

Her mother calling his number had definitely worked in his favour. He’d got more reasons to seek her out, get her to talk about her life, both professional and private.

Raquel wanted to laugh at how easily she’d dropped the tough façade and opened up to a stranger.

Oct. 22^nd, around 4:30 p.m. — I arrive at Hanoi, after I stole Sergio’s phone, to give it back; I borrow it again to call Angel, so that he would know where to find me, tell him I want to grab a sandwich before I return. Sergio orders me a vegetarian sandwich and wine for both of us (even though I was the one who invited him; no wonder he charmed me). He asks me again if I am alright, I start venting (God, I was SUCH a mess, what possessed me to use a stranger as my shoulder to cry on?)

Raquel was perfectly aware of the reasons why—it had happened because she’d had no one to talk to about her problems caused by Alberto. She hadn’t been able to confide in her mother, who had been of barely any support after the divorce, she hadn’t been able to rely on Angel, as he would’ve definitely taken it in the wrong way, she hadn’t got any friends left, due to years of Alberto’s isolation and then of his efforts to turn everyone against her, his “vicious, jealous, bitchy ex-wife.” She’d been exhausted, having slept for less than two hours that morning, before she’d woken up to prepare Paula’s birthday party, and finally, she’d been so distraught from the stunt Alberto had pulled on her by taking Paula and breaking his restraining order, that she’d been unable to hold anything back. The words had poured out of her uncontrollably, and they would’ve probably done so around anyone who would show her an ounce of kindness the way “Salva” had.

In one of his letters, he wrote that in that moment he’d finally seen a real person. Could that be a moment a first crack had appeared in his perfect plan? He accepted my invitation to a meeting that afternoon, even though problems had started arising inside the Mint, could it be a sign that he actively sought me out, consciously abandoning his post and leaving his crew on their own, despite being responsible for overseeing them, because he was worried for me?

He recorded a voicemail on my landline phone in the evening, checking on me after I ordered the shooting of Arturo Roman. I want to believe he was genuinely concerned how I was holding up—especially, if what he told me about his reaction to Angel calling me in the middle of the night was true.

During one of their numerous discussions, they’d brought up Angel and his overbearing need to impose on her life. Sergio had mentioned Cercedilla and how Angel had acted, as if one night spent together had meant that he’d possessed a right to her attention and affection—and that had led them to acknowledging the way Sergio had essentially stalked Raquel and invaded her privacy during the heist. Because while he’d never intended to eavesdrop on her personal matters, by spying on her as his opponent, he’d involuntarily done just that. Sergio had then proceeded then to describe the events of that night from his perspective. He’d told her his reaction to hearing Angel call her; how he’d grumbled aloud to himself, saying something like “Let her rest, she must be worn out.”

If what Sergio had told her was indeed true, that was a sign that his allegiance started to slowly shift from his operation to her. He should’ve been happy to hear Angel call Raquel—and to hear them feuding, even if it was about something inconsequential, as any conflict among the Police had worked in his favour—and to know that she had been willing to sleep with the stranger from Hanoi. It had meant that his plan to get close to her to keep track of the investigation had worked really well. But instead of celebrating, he’d allegedly gasped in bewilderment, completely astonished by the revelation.

Oct. 23^rd, around 11:00 a.m. — Sergio leaks the recordings from our conversation, in which I choose to free Alison Parker instead of eight other children, possibly in a desperate attempt to make the public hate the Police more than they would hate the robbers, in case the information of the “death” of one of the hostages goes out before their escape.

It was hard not to feel angry about this. She knew that back in that moment it all had been only a game to him, a chess match and nothing more, but it still hurt her that he’d just thrown her to the wolves, despite being aware that the sexist public would rip her apart the second she made a mistake.

This was the cold, calculating side of him, one that was willing to do whatever it took to achieve his goals, a part of him she’d only known as the metallic voice on the other end of the line. Because the Professor wasn’t just an extension of Sergio, something he could easily get rid of and pretend it wasn’t him—no, Sergio was equal parts the sweet, caring Salva and the ruthless, devious Professor. But Raquel had almost forgotten about it after living for months with someone who’d acted exclusively like the shy but charming man she’d fallen head to toes in love with in the span of three days back in Madrid.

A part of her knew he’d only done what he’d considered necessary to preserve the plan. But it unnerved her that Sergio indeed had it in him to go to such lengths.

(Raquel consoled herself in the thought that he’d tried to amend the wrong he’d caused with those recordings by releasing the full version and the conversation with Prieto, in which he’d promised the Intelligence to take full accountability. That he’d always seen it for what it was.)

Perhaps him leaking the recordings was also an attempt to remind himself where his priorities lay. Perhaps he needed to refocus on the heist. He didn’t want to hurt me, but he needed to hurt his opponent, because the larger the space which he made in his mind for me grew, the more he was afraid that his personal sympathies would endanger the plan.

It had been a dangerous game he’d been playing. Meeting her at Hanoi as Salva, offering his help and company, agreeing to a dinner together and then not cancelling it, too selfish not to indulge in the fantasy of the two of them spending time together, and then plotting to destroy her reputation as the Professor, as if he hadn’t known her struggles at work, hadn’t known how mistreated she’d been, and hadn’t himself weaponized her sex to undermine her authority, just because he’d wanted to gain an upper hand in the negotiations. Hoping he would be able to separate the part of him that had been capable to strike against Inspectora Murillo, while the rest of him, completely autonomous, could actually pursue Raquel with clear conscience and dive deeper into their almost-genuine connection, forgetting about the foul moves he’d made in his game.

Oct. 23^rd, around 8:35 p.m. — Sergio arrives at Hanoi around ten minutes after I called him to confirm he was going to show up. He showers me with compliments and tells me that he wasn’t going to mention the heist at all, as he imagined I wouldn’t want to talk about work during a date, but that he wanted to say that he’s sorry for how the press attacked me because of the recordings.

For someone who approached me to gather as much information on the investigation as he could, he abandoned this mission pretty fast—ever since I used him as my shoulder to cry on. I know it was mostly because he bugged Angel’s glasses that day, and throughout the next one, he was too busy tying lose ends to meet me before our date, but a part of me wishes to imagine that he wanted to distance himself from his Professor persona whenever he had contact with me from that moment on.

She would never not feel conflicted about him. She acknowledged the darkness in him but saw the light as well. She was aware that he’d used her, that he’d approached her under false pretences, but she could notice how his act had started to dismantle the longer he’d spent with her.

What had started solely as a part of his plan had turned quickly into something almost true.

Sergio had met her that evening, because he genuinely seemed to have wanted to.

He’d told her he hadn’t expected to fall for the inspector in charge of the investigation, and that had probably been one of the most honest things he’d told her. Because you can’t time your feelings, can’t completely fight the chemistry in your brain, as you start to fall in love. Perhaps blaming everything on alchemy, on fate, was too graciously exonerating him from any accountability he should take for everything that had happened between them, for every line he’d crossed for just one more moment he’d got to have with her, but it’s not like she could take them out of the equation.

Oct. 23^rd, 9:45 p.m. — After I held him at gunpoint, Sergio brings me to his fake cider warehouse. Me believing he was who he claimed he was leads to our first kiss.

It had taken her almost an hour to bring herself to force him to come clean. And it would’ve probably taken her even longer, considering how smoothly the conversation between them had been going, if it hadn’t been for that drink or two that had made her mind a bit dizzy and reminded her of what she’d been meaning to do—before her senses were too clouded and it was too late.

Well, in a way her senses had already been too clouded, and it had been too late to prevent her from inevitably falling into Sergio’s arms. The magnetic pull, the unexpected, but ineffable mutual attraction had been too strong. And she’d been almost certain Sergio had felt the exact same way.

Oct. 23^rd, 10:30 p.m. — Sergio invites me to stay the night; a weird thing to do, considering he has a heist to oversee. But I think he genuinely doesn’t want me to leave yet. You can tell from the desperate ways he tries to convince me to remain here with him—by playing me the piano, by kissing me back with inimitable passion, with the desire and hunger of a starved man, by making me come again with his skilful fingers… He acts as if the Mint was the last thing that’s on his mind. This is no longer behaviour of someone determined to win the game, someone always thinking two steps ahead to get an upper hand; this is behaviour of someone living purely in the present.

When we talk on the phone later, around midnight, right after I left the hospital and texted him if he was still awake, he repeats the invitation. I decline but ask him if we could stay on the line for a while, in the great need to not be alone with my own thoughts. He, almost eagerly, says yes.

(I know I was not alone in the sentiment—one of Sergio’s team, Oslo, had lost his life that late evening, and I know Sergio blamed himself, probably just as much as I blamed myself for Angel’s accident.)

We keep talking ‘till early morning hours. It almost feels like the continuation of the date I put an end to a few hours before. There’s this… connection between us. It’s special. I’ve read somewhere that you could fall in love in the span of five hours, and we’ve spent much more than that exchanging our worldviews, discussing books we both read, sharing stories from the past.

When Raquel had asked Sergio if what he’d told her about himself had been true, he’d confirmed it.

One of the lying tactics she had learnt was to slide a bit of truth in between the things that are meant to deceive you, and that was exactly what Sergio had been doing. It’s more difficult to be caught in a lie if you mix it with truth. Though, she now wondered, perhaps the reason Sergio had been genuine with her was not because he’d been afraid of slipping, but rather because he’d wanted to give her all of him that he could. Hadn’t he written something like this in his letter? That with no one else had he been as open as he’d been with her?

Perhaps every time Sergio had been meeting her, he’d been fighting a battle in his head between what had been morally right and what he’d actually wanted most. Between staying away from her, as he couldn’t have been honest with her, and acting on his desires—which there weren’t many of. Sergio Marquina desired very little, but the things he did consumed him wholly. And which each hour they had spent together, Raquel had usurped a higher position on the list of those few things he had yearned for.

Oct. 24^th, around 11:30 a.m. — High on tranquilizers, I call him to get me out of the police tent; he tells me he’s busy, and he sounds strange, so that must be around the time my mother contacted him and asked to pass on a message. In retrospect, he was probably dissociating, bracing himself to do the unspeakable—to kill an innocent person, the mother of the woman he was falling in love with.

And perhaps, in the same way that he’d been fighting a battle between the things that were righteous and the ones he craved for, every time his hand had been forced to do something he hadn’t wanted, he’d been wrestling his conscience to be able to detach himself from the love he’d felt for her, so that he could maintain control over the heist.

Oct. 24^th, some time between 12:00-12:30 a.m. — Sergio arrives at my old house. He’s there to kill my mother, the only person besides Angel who knows the truth about his real identity. For some reason, he decides against it. Less than half an hour later, he waits there for me with flowers—as if nothing happened.

I always treasured the memory of how he first met my mother, of the moment we all shared soup and enjoyed the meal as if it was a normal Monday. I used to perceive it as a scene like from a rom-com, but now I can only see it through a horror filter.

What kind of person do you have to be to be able to look the person whom you tried to murder in the eye? What kind of person keeps getting closer to that person’s daughter and then proceeds to spend a night—no, not just a night: a life!—with her?

That’s what hurts the most now—that Sergio was able to keep doing a snow job on me, that he pulled the wool over my eyes by telling me he’d spent the best night of his life with me, and that he’d never felt this thirst for life as he did with me. He promised me paradise, despite knowing how much it was going to hurt me to find out the entire truth. Unless he lied to me that me uncovering his identity was a relief to him, and he intended to keep fooling me forever.

She stared at her notes for good five minutes, before a new thought appeared in her head and forced her to admit one, undeniable truth—his love for her didn’t absolve him from the wrong he’d committed. He’d attempted to kill her mother, effectively crossing a line from which there was no coming back, and then not just hidden that from her, but had acted as if it hadn’t affected him at all, and that was something she could never forgive. It didn’t matter why he’d done it and how justified he’d thought he’d been. It was inexcusable. He didn’t deserve her absolution; he deserved to be locked up for life.

Rage rushed through her veins.

Slowly, she stood up from the flood, and, on trembling legs, she walked to the bathroom. She splashed cold water onto her face, to cool herself down, but to no avail. She stared into the mirror, catching a glimpse of heartbreak and hopelessness in her eyes.

She screamed.

You are such a wreck, a voice in her head said, all smug and judgy. But it was right, though. She’d never acted this way, even after taking punches from Alberto. She wasn’t overdramatic like that, so why was she behaving this way?

God, being drunk really didn’t become her anymore.

She had to sober up. It was still a few hours before it got dark, maybe if she drank enough water, stuffed herself on electrolytes and went on a walk to get some fresh air, she would calm herself down and would be able to fall asleep without her head spinning from booze and having another hangover tomorrow that would cause her to reach for another bottle to drown her sorrows. She had to pull her shit together, or else she would end up going on a drinking binge, losing herself in alcoholism and ignoring her duties as a mother and a provider, too busy with self-pity. She couldn’t pretend alcohol would solve her problems.

The rest of the afternoon passed her by in a blur. Sergio didn’t cross her mind even once.

But as she laid down on the mattress late at night, almost sober, in their—her—bedroom, all her notions from earlier that day came rushing back. The cacophony of her thoughts, the echoing voices of her doubts and worries, the occasional arrière-pensées playing out of tune standing out in the harmony reverberated in her head, making it impossible for her to fall asleep.

When she’d sat down to work, she’d wanted to find clear black or white answers to the conundrums inside her head, forgetting she was analysing a man who was anything but. Sergio was a complicated person, full of contradictions, of internal conflicts, someone hiding in the grey area of morality. And instead of answers, Raquel only had more questions.

She knew now that Sergio loved her. A proof of that couldn’t be only found in grand confessions and letters no one was meant to read—just because he’d pronounced and then written that he’d fallen for her didn’t mean that he had; he might’ve believed so, but what could someone who claimed he’d never been in love before know about it, especially after merely a few days? But it could also be found in the patterns of his behaviour. When she’d pulled a gun on him in the ladies’ room, finally hitting her limit, he’d gone with her willingly, tired of lying to her. When she’d threatened him, struck him in the face more than once, he’d never answered to her violence with cruelty. When she’d decided to bring him in, he’d shown her that he’d been able to escape all this time but instead wanted to prove to her that he’d been telling the truth. He’d then put her nine-millimetre back in her hand, entrusting her with his life and possibly forsaking his precious plan.

His feelings for her were undeniable. If the fundament of every serious, long-lasting relationship was mutual affection and deep, almost as if spiritual, connection, then at least that wasn’t false. They hadn’t entirely built their life on a lie.

But their paradise had crumbled all the same the second something had shaken it. And there was no chance they could rebuild it now. The pieces were way too shattered, her trust far too broken to ever be able to put it back together.

Raquel’s mind conjured the good things that she was going to miss, now that Sergio was out of her life.

She thought about how free—truly liberated from society’s expectations and the shackles first her womanhood (or rather the way the world she’d grown up in associated with being a woman), then her motherhood had put on her—she was with him; she could be unapologetically herself. She didn’t have to behave a certain way to receive warmth in return or to beg for affection. She didn’t have to choose between being loved and being respected, which, at first, had been news to her, who had been used to believe that her partner could only love her when she was acting as if she was lesser than him.

No, Sergio worshipped the air she breathed, and not just because he wanted something from her, but because he truly, undeniably admired all of her. He’d seen her at her lowest, he’d tasted her iron-flavoured wrath, and yet he’d never turned away. Because he wanted her in its whole, all her baggage, all her fears and past traumas.

He loved her. And she loved him. And yet, she’d tumbled what they’d had like it’d been stone, because there had been no way they could ever come back from this.

She wanted to wail like a wounded animal.

The pain in her chest was unbearable. Her heart ached, as it was still beating for him—him, who had pushed life into it, who had made it flutter and soar with joy, with his tiny gestures that made her feel appreciated; him, who made her feel happy for the first time in ages and who showed her that she deserved to be.

Will you really be able to keep living like this?, that annoying voice in her head nudged her again, thriving in the despair that overcame her body and soul. All you have to do to end this misery is to take him back. Call him, or better yet—go find him. It’s clear you want to.

Except she couldn’t do that. She was way too scared to. She’d spent weeks, if not months, mending the trust he’d broken, and now it was ruined once more, completely shattered beyond repair. All the effort she’d put to create a relationship with him had gone to naught, because he’d destroyed months of love with a single confession. Whatever they’d built had all fallen down, and there no way she would ever feel safe around him. She would second-guess his every word, sleep with one eye open, afraid he was going to take a gun from underneath their bed and hurt her, or worse—hurt her family. This wasn’t a life she wanted for herself. This wasn’t a type of home she wanted to create for Paula.

Forever without him sounded terrifying. But the alternative was much, much worse: what if she, somehow, managed to forgive Sergio for that horrendous deed and for deceiving her again, and she learnt to trust him again, only for him to lie to her again?

She wouldn’t survive it.

She didn’t deserve more suffering than she’d already endured—both by Sergio’s hand and by others. And if in order to protect herself and her family she had to give him up, she was willing to accept it. She would learn to navigate the future with no him in it.

Eventually.

The next morning, she dosed herself up on painkillers, trying to fight the throbbing inside her skull. Despite her greatest efforts, she hadn’t been able to completely rid herself of the negative consequences of her drinking for two consecutive days. However, a new day gave her a fresh amount of energy that she decided to put in good use, going out for a long run and starting to clean the entire house. Anything exhaustive that would force her to focus on anything but Sergio.

(It seemed like all she did since their break up, besides getting drunk, was to distract herself to the point she didn’t have a spare second to reminisce about the love of her life whom she’d had to let get away.)

She was half-way through tidying up the kitchen, when her mother and daughter came back from the mainland. Raquel walked over to the entrance to greet them. A piercing sting went through her heart, as Paula only said “hello” to her and immediately passed her by to hide in her bedroom, instead of hugging her the way she usually did. Raquel followed her daughter with her eyes, overcome with sadness. She didn’t know what she could do to make things better with her.

The past few months that they’d been living on Palawan, Paula had seemed extremely happy. Not all the time, perhaps, since there had been moments in which the realisation that they weren’t here on holiday had caught up with her, causing her to blazon out how much she missed her father and how much she wanted to go back. “I haven’t seen him in so long, and he’s probably out of prison already, so I could finally meet him,” had been commonly used, along with an obsolete tone, raising her chin and stamping her foot, and Raquel couldn’t deny that there wasn’t any merit to those arguments. But until now, there hadn’t really been any consequences to Paula being mad at her for prohibiting her from having any contact with Alberto—she normally went back to acting cheerfully as soon as some distraction, like having a snack or going out for a swim, appeared in front of her. Sergio had been of much help in moments like this, stepping up as a father figure and defending Raquel’s choices, and all those months it had been enough.

A chill went down her spine. How was she going to go back from this? How could she make amends and make sure Paula didn’t hate her for the rest of her life? Would she have to expect now that as soon as her daughter turned fifteen—or even earlier that that!—she would book a plane ticket behind everyone’s back and return to her father?

“Are you alright?” her mother asked her. “You look awfully pale.”

Raquel turned to her mother and held her gaze. While there wasn’t an ounce of accusation in Marivi’s voice, no sign that she wanted to berate her for coping with the break up by drinking herself to sleep, Raquel was already seeing where the conversation was going. And she couldn’t falter; she had to stand her ground. Convince her mother to convince herself.

“No, I am not fine. The love of my life broke my heart. I am terribly hungover, and no amount of painkillers works—and don’t tell me I’m reaping what I sew, because I fucking know this. Moreover, my daughter hates me for taking her away from home and from her father, and I can’t explain to her the real reasons why. And all you seem to want, is to convince me to take back the man who is the reason for all my problems…”

“Well, I wouldn’t be doing all that if you just told me why you ended things with him!” Marivi threw hands, rolling her eyes at Raquel’s stubbornness. “Raquel, you have a degree in psychology, you should know better than to bottle up your emotions.”

Raquel’s heart skipped a bit. Her breath caught, and she stared into the distance, astounded.

Right.

Her mother was right. Raquel had to let it all out, or else she would explode—lash out on her close ones or have another meltdown. She acted all tough, but she’d never been good at pulling herself together after a hard break-up. She’d tried so many coping mechanism—kissed a hundred guys in bars, shot another shot trying to stop the feeling; slept with a colleague after having too much to drink; seen a psychiatrist and dosed herself with antidepressants every day for months—and none of them helped her. Bottling her despair would only worsen her already terrible mental state.

“I— I don’t know where to begin…” she wept.

She didn’t know how to tell her mother that she’d allowed someone who had almost taken her life to live with them for months. She wasn’t able to utter those words out loud, to fully acknowledge how fucking close she’d been to losing her.

Before she knew it, she was crouching, her legs no longer able to hold her weight, her face hidden in her palms. Her body was trembling with sobs.

“Oh, my dear…” Her mother immediately reached to grab her by the arm and started lifting her from the ground. “Come on, let’s sit somewhere comfortable.”

They moved to the living room and onto the couch. Raquel imagined that if it was slightly colder, her mother would wrap her up with a blanket and pull her into a tight embrace, but with the day being so warm—and Raquel being so sweaty from cleaning up the house—neither of them was too eager to close the space between them.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” her mother prompted. “What was it that caused your break up?”

Raquel took a few deep breaths before she began.

“He… decided to tell me something he’d hid from me when we first met after that year apart.” She started, her voice steady, almost calm, despite the turmoil inside her head. “Something… horrifying. Something he’d almost done during the mint heist.”

Her mother tsk-ed under her breath, looking almost disappointed.

“Ah, Raquel… He pulled off the heist of the century! Of course he did some things that you would deem deplorable, horrifying even—it came with the job. But you knew what you were getting into when you decided to move across the world for him, you can’t keep holding him responsible for every wrong he’d committed to protect the plan and get his team out alive!”

“Will you let me finish or not?” Raquel huffed.

“Right, sorry.”

Raquel took another breath, bracing herself to tell the rest.

“Do you remember that day when Sergio arrived at our house?”

“Hardly. I remember being surprised to see him on our doorstep, honestly. I think he said I had called him, but I can’t recall if I did—”

“Did he tell you why he was there?” she interrupted. She wanted to know what kind of pathetic excuse Sergio had sold her mother before attempting to kill her.

“I am not sure…”

“And you didn’t notice anything suspicious in his behaviour?” she immediately followed up, automatically slipping back into her inspector mode. She didn’t know why exactly she wanted to know all that—whether Sergio had been acting differently, or in a way that could’ve suggested how he’d planned on doing this and how cold-blooded he’d actually been—but she let her curiosity get the better of her.

“Now that you mention it, he might’ve acted a bit tense—way more tense than in a ‘you’re just meeting your possible future mother-in-law’ kind of way, anyway… Why?”

“Anything that stood up to you?”

“Do not interrogate me like that! I already told you I can’t remember much from that day, at least up until I broke my cup, you know, the one from the set your father had gifted me for our last anniversary before he had passed. He was really eager to help me clean the mess, Sergio, I mean. Coffee and glass were everywhere, even the kitchen cabinet doors…”

Something in her mother’s response brought Raquel’s attention.

“You broke the cup?” She furrowed her brows.

“I assumed so, yes.”

“You assumed. But you don’t remember exactly.”

“No, Raquel, I don’t. I already told you that.”

“But can it be that you didn’t break it accidentally, but rather that Sergio knocked the cup from your hands?” She didn’t really need her mother to confirm it—throughout her career Raquel had worked with clues far more circumstantial and ended up with a well-built theorem solving the case, after all.

“I don’t think so, that doesn’t sound like him at all. Why?”

She took another deep breath.

“He poisoned your coffee, mom.” Raquel accented the subject, wanting to make an emphasis on Sergio acting a certain way, on him actively choosing to commit a murder. If she said something like the coffee was poisoned, that would erase Sergio’s agency in him deciding to do it, and Raquel couldn’t let that slide. “The reason Sergio was there at our house that day was because he wanted to take your life.”

“Oh.”

Oh?

Raquel blinked a few times, completely flabbergasted.

“Can’t say I expected to hear that.” Her mother straightened her back. “Did he tell you why?” she added, genuine interest in her voice. She looked all but unphased, as if she didn’t care at all.

“Really? That is your reaction?” She knew her mother was a bit… too forward about discussing the prospect of her inevitable passing, almost indifferent to everything she was going to leave behind, but that was simply beyond Raquel’s imagination.

“Is anything wrong with it? Of course, I am a little surprised to hear that, but also… I can’t say I didn’t at all expect you to say this—I rarely get to see you so distraught, distressed even. When you started talking, I figured that whatever he told you must’ve really upset you.”

“How— How can you be so calm about it? I just told you that the guy I disrupted all our lives for, someone who you’ve been treating like a son-in-law for months, mom, months had tried to kill you!”

Raquel’s mother just shrugged.

“He must’ve had a good reason to. Did he tell you?”

“What?! What are you even talking about?”

It was mind-boggling. Yes, Marivi could be a bit weird at times; excentric, to the point she didn’t treat life seriously, but how, how, was she able to keep acting as if what Raquel just told her wasn’t a serious matter?

“What do you want me to say? That I condemn you for leaving your life behind for love? That I think you made a good decision by breaking up with him? Because I won’t do that, hija, no. Because even if you won’t ever change your mind about it—a mistake if you ask me—then at least you’ve spent a wonderful few months with someone who had eyes only on you. And love is never a waste of time.”

“But he almost took your life, mom, and then lied to me about it. How can you not see it the way I do?”

“It seems you are way more affected by it than I am. So let me tell you a few things: I’m not holding it against Sergio that he came to our old home with the intention of killing me. Whatever reasons he had, must’ve been good, because, let me remind you, in case you don’t remember something for a change, that he was in charge of a dangerous operation, and doing something this reprehensible didn’t come out of nowhere. So let me ask you again—did he tell you?”

“His reasons don’t change anything!”

Now, it looked like she was trying to convince herself of that more than she was trying to convince her mother.

She had a tendency to do that—to try to overcompensate her faltering with anger, with intensified hatred towards him. Back at the house in Toledo, when he’d told her his backstory, and she’d been at the brink of crying, she’d yelled at him and forced herself to bring him in to the nearest police station. Yesterday, she’d blown his wrongdoings out of proportion to make it seem like they balanced out the way he’d tried to make amends. It was nearly the same now.

“Oh, please. They change everything!” Marivi used an impatient tone she hadn’t used in what seemed like ages—possibly ever since Raquel had been a teenager, an insolent girl breaking her curfew and ignoring her mother’s warnings against going to a protest. “You were a policewoman for like, what, fifteen years? You were a part of the judiciary system, so you should know that motive is one of the key factors in deciding on the punishment. And besides, isn’t abandoning a crime’s commission by not going further with it or by prevention of results the basis for absolution from criminal accountability? I think I heard them once talk about it on TV.”

That was correct. The criminal code states that whoever voluntarily avoids the criminal offence being consummated shall be exempt from criminal accountability. She’d dismissed cases based on this particular article numerous times during her time at the Police and never treated those people like felons or villains, and yet she wasn’t willing to apply the same standard to the man who loved her—possibly more than he’d loved his plan he’d spent half his life on.

“Do you really think Sergio was actually capable of murder,” her mother continued, “that him simply thinking of committing it is equal to you to doing it? That man wouldn’t hurt a fly! I’m not saying he’s all innocent; it takes a lot of cold blood to orchestrate an assault on the Royal Mint, but I believe that a man like him wouldn’t start considering taking an innocent life until it was his last possible resort.” Marivi couldn’t know about it, but Raquel was aware that the first rule of the heist was no blood—and the Sergio she’d once believed one hundred percent she knew, the one she’d been analysing multiple times since she’d met him indeed would never cross this particular line, not unless it was a do-or-die situation.

Raquel closed her eyes, fighting the tears.

“He said he’d done it to protect the plan. His identity had been compromised, and you were the one to receive a message from Angel, who discovered the truth. Angel found out Sergio was the one helping the robbers on the outside and found his hideout, the hangar they were going to use to escape.” The words spilled out of her uncontrollably, the truth she’d known about all this time but hadn’t wanted to accept finally hitting her in the right spot and making her confront the reality.

“So, now even you see the difficult position he found himself in. You’ve never condoned him for pulling off the heist, why then do you condone him for wanting to protect the plan and the people he’d promised to get out alive?”

They’d been his family. Andres and Sergio shared blood, the rest had surely become as close to real family as it had been possible, given the circumstances.

There was nothing Raquel wouldn’t do for her kin; no line she wouldn’t cross to protect them.

“The most important thing is that he didn’t do it,” her mother voiced aloud what Raquel thought.

Sergio had abandoned his mission out of his own conscience, his commitments shifting from his brother and crew to Raquel and her close ones, and risked everything, including his own freedom, because he hadn’t got it in him to go through with killing a person. And because he’d loved her and hadn’t wanted to hurt her even more.

That had happened even before they started building a life together. And if Sergio hadn’t actually been a threat to her or her family then, he surely wasn’t a threat now. On the contrary—he’d become a part of their family, its another protector. He’d become, or maybe always had been, someone who put their safety above his own life. The first week after they’d moved in together, he’d ran after her mother into the ocean that time she’d wandered into the perilous waters while stuck in one of her episodes, despite not being a great swimmer. Merely last month, as they’d gone to the market, he’d jumped in front of Paula and covered her with his own body when a careless driver had lost control over his motorcycle and almost had run over her. And now, he’d let her throw him out of the house and accepted that she’d no longer wanted to be with him, without forcing her to at least hear him out, not to mention convincing her to forgive him.

Sergio wasn’t monstrous or dangerous, or selfish. He wasn’t a psychopath. He was a person whom fate had forced to do unthinkable in order to protect his family. And yet, even though the stakes had been so high, he’d chosen to forsake his precious plan and risk his life and lives of countless others because he was a good person. He’d chosen her and her kin. She could choose him too: forgive him and reunite their souls that longed to be together forevermore.

He was the love of her life, as she was his, she didn’t doubt that anymore.

But there was something that still was holding her back.

Her chin started trembling.

“I’m scared, mom…” she whispered. “I love him so much, and I want to forgive him, because I do see why he did it, but I’m just so scared to trust him again…”

“I know, Raquel.” Her mother pulled her closer. “I know you fear getting hurt again. You love him, but you hate him for lying to you. But, please, try to step into his shoes for a moment, try to understand why he’d hid it from you. It was an impossible situation for him, and I think you know it. Ask yourself if you wouldn’t do the same thing, if you too wouldn’t risk ruining the prospect of a dream life with him by telling him the truth immediately.”

When she’d joined him in Palawan, she’d proudly pronounced that she didn’t care about the wrong he’d committed as the Professor, because she wanted to put this hurt behind her. She’d wanted this life with Sergio and accepted everything that came with it. She’d forgiven him—that hadn’t been a lie. She’d truly stopped holding the pain he’d inflicted upon her with his deception against him. And while the wound she’d believed to be healed reopened two days ago, when he’d told her his gravest sin, it wasn’t impossible for it to close again. What had happened that morning was just another thing she had to put behind her, along with the rest of their difficult past.

She wasn’t ignoring it; she wasn’t diminishing the hurt that this entire ordeal had put her through. Not the way she had with Alberto—with him she’d been making excuses, forgiving him even before he’d been able to utter his sorry’s and regrets. Now she’d analysed the data, weighed the evidence, taken Sergio’s perspective into account, without relying solely on his remorse, and after loads of convincing she was able to conclude that he wasn’t a danger to her, her mother, nor her daughter. That he belonged with them.

That he belonged with her—as her life partner.

“It must’ve taken him a lot of courage to finally come clean. But in spite of knowing how you would react—and it was impossible to not foresee your anger—he still decided to tell you. Because he loves and respects you. Don’t sacrifice what you two had. His wrongdoings during the heist shouldn’t balance out the good he brought into your life.”

Raquel only nodded.

“Will you… watch over Paula today,” she began after a moment of silence, still a bit hesitantly, “as I go to the mainland to find him?”

“Of course. Don’t waste any more time.”

You had lost enough during the year you’d spent apart remained unspoken. But it didn’t need to be voiced aloud—Raquel knew that well enough now. She only hated that she needed her mother to put some sense into her.

She took a deep breath and got up off the couch, glancing towards the moored boat with intention, a plan already brewing in her mind. She was going to find Sergio—and she was going to do whatever it took to get him back.

Chapter Text

Sergio didn’t register much from his way to the mainland. He was too focused on forcing himself to breathe, too concentrated on trying not to break down before he got to his destination and delegated someone to take the boat back—sooner rather than later Raquel would need it, and the only thing Sergio wanted to do now, was to make her feel safe, not trapped on a distant island or reliant on others. He’d never thought he would have to conjure his other persona, the stoic, calm under any circumstances side of him, not since the day he’d had Vicuña arrested, but he did and let the Professor guide him until he could be himself again.

He docked the boat at the harbour and directed himself to Kanda’s shop. The store was quite busy, despite the early hour on the weekend, and it took some time to get the woman’s attention. He didn’t make a scene, deciding to wait patiently for his turn, even though the longer he was standing there uncomfortably—big crowds had always made him anxious—the tighter the knot in his stomach became. His heart was pounding, and the one thought which could keep him as close to sane as possible, given the circumstances, was that it was going to end soon. He would do what he came here to do, he would find the nearest hotel, certainly not the one Raquel had stayed in when she’d first arrived on Palawan, book a room, and then he would allow himself to process what had happened.

Suddenly, finally, finally (though he was definitely exasperating, it couldn’t have taken too much time) Kanda turned towards him and greeted him with a smile on her face.

“Hello, Sergio. What can I get you?”

“Hi.” He smiled faintly, trying to hide his nervousness. “I was wondering if perhaps I could ask someone from your family to take the boat back to m— the island? I don’t know if anyone’s free now, so I came to you first.”

“Yeah, sure. I think Lakan is already up, so I’m gonna send him.”

“Thank you.” He started to take out his wallet to give Kanda a tip for her nephew.

Kanda snorted, rolling her eyes.

“Hide that. Friends help friends, right?”

“You know that is not a problem.”

“You can thank us by asking Marivi to bake her cookies for a dinner party tomorrow.”

Shit.

A smile disappeared from his face, though only for a blink of an eye (but honestly, who was he to tell? At this particular moment he couldn’t tell how much time had passed, even it his life depended on it, that’s how much he was stuck in this mode, this bubble, in which he was able to hold the world surrounding him, and more importantly his emotions, at the arm’s length.)

“I am not sure if I can make it. I have some errands to run, and I don’t know how much time it would take.” He lied, not wanting to hurt Kanda’s feelings by blatantly rejecting her invitation. He knew he couldn’t show up at a social gathering, as if nothing had happened, especially if Raquel, Marivi and Paula were to be there as well. It wasn’t right that he would continue his normal life after everything he’d done.

And besides, Raquel had promised him she would have him arrested if he as much as accidentally bumped into them on the street. He wouldn’t dare cross her. He’d fallen victim to Raquel Murillo’s wrath before already, and he wouldn’t want to experience it again. The burning pain on his cheek still lingered on his skin when he remembered how she’d slapped him in the house in Toledo, and then there was another permanent mark she’d left on him: small scar on his palm from when she’d bitten him in his hangar, fierce and defiant, even with her hands constricted and tied high above her head.

Kanda nodded. He, in response, left her the keys to the boat and then walked out of the store.

Only after he said his goodbyes, did he start analysing the reasons why he’d lied to Kanda. Because it would be so much easier for him to just tell her that Raquel had broken up with him, and that this was the reason why he wouldn’t attend any social gatherings anytime soon. And it would be kinder for Kanda and her family as well, instead of coming up with a new excuse every time their paths would cross, and she would invite him over. But he used a language of falsehood, as if deception was his native tongue, and hadn’t batted an eye. Maybe Raquel had been right about him. Maybe he was living a pathetically dishonest life.

Maybe he was as bad as the worst thing he’d ever done. Maybe he was unforgivable, deplorable and had no right to exist in a respectable society.

But this wasn’t the right moment to contemplate about it.

He forced his feet to guide him to the nearest hotel—oh, actually, not to the nearest one, because he, involuntarily, ended up in the same damn hotel, that Raquel had booked a room in, one much closer to the coordinates he’d provided her with, way down the coast, instead of the heart of the village.

They both had returned here the day she’d arrived, after a night spent at his house, so that she could gather her things and then return to to Puerto Princesa’s tourist centre, where she’d left her mother and daughter, to fetch them. Before they’d parted ways, and less than two hours since they’d put them on, they’d ripped each other’s clothes off and christened the neatly made bed, as if they were to not see one another for at least another year.

As he entered the atrium, he forced himself to shake off the beautifully painful memory of them together.

“Is the room 103 available?” He asked at the receptionist’s desk, praying that it was free.

The woman shot him a curious glance, visibly startled by his inquiry. She raised a finger to prompt him to wait, and then she typed a few phrases on her keyboard.

“It’s available, but, sir, the hotel day starts at 3 p.m.”

“I can pay extra for an earlier check-in. Or even for the previous hotel day.” He was hell-bent on getting that room, even if it meant he’d have to speak to the manager, the hotel’s owner, God, or the Chief of Interpol, who would be definitely sent here after he was identified by the police he’d bring upon himself due to a tantrum he was about to throw, just to be able to press his face to the bedsheets in the search of even an ounce of Raquel’s scent.

But, fortunately, there was no need to make a scene, as the receptionist only nodded.

“I’m going to need your ID or passport and your credit card number. How long are you planning to stay with us, sir?”

“Two weeks.” A reasonable time to try and find another house for himself where he would spend his future.

He took out his wallet and handed the receptionist his fake ID over—as he did so, he glanced at the name written on it. Raquel had been the one to pack his documents, and he wondered, if she’d picked Salvador Martin on purpose, to remind him of his deeds, which were to haunt him forever.

He would never get away from his past.

And he let it catch up to him, once he was alone in the room 103 that the receptionist had handed him the keys to after a short moment of filing up the forms and gathering his signatures from him. The door shut with a loud thump caused by a draught from an open window—the weather was so nice today, sunny and warm, the complete opposite of the storm that had wrecked his life—and Sergio just stood there, right in front of it, not moving even an inch.

Flashes of them lying on this very bed, flushed, naked and gloriously laughing in the post-coital haze at how wonderfully unreal, how completely improbable their situation seemed—less than twenty-four hours earlier neither of them had known if they would even reunite, not to mention supposing that they would immediately start acting like the happiest established couple in the world—came back to him in a blur.

He tilted his head back, trying to relieve some of the tension gathering in his neck. He then took exactly three long breaths, a vain attempt to compose himself, his chin quivering as he did so, his exhale coming out with a grunting, primal sound of something between a cough and a sob.

Tears finally streamed down his face, as he lowered his head, but he held back an impending wail. He didn’t deserve to act like a mourner, to pity himself as if he was a victim in this situation, when he was anything but. No, he was reaping what he had sown.

But despite all that pain, all that anguish, not even for a second did he regret telling Raquel the truth. The memory of almost taking a human life had been eating his insides—or rather still very much continued to do so—and not just every time he’d looked into the kind eyes of the woman whom he’d been close to killing. It had accompanied him daily, becoming more and more unbearable with each passing week, and after a while he’d been incapable of functioning normally, as his conscience hadn’t allowed him to sleep or to think about anything else. There was no universe in which he would’ve been able to keep it a secret without losing his mind, or at least without hurting Raquel or Marivi, or, God forbid, little Paula, by accident, simply because he’d snap at one of them due to all those months of having to lie to them and hating himself because of it.

He’d intended to come clean; he really had. He hadn’t wanted to start his new life with Raquel on insincerity. He’d even begun telling her the truth, wanting to at least hint on the entire scope of his sins, so that she would know what she was getting into, but she’d stopped him, said she realised that there was a lot she didn’t know about, but that she was willing to accept it, and that she didn’t care about the wrong he’d done as the Professor, because she wanted a life with the man she’d fallen in love with in less than a week, a man who’d called himself “Salva,” but had always been, at his heart, the real Sergio.

That was why he hadn’t forced the truth on her; why he’d acted like a greedy coward by taking his chance to be with her.

At first, he’d believed he would be able to live with the consciousness of sharing a home with someone whose mother’s life he had almost ripped away. To go on with a secret like this. Raquel had convinced him she’d been able to put away the hurt he’d inflicted upon her during the heist, and that she’d wanted to be with him in spite of it. And so, he’d thought that if she hadn’t held his wrongdoings against him, he could stop berating himself for them as well.

Except, he hadn’t been able to do that, not fully, his remorse at the back of his mind at all times, sometimes bothering him to the point he’d struggled to look either of them in the eye.

His guilt had only become worse in the days following his forty-third birthday.

His birthday had always been rather dreadful. The first that he’d got a recollection of he had spent in a hospital, and for years that had been the norm. He remembered being jealous of the kids who got to spend their special day with friends—which he’d got none, besides his brother and nurses, who, in retrospect, hadn’t exactly been the type of company that a timid, sheltered boy like him needed—or with their family, going out on a trip—which he’d been prohibited from going, due to his poor health, and besides, it’s not like his parents had got money to sponsor any fun activity anyway—or simply a scoop of ice cream. For him, his birthday had only been a reminder of the things he’d been missing out on; things he might’ve been doing if only he hadn’t been ill. There even had been a moment in his life during which he had feared that each celebration of him turning one year older had only been moving him closer to his untimely death. That had obviously been before his father managed to secure a place for him in a hospital in the United States, but a connotation remained there for the next decade or so.

And then, on top of that, slowly less and less people had graced him with their presence, holding a cake and singing him “happy birthday.” His father had been the first to die, then his mother, then even Andres, who had often been disappearing for prolonged periods of time, stopped appearing by his bedside. Sergio hadn’t got anyone to celebrate his birthday with, so as an adult, he had stopped doing that altogether.

This year was the first time in over a quarter of century that he got to spend this day in a happy atmosphere, with the people he loved dearly. And it simply felt wrong. He didn’t deserve any of this: their kindness, their wishes, their presents, their presence. He should’ve been delighted to finally be able to celebrate the way he’d once wished: with family and friends, indulging himself with as good as unlimited ice cream and going out on a fun road-trip later. But instead, he only felt guilty. He’d built this life on a lie, and everything was tainted with his secrets and omissions.

And so, he’d decided to tell Raquel everything, accepting that once he did so, hell would come loose and his dream life with her and her family would end. But he’d owed her the truth. He was still repentant for all the ways he’d deceived her back in Madrid, and hiding something from her had only reminded him of their troubling past. Sincerity was the basis for any healthy, long-lasting partnership, and the last thing he’d wanted was for her to be stuck in another toxic relationship. She deserved better than that.

Now he was here: alone and broken-hearted, exactly the way he deserved. And, for the first time, he really had no vision for his future. He was supposed to find a new house for himself, yes, but this task was neither pending nor important in the grander scheme of things—for all he cared, he could stay in this very hotel forever. This wasn’t like when he’d looked into the horizon on the boat from Portugal after the heist’s conclusion, mourning his brother, Oslo and Moscow, and thinking to himself that without both Andres and Raquel by his side he wasn’t able to imagine any long-lasting enjoyment across the ocean. At that moment, there had been a thousand things to take care of; things he’d had to handle, or else everything would’ve fallen apart. Those plans hadn’t covered more than two- or three-month’s time, but it had been enough to allow him to somewhat persist in the lonely period of his first weeks on Palawan. Delusionally—until she’d actually arrived—hoping that Raquel would join him eventually had helped.

He didn’t have hope anymore. She’d turned away from him, this time for good. She’d got away and taken all his will to go on with her.

He didn’t know what to do.

Normally, when facing a difficult situation, he would’ve gone to the gym and turned his unrest into fuel he needed to exercise. But now, he simply didn’t have enough strength for that.

After a while—once again he wouldn’t be able to determine how much time had passed—of standing still like this, Sergio slowly and labouredly walked towards the bed, where he lay down with a heavy sigh. He stared at the ceiling, his mind racing, repeating Raquel’s name like an invocation, his heart pounding, confused why the string that had connected it to Raquel’s heart was no longer there.

Raquel, he ruminated, hoping that this thought would transcend realities and reach her, I’m so sorry. For everything. I love you; I will always love you.

As he lay there, he remembered everything that Raquel had told him this morning. Memories of her shouts and accusations rushed through him, forcing him to finally face them properly. Because back then, he’d been too much in a state of shock, dissociation even, to overthink the way Raquel had looked at him or the way she had spit out in his face that he was about as terrible as her ex-husband.

She’d been afraid of him, Sergio realised. She’d flinched at his touch—which to him had been nothing but an innocent and automatic attempt to help her regain her balance after she’d stumbled—and acted like a wounded animal, the two of them once more stuck in a dynamic resembling a huntsman and a prey. He’d asked himself once, during the heist, who he’d been to her: an enemy, a friend, a hunter or a lover, and this question had made him realise that he’d been them all, as contradictory as it was. He’d played cat and mouse game with her, but at the same time he’d wanted to be the one she’d been running to, instead of from.

And this morning, Raquel must’ve certainly felt like a mouse again, trapped by cat who’d used deception and clever omissions to lure her and force her to remain in the cage of their relationship forever. She could’ve even felt as if he’d taken joy in keeping her with him under false pretences and gloated himself in the fact that he’d manipulated a woman like her again, just like her abusive piece of shit of an ex-husband had done.

Except, contrary to Vicuña, Sergio wasn’t really a hunter, not in his heart, and nor was he a trapper. When Raquel had stormed out towards the beach, he hadn’t followed her, so that he could try to explain himself (a bare minimum, he knew, though there had been nothing he’d wanted more at that moment, than to run after her and confess why he’d done what he’d done, even if that wouldn’t have changed anything) or hadn’t cornered her in any other way. And when he’d seen her pack, he himself had proposed that it should’ve been him to move out—he hadn’t wanted her to think she was the one who should run to save herself and her family. He would’ve never made it hard for her to get rid of him.

The thought of being compared to Vicuña shook him to his core, but he couldn’t really blame Raquel for seeing similarities between them. They both had lied and manipulated her, they both had concealed important parts of themselves to keep Raquel by their side, they both had turned out to be someone different than they’d initially claimed to be.

The biggest difference between them was that Vicuña hadn’t given Raquel the curtesy of letting her go—she’d had to free herself from him on her own. Raquel had had to pack her bags and take her daughter somewhere safe and had left the house that had been equally hers, and she’d only returned there after the divorce.

All of that had been the reason why Sergio had been the one to walk away, hoping she would be able to rebuild her sense of security. All that he’d ever done was to make her feel safe.

He’d finally let her go, realising he’d been selfish to keep her by his side all this time. Because her agency had been more important to him that his own narcissistic desires.

He should’ve done let her go earlier; on more than one occasion, in fact. Or actually, he should’ve never gotten involved with her in the first place, as much as it pained him to admit it.

Oh, how many disasters could’ve been avoided, if only he’d never gone to Hanoi that day…

If he’d never met Raquel there—had never lent her his phone in order to establish contact with her—so much could’ve gone differently. He wouldn’t have been forced to arrive at her house intending to take her mother’s life. He wouldn’t have abandoned his station leaving his crew to die. Oslo and Moscow would still be alive.

His brother could’ve walked out of the Mint alive as well—unless he’d always meant to go out with bravado, with glory, and never planned on letting his illness kill him. But now that was beside the point. The point was that Sergio, deliberately and purposely had sought Raquel out rather than oversee the heist which he’d dreamt to fulfil for as long as he could remember.

Sergio Marquina might not actually be capable of taking a human life, but he was a killer.

He’d killed Oslo and Moscow and Andres.

He’d almost killed Marivi, an innocent.

He was also responsible for Raquel nearly killing herself. He’d almost killed her too.

Learning of Raquel’s suicide attempt broke him. He remembered how his stomach had twisted when she’d told him. He’d been repulsed by the news, not because he’d condemned her, but because a mere thought of Raquel wanting to end her life made him want to at least puke. The ugly consequences of his heist, of his opus magnum which had been supposed to not hurt a soul, always caused him to feel disgusted by himself. He’d created the circumstances due to which innocents had been scarred for life, way more than he’d intended, due to which a rape had taken place—at the hands of his own brother, for fuck’s sake! Hands of the person he’d believed he’d known!—and finally, the circumstances so stressful that had pushed Raquel Murillo to make an attempt at her own life.

The thought of this fierce, resilient, incredibly strong woman trying to commit suicide was inconceivable. He couldn’t even imagine this scenario, think of a method she’d chosen and what state she must’ve been in before the sedatives kicked in, not to mention picture a reality in which she’d succeeded at her attempt.

Or the one in which he’d succeeded at his attempt to murder her mother, and Raquel would’ve indeed found Marivi’s dead body.

Dear God…

No words were sufficient to convey how sorry he was for all that.

He struggled to breathe. His chest hurt, and so did his stomach, currently tied into a tight knot. His vision became blurry, and his hearing was muffled. A panic attack, he realised.

He’d read a lot about them, namely because he’d sometimes suffered from them, his brother’s death being the most frequent reason for panic to clutch his lungs and overcome his brain, making him feel worthless and undeserving to keep living after every wrong he’d committed. He knew the techniques that were meant to calm him down: focus on his breathing, focus on a point in his eyesight, focus on your surroundings and name five things you can see, all that stuff. Except none of it was working.

Then suddenly, he’s dissociating. His head spins, his stomach twists and turns, his lungs burn. Blackness overcomes him, and the only thing that is left is this voice in his head telling him that suffocating is exactly what he deserves, that he should be the one ready to end his own life, that doing it is the right punishment for him, and besides it’s not like he has any reason left to go on, so killing himself is actually the only logical thing to do.

He already feels like he’s dying—this experience similar to what he imagines a heart attack to feel like—he might as well end his suffering.

Breathe in, breathe out, he forces himself to remember and actually inhale and exhale. But despite his every effort, no oxygen is filling his lungs. His throat goes dry, and there’s this repugnant taste in his mouth. There are few feelings as unpleasant as this one.

He prays that something will soon put him out of this misery.

Involuntarily, his mind conjures Raquel’s face underneath his eyelids. Ever since she arrived on Palawan, she’s been helping him a lot whenever he was waking up from a nightmare, panting and unable to shake the feeling that he could’ve done more during the heist. That he was responsible for one third of his crew dying. Raquel was his solace, her arms his refuge, her soothing voice the right consolation. He would never be able to repay her for everything she’s done for him.

Picturing her now feels wrong. She’s no longer in his life, and imagining her as if she was, as she was here, helping him, seems too much like a violation for him to allow himself to use her like that.

So, he doesn’t. Instead, he allows the darkness to consume him, and after a while of not being able to properly breathe, he loses himself in this hopelessness. He makes peace with whatever happens to him next.

At some point, weariness caused by the panic attacks overcame him, sleepless nights catching up to him on top. When he awakened—completely drained and confused as hell—he wasn’t sure how long he’d spent in this dreamless state. It could’ve been a few hours or an entire day, nothing in between, that he’d spent in this half-slumber, drifting in and out of consciousness.

But it’s not like it mattered, how much time had passed. He had nothing to do. And even if he had, he didn’t have the strength, nor the will. Because no amount of effort could undo his sins or make Raquel forgive him.

Raquel was his light. Now, wherever he looked, there was only darkness ahead of him. Life lost all its colours, the sounds around didn’t sound a half as cheerful, as vivacious as they used to, the smells weren’t nearly as much intense, and even food lost all its appeal—nothing would ever taste the same. He couldn’t imagine himself order a full-course meal and savour it the way he had before. And, to be honest, he couldn’t even bring himself to call for breakfast (or dinner—he wasn’t sure what time it was). He wasn’t hungry.

His stomach growled.

Okay, maybe he was hungry. But not enough to order anything to his room or go out to buy his favourite snack at the local market. Market they’d visited only yesterday, as per their tradition: they always did their shopping on Fridays. A sharp sting pierced through his heart. How was he ever going to go back to normal? Because despite the natural, beautiful chaos that had come with those three gleeful souls, there had also been a well-structured routine with his life with them; routine that was no longer possible to replicate. There would be no more preparing elaborate breakfasts on weekends, no more shopping with Raquel, no piano lessons with Paula, no driving her to school daily or bringing Marivi to the mainland to her doctor appointments on Thursdays and their long, deep conversations on their way there.

His life had never seemed so… pointless. And it hurt twice as much, considering that actual people had given their lives up for him to just stare at the ceiling and mourn something he’d never deserved in the first place.

Andres would’ve been so disappointed in him…

You need to find out what life is for you, besides the Plan, Andres had used to say. Because once you fulfil it, you’d have to keep living, but how are you supposed to do that if you don’t know how to live at all? You endure life, brother, not live it, because life is not about your books and schemes, it’s about enjoying yourself and embracing whatever the world has to offer you. It’s about love and indulgence. You need to learn how to do all those things, or else you’ll be dying of loneliness and boredom!

At first Sergio hadn’t believed a word his brother had said. Boredom—like love—had been an unknown concept to him. After spending his childhood in a hospital bed, alone for most of the time, and his adulthood in the same way, except that in some humid den in the worst, but cheapest, neighbourhood instead of a medical facility, with only his plans as his company, he’d claimed that boredom and loneliness were for weak, unintelligent people who couldn’t stand their own company. He’d taught himself to never need anyone but himself, and for many years he’d been capable of living, or rather enduring life like this brother had called it, in almost complete isolation. If he’d had books and a sheet of paper, he’d been able to entertain himself.

But he’d never enjoyed himself, not really. He’d only known enjoyment back in Toledo—though that time had only shown him an ounce of what he’d felt later: the truest delight, which made him understand what Andres had been talking about—and then after he’d met Raquel. She had shown him what actual enjoyment was like. And Sergio had thought to himself at times that his brother would’ve been proud of him, knowing that he’d finally realised what it was like to live and enjoy it.

So, how, how was he supposed to keep enjoying his life, to keep living his life, if the reason why he’d been happy in the first place was no longer in it?

He’d thought he’d made peace with losing Andres, but now that he didn’t have Raquel, he was back at the hellhole of misery and loneliness and emptiness he’d been in after Berlin’s death, overwhelmingly conscious that he was wasting the life others gave theirs for.

But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t even get out of bed, the piercing hole in his chest making it impossible to lift a finger.

He’d never suspected heartbreak would hurt so damn much.

He missed her.

The love he felt for her paralysed him. He was now aware of the time passing (six hours and forty-one minutes had passed since he’d woken up, though he still wasn’t sure about what hour it was—he didn’t even have the strength to lift up his hand to check it on his watch), and during those four hundred minutes he still hadn’t gotten up once. He didn’t eat nor drink nor use the bathroom.

His thoughts kept going back to her. To her voice, her confidence, her radiant grin, her golden-brown eyes smiling at him as well, her laugh that he wished he could hear again. He closed his eyes, and he could see her, the memories of his happiest moments flashing through his mind and making his heart flutter (Raquel would never not stop making it soar or causing his breath to catch).

His heart beat in the rhythm of her name—Ra-quel, Ra-quel, Ra-quel…—and the ache he felt in his chest because of it made him understand why people could die from missing someone they loved.

He hoped she was holding up better than he was. That she didn’t miss him and that she didn’t hurt. She didn’t deserve to bear the pain of any of it—he was the only one who should experience it.

He wondered what she was doing now, if she’d eaten and if she’d drank enough water—he’d always had to remind her to keep herself hydrated—and if she’d managed to get through the day without thinking of the distress he’d caused her. Fortunately, she had Paula and Marivi to distract her, even if just a tiny bit.

He thought of the three of them. Raquel had brought such an immense change to his life: gave him a home—the house they’d shared together had been a first real home he’d ever had, he realised—a family, a life. He’d never considered himself a family man, had never wanted one of his own, but with them he’d understood how much strength a family could give you. Paula was the child he’d never thought he’d need, and with each passing day he’d increasingly wished she could accept him as a father-figure, as he’d started to see her as his daughter. Marivi had shown him the akin to parental care and support which he’d long forgotten what felt like.

And Raquel…

Raquel was his everything: his partner and best friend, someone who he wished would remain by his side forever. She had no idea how much he owed her for changing his life for the better. She had been the one who made it possible, him gaining a family after years of struggle to find a place where he belonged. Because even in Toledo, with his gang and even with his brother as a part of the team, he hadn’t got a sense of belonging, as he hadn’t been one of them, not really. He’d been the leader, and there had been an aura of authority around him that had prevented him from bonding too much with the rest. No personal relationship and all that.

But perhaps that’s how his life was supposed to be. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to belong anywhere, even with Raquel and her kin, despite considering them his family.

Besides, the three of them were a team in a way he could never entirely comprehend. And not just in a way that they were a family which he’d never really belonged to (and could never fully belong to, no matter how hard he would try to see himself as a part of their clan). There was a special solidarity between them—one only seen in three generations of women, one that couldn’t be replicated in any other consanguinity. It had been a wonderful experience to witness them together, to see how they supported and cared for one another and to build this home with them, even if it was just for a few mere months.

But how could he ever imagine he would truly find his place with them?

They didn’t need him at all. With him gone, they would surely and effortlessly bounce back into normalcy. And, most importantly, they would be safe. He’d been a danger to them, once, someone who had almost destroyed this family, and he was a danger to them for as long as he was anywhere close to them, still. It was him the Interpol was after. They were all better off without him.

This thought gave him a bit of solace, though it still wasn’t enough to ease the pain his longing caused.

Pain came and went in waves, sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger. Sometimes it was so agonising he could barely breathe. In those moments, he felt a hole where once his heart had used to beat. He felt as if someone ripped it out of his chest and left him bleeding, and the wound would neither close nor heal. He deserved nothing else.

The suffering didn’t become more tolerable as the minutes, and then hours, passed.

The suffering didn’t let him go, even after he managed to fall asleep, a long, long time after it got dark (and a long, long time after he’d accepted he wouldn’t be given the curtesy of escaping from his own brain, which stubbornly continued to work), as when he finally dreamt, he dreamt of Raquel.

In his dreams, they were happy—simple as that. She was beaming at him, chucking at his words (whatever he said to her, he didn’t remember, once the sequence came to an end). Her eyes were glowing, glistening with something he would never see again, were he to somehow to cross paths with her in real life. (He would forever miss seeing her soft gaze, her loving glance, or the mischievous spark flicker through those beautiful orbs, at which he could stare for hours.) They were walking down the beach, as they had many times since she’d moved here, hand in hand, comfortable in each other’s company.

This was the most painful thing his mind could conjure. The contrast between this beautiful vision and his harsh reality tore his heart apart, as he subconsciously knew that this scene was just a figment of his imagination.

Raquel nudged him playfully with her shoulder. His heart beat faster at her touch. Overcome with emotion, he pulled her close, because this was the only time he could do so. Here, he could whatever he desired, and there was nothing he desired more than to have her in his life again, to see her so gleeful and at ease. It felt like a last goodbye, their kiss delicate, elusive, fleeting, barely a peck…

He woke up with her name on his lips, the sweet taste of her mouth still lingering on his own. It was early morning.

Longing grasped him by the throat.

Oh, how he missed her… How much he’d give to be able to hold her in his arms the way he did in his dream or wake up next to her… Because without her everything felt wrong. Twenty-four hours—yes, it had barely been a day, he checked—apart didn’t seem like a lot, but to him, it could’ve easily been forever that had passed since he’d last seen her. He couldn’t imagine himself spending every night from now on alone. There was no way he could go on like this, when he couldn’t stop remembering her.

It sounded pathetic, even to him, the way he was a total mess now that they weren’t together.

He hated that he was making the break up only about him, that nearly all he was thinking about was how much pain he was in and how wrecked, how utterly destroyed he felt. Because it wasn’t his life that had been destroyed; it had been Raquel’s. He’d fucked up her life in more ways than he could count. It was her trust that was broken, her perception of reality that was shattered. She’d been living in an illusion of a perfect life, illusion that he’d created and later ruined.

He couldn’t begin to imagine how difficult it was going to be for her to rebuild herself after this. He knew she was strong enough to do it, but the process simply seemed too difficult for him to picture anyone bouncing back to their old self after everything he’d put Raquel through, even the fierce former Inspectora.

Words would never express how sorry he was.

But it’s not like it mattered. He wouldn’t be forgiven anyway.

The second day of lying motionless, deep in self-pity, passed him by in a blur. It was an endless spiral of guilt and remorse, of depression and hopelessness and, finally, of him remembering his happy moments with Raquel, and then with Raquel and her family, that only pushed him further down into the pit of despair, and before he knew it, it was already dark outside again.

Once more, he struggled with falling asleep. When he finally did, it was more because his organism ran out of fuel to keep him awake, rather than because his brain allowed him to rest or because sleep came to him naturally.

No wonder he didn’t open his eyes until it was almost noon.

His throat and mouth were dry, painfully so, his tongue was sticky, and there was this sour, fusty taste on it, surely caused by the absolute lack of hygiene in the past forty-eight hours. On top of that, his head throbbed like never before. (It wasn’t the first time he stopped taking care of himself due to heartbreak and mourning, but it had never been as terrible as now—after Andres’ death, Sergio, at least, had hydrated himself and eaten something. It had been merely strong coffee, to help him focus on his brother’s plan, and canned food, but it was something.) His entire body was hurting, in fact, not just his head, dehydration kicking his ass after two days of not having anything to drink. An average human could last around three days without drinking, but their organs usually started to give up before that, and Sergio already felt as if he was about to lose consciousness because of lack of nutrients.

He crawled out of bed and poured himself some water, which he drank, slowly, careful not to consume too much at once. Overhydration could dilute the concentration of sodium in the blood, which leads to a condition called hyponatremia, and overall could cause problems with heart or kidneys, he remembered. And despite not having too much will to live at this moment, Sergio didn’t feel like dying either.

He’d been too close to dying as a child to not want to live ‘till old age. No matter what his own brain suggested him in his lowest moments.

After he finished a second glass, he decided it was time to at least try to pull himself together. He got a quick shower and, having taken his entire bag with him, went out to the market, since the hotel had stopped serving breakfast already, but the restaurant wasn’t yet open either, to grab something light to eat before he’d hit the gym. Physical activity had always been his way to regain his concentration and composure, and a little bit of healthy exhaustion would surely do him some good.

This unexpected shot of energy and determination abandoned him as quickly as it had appeared. He was half-way through his warm-up routine, when a surge of longing and despair hit him like a tsunami. Deep, utter sorrow grasped his heart and squeezed it so tightly that Sergio was afraid it would burst. Suddenly, he was completely out of breath, his chest aching not from exertion—he was already pushing himself to his limits, trying to distract himself from emotional pain with a physical one—but from holding back sobs of dolour.

During his training, he was punching the bag with so much force, with so much madness, that his knuckles quickly became bruised like violets. The scratches on his skin were bleeding, but he didn’t care. Because all he wanted to do was to lean his forehead on the punching bag and scream, until he lost his voice.

He hit harder, with a grunt, with an outcry of a broken man. He wondered how long he’d have to keep throwing punches, before he broke his fingers, so that his spirit wasn’t the only thing that was crushed, but his bones as well. Usually, with good technique it was hard to get injured, but sometimes even professionals accidentally hurt themselves.

Not that Sergio wanted to purposely inflict harm on himself. Of course not.

He had to stop thinking about it. Stop thinking about his guilt, about every line he’d crossed, every sin he’d committed, about how much punishment he deserved for it. How he should feel this pain, for hurting another person, especially the one he loved so terribly.

How dare he have imagined he would’ve been able to keep Raquel by his side? He’d always known how this all would end, and yet he’d hidden the truth from her and fallen with her more with each passing day, delusionally pretending this paradise could last forever. Fucking idiot.

But his anger, his distress, was incomparable to what Raquel must’ve been feeling now. Do you realise how unsafe I feel right now, she’d screamed in fury, and in that moment, Sergio had realised he’d got no idea what it felt like to be afraid in your own home. He couldn’t imagine what Raquel had been going through and most likely still was going through, with her trust and sense of security destroyed. All because of him.

He screamed, as he threw another punch, agony ripping away through his throat.

When he came back to his hotel room late in the evening, completely drained, both emotionally and physically, he barely noticed the changed sheets and cleaned floors. The pedantic he was, he’d left the suite neat and tidy (besides, what kind of mess would’ve he made, anyway, while idly rotting in bed for two consecutive days?), so the difference was barely discernible, but the sudden realisation that someone had been in his room in his absence (he cursed not remembering the cleaning policy in the contract he’d signed when checking in that stated that unless the guest notified the staff they wish not to have their room cleaned, the room service was obliged to come in and tidy up every forty-eight hours) made him prepare a mental note to put the “do not disturb” sign on the doorknob next time. He didn’t want anyone but himself to clean after him.

He fell onto the mattress, his body aching as when it had when he’d been getting up with a different type of ache. More physical one. But it didn’t mean that every inch of his body wasn’t in pain caused by yearning that made every fibre of his being twitch and tremble with longing.

Raquel… he invoked. He didn’t really know what he wanted to tell her. That he loved her? That he missed her? That he was sorry? It was all so trivial. But he didn’t have to worry about it—his called remained unanswered in the ether anyway.

He left out a weird sound between a sigh and a sob. He couldn’t go on like this, couldn’t carry on with this hole where his heart had used to beat, with such vast emptiness inside his chest. Whatever future he had in front of him, it didn’t hold any appeal to him. He still had his money and contacts his money was buying and opportunities he could gain with his contacts and his money, but he felt awfully stuck. He was back at the beginning, right after the heist, possessing nearly everything he’d ever wanted but at the same time feeling like his world had ended.

He would go on, somehow, but there wasn’t any point in it. He’d left his purpose back on that little island he’d shared with Raquel and her family. He’d lost his will to live on his way to the mainland. All was left was an empty shell of a human being. Of the smallest man who ever lived.

Because that’s who he really was. He might’ve pulled off the greatest heist in modern history, but he wasn’t nearly like who he’d claimed to be while he’d been disguising himself behind a metallic voice. He wasn’t the confident Robin-Hood, determined to expose the system and bring attention to the injustices of the world, driven by his need to make a difference, as the media had portrayed him.

He was a manipulator and a liar, who used deception as if it was his native tongue, simply because he was too much of a narcissist to care who he would hurt, just like his brother had been.

Sergio had always believed he was different from Andres. They shared similarities, yes, but were their own people with their distinct personalities. Sergio had even prided himself on being better than Andres, who had abused his wealth and power, once he possessed them, instead of striving to make a change in the world the way Sergio had wanted to do. Andres had wanted to make himself a throne in a world where only a few could live like kings, and he had done despicable things—manipulated and hurt others—do achieve his goals.

But so had Sergio.

Turns out they weren’t that different after all, neither of them a good person, no matter how much Sergio thought about changing the system and destroying the world in which few people had power and others had none.

Well, he still could make this difference he’d just thought about. He could prevent his intelligence from going to waste.

He could turn himself in.

Back when they’d been opponents—not friends, not lovers, not enemies, not partners—Raquel had told him the system needed more people like him. Perhaps they would allow him to utilise his skills to better the world, not even as an exchange to lower his sentence, but simply because he would want to help fix everything that was broken in this modern society. He would serve well, using his sentencing to atone for his sins and mistakes, treating life in isolation as a way to prevent hurting anyone else.

It’s not like Sergio particularly desired to become a part of the system that had abandoned him as a child, turned his father into a criminal and completely rotten his brother’s soul, but prison provided routine and purpose his life was deprived of. It was a place where men like him belonged, and there was nowhere else where he could continue his life without reproaching himself endlessly for the lives he’d forsaken or almost forsaken, so that he could walk on this earth, free, but instead used their sacrifice to dwell on the things he could not change. Perhaps once he turned himself in, he would stop wasting his time regretting his actions and clinging onto the memory of a dream that wouldn’t return, because he would be too busy with whatever activity he would be accorded by his jailors.

That it, of course, unless they lock him up in a tiny cell to torture him, so that they could try to get out of him the whereabouts of the rest of his crew, and even Raquel. He deserved that, too. He would welcome the pain compliantly, gritting his teeth and holding his chin high, cockishly provoking them to punish him further. He knew his limits—he wasn’t at all afraid he would tell them anything—and he knew they would never break him.

What could, however, break him, was remaining here like this, dreaming of Raquel’s lips and touch, of their days filled with joy and long conversations and of nights they fell into pleasure, as they got to know each other in a different way. This was real torture. Everything else he could bear.

He nodded to himself, analysing this plan through various lenses. If in the morning he was still thinking it was a good idea, then he would set everything in motion.

With this thought, he focused himself on his breathing and tried falling asleep.

Unbeknownst to him (or to her, for that matter), on the other side of the wall, Raquel was lying down on the mattress, staring at the ceiling and hoping that wherever Sergio was at this moment, she would find him.

Chapter Text

her

Monday, 14:12

She had to be smart about how she was going to do this.

Raquel stood in front of the very hotel she’d booked for herself the day she’d reunited with Sergio, nearly certain it was also the hotel he booked after she’d broken things off between them. She’d got to know him well enough to figure out it had been likely the first place he would go, save for visiting Kanda’s shop to appoint someone to bring their boat back to the island. She also confirmed that this was the direction he’d gone in when she stopped by at the store to question its owner a few minutes prior.

Despite his tough exterior of a man who hadn’t been allowed to build any sort of attachments and his will to get rid of anything linking him to his past—like the only picture he had with his father that he’d burnt before the heist, which he’d told her about—Sergio was quite sentimental. He kept everything in his memory and treasured all his experiences, so if Raquel were to guess where he was staying at right now, she would point to the room 103 of the Hotel Three Roses.

She watched the receptionist’s desk through the glass door, smoking, with her sunglasses on her face, trying to look like a normal guest—were she to fail to find Sergio in “their” room, she would have to go through the security footage, and the only way to obtain them, since there were loads of privacy regulations prohibiting the staff from sharing any information about the guests, was if she passed off as a police officer, so she needed to not be recognised once she came in possession of a badge one of her contacts she’d got in touch with right before she’d boarded the deck to drive the boat to the mainland was to provide her with—and waiting for the right moment to enter the atrium.

The smoke burnt her lungs—it’s been a while since she’d last smoked, and she almost forgot how unpleasant this action was when you weren’t addicted or partying. But it was a great cover, and it kept her busy or at least prevented her from getting too distracted, her mind hazy and wavering from the pills she’d dosed herself with, her impatience making her muscles quiver from anticipation on top of everything. When she’d been in the Force, she’d learnt to contain it with loads of discipline, but now that she was no longer a cop, her restiveness often got the better of her, and now she was seeing the effects of having too much time on her hands in her new life.

Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale… And… There she had it: the right moment.

As the receptionist picked up the phone and started typing something on her keyboard, completely focused on the computer’s screen, Raquel extinguished the cigarette with a quick stomp and walked inside and then to the elevators.

About a minute later, she stood in front of the door to the room 103, her ear pressed to its surface, eavesdropping on whatever was going on inside like she’d used to do before storming in during her time as the Inspectora. Except that nothing was going on inside—the room seemed to be completely quiet.

Raquel knocked, nonetheless.

And when only silence answered her, she decided to be a bit more straightforward. She took out a hairpin from one of her pockets, and quickly, without any hesitation or regret, her law-abiding days long left back in Spain, she unlocked the door.

The room was empty and, seemingly, freshly cleaned by the room service. There were no signs of Sergio, not even a scent left behind, no aroma of his shower gel or his perfume, not even a hair. Raquel found no clothes, nor his personal items hidden inside the wardrobe or drawers of the bedside tables, as she rummaged through every piece of furniture, her old instincts of a former police inspector kicking right in and making her treat this search like a proper perquisition. If Sergio had really booked this apartment, like she’d thought, it seemed like he no longer inhabited it.

Raquel huffed, annoyed.

She hated not being right about something. A chill of worry that she didn’t know Sergio all that well if she couldn’t guess where he’d gone ran through her spine, but she quickly shook it off. It was fine, she could handle this small setback. It’s not like she hadn’t expected to be chasing a ghost—Sergio had years of practice of living as one, after all—especially after she’d tried calling him and the connection had gone straight to voicemail.

(God, she really should’ve written down which burner phone and disposable SIM-card she’d thrown into his bag.)

She was prepared that she would have to hunt him down again. And she was prepared that she would most likely need to use a stolen or fake police badge—she didn’t have to know which one she would be provided with by her contact—more than ready to get into action, missing the thrill that had come with her old job. Red herrings and dead ends were a part of it as well.

She took a long breath, composing herself and regaining her focus. Just return to the plan: get in touch with Sergio’s informants and ask them whether he contacted them in the past two days, while waiting for her own associate to give her a call that her badge and cover were ready, and then go back to her search through nearby hotels, gyms and restaurants and go through every security footage she would put her hands on.

Whatever setback she would encounter next, she would deal with it. She wasn’t going to back down easily.

19:36

“Inspector Alejandra García, Criminal Unit,” Raquel began, showing off the badge to a young woman—the same one that was here a few hours ago—at the reception desk, “I need the camera footage from the past three days.”

She spoke accented Tagalog with confidence of someone fluent, despite being anything but and relying only on memorized phrases she’d checked before entering the atrium of the Hotel Three Roses. After only four and a half months she was far from proficient and preferred to use English, which was also nowhere near perfect but communicative enough to allow her to rely on it in most cases, or asked Sergio to translate things for her, but now she needed to not be questioned about her position. After spending years in a male-dominated field, Raquel had learnt to navigate the world with the assurance of a fifty-year-old straight white man, and while it hadn’t always worked around said fifty-year-old straight white men, it mostly did wonders when it came to having to cooperate with civilians.

It felt weird to use the title Inspector again. She felt as if she was pretending to be someone she wasn’t, and it wasn’t just because she was impersonating a public officer. No, it was more than that. Back when she’d been climbing up the ranks, she’d been putting on the mask of someone compliant, someone who put up with her colleagues’ sexism and turned a blind eye to systemic injustices. That mask had eventually become her second skin, and Inspectora Murillo had stopped being the other persona she could just leave at work. In the end, Raquel had turned herself into that second her and used her as her defense mechanism against the hardships her life had been throwing at her. Inspectora Murillo was someone who learnt how to swallow her pride, take punches lying down and remain strong in spite of the rocks thrown at her. Inspectora Murillo was a hardened woman who had diligently built her resilience and never broken down, even when she felt like she couldn’t take it anymore. Inspectora Murillo was someone who had helped Raquel survive years of abuse and the difficult months after she’d walked away from Alberto. But Inspectora Murillo wasn’t Raquel. Well, she was, but she wasn’t, not really. And now, using the title Raquel had associated with one of the lowest points in her life was bringing a lot of mixed emotions.

“And the guest book,” she added, trying to refocus on her goal.

The girl at the desk stuttered when answering the requests, making it way harder for Raquel to fully understand what she was saying—she only caught the phrases “I don’t know,” “manager” and “please wait a moment”—but she didn’t let her act drop.

Raquel just nodded. As the receptionist called her superior to join her in the atrium, Raquel did her best to try and read anything that was left on the desk, but nothing she would be interested in brought her attention.

The manager—an older woman who looked like she didn’t take any bullshit—appeared a moment later through the door behind the receptionist’s chair.

“What is the problem?”

The receptionist explained the situation, making the older woman scoff under her breath and mutter something Raquel could neither understand nor decipher.

“Do you have a warrant?” she eventually asked loud and clear, with audible reluctance in her voice.

“When the case is urgent, the warrant is not needed,” Raquel explained calmly, “You have a right to write a request for the preparation and delivery of a court or prosecutor’s decision approving of the seizing of your possessions.”

“How urgent is this case?”

“Let’s just say that if I do not crack it, then Interpol will start…” she hesitated, searching for the right words.

“Fine.” The older woman stopped her. “You can have the recordings.”

Raquel sighed in relief. The fiasco of today’s search that had led her nowhere—she hadn’t been able to find Sergio at any place she’d gone to, not at his favourite gym, not at any gym she’d visited for that matter too, not at any restaurant nearby, including the hotel one, not at their bar; it had felt as if he’s disappeared into thin air—was bringing Raquel down, so she was glad that at least she had anything to cling to.

“But for the guest book, come back with a warrant,” the manager finished. She then said something to the receptionist and left.

Once the two of them were left alone, and while the young woman started copying the files into a DVD, Raquel spoke again:

“I am going to need a room. On the first floor, 103 preferably.”

The receptionist raised a brow but started typing, without uttering a word.

“Unfortunately, this one’s booked. Room 102 is available.”

Raquel’s heart beat harder.

This could be a coincidence. The room 103 had been empty a few hours before, but the check-in began at 3 p.m., so almost an hour after she’d broken inside—anyone could’ve booked it, even during the time Raquel had spent hunting down Sergio’s contacts only to find out the only one she’d managed to find hadn’t heard a word from him and couldn’t reach him either. Except, Raquel had stopped believing in coincidences in the cases she investigated, and any chance was worth clinging on to.

“Since when is the room 103 booked? And how long?”

“I’m sorry, Inspector, but I think I can’t disclose such information.” The girl looked around, as if she was checking if her superior was hearing or seeing what was going on. Guessing by her age, this was likely her first job, and Raquel couldn’t blame her for wanting to do everything by the book.

“I understand. Then I will get the other room.” Raquel replayed the memory of her walking down the hallway and then going through the room 103, trying to make sure that it and the room she just booked had doors close to each other, so that she could hear if someone was entering.

Raquel provided the girl with her ID, one of the many fakes she and Sergio had ordered right after they’d been reunited. If memory served her right, they might’ve even discussed the need to get her false documents in this very hotel—Sergio had offered to take care of it while Raquel would return to fetch her mother and daughter.

In return, the receptionist handed Raquel some forms to sign and in the meantime clicked something on her computer. As she did so, Raquel glanced over at the screen, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything she was looking for. Her breath died on her lips when she actually did manage to spot the name Salvador Martin on the screen, before the site reloaded. She didn’t notice for how long he was supposed to be here, but she did pick up the name of the room he was booked at.

It was, indeed, the room 103.

She fucking knew it.

“And that will be all,” the receptionist announced, having finished typing everything into the system. She placed the key to the room onto the counter and the DVD next to it and accepted the signed declarations from Raquel.

“Thank you.”

Raquel took both objects from the desk and hastily directed herself to the elevators. She had around sixty hours of footage to go through.

21:53

She stared at her laptop in disbelief, the screen frozen at the image of Sergio standing next to the receptionist’s desk, handing the man something that wasn’t visible on the recording, the hour in the corner showing the hour 12:04. He had his bag—the same one Raquel had packed two days prior—in his other hand.

Sergio didn’t appear on the recordings from this day again. He hadn’t gone back to the hotel yet, and maybe he didn’t plan to at all.

It looked as if he was checking out, and Raquel uttered a curse under her breath, terrified by the perspective of missing him by just two and a half hours. Because if he had actually left the hotel without intending to return (it’s not like she could ask anyone about whether he’d really checked out; even if she’d tried getting the answer out of the receptionist, she would’ve been discarded and told to come back with a warrant, since the hotel workers were by law forbidden to provide any information about their guests), she had no idea where he might’ve gone. She could call every realtor in the area—since Sergio had either just purchased a house for himself or was still in a need for one—get her hands on every recording from nearby to search for a glimpse of him and ask the receptionist to notify her if anyone saw him, but the chances of finding him now were getting lower and lower by each minute.

She took a long breath.

Maybe what she saw on the footage wasn’t Sergio handing the receptionist a key to his room with the purpose of checking out. The room was still booked, after all, so someone must clearly occupy it. Maybe Sergio had simply left the key at the desk for safe keeping. Maybe he’d asked the receptionist about something and tipped her in gratitude—Sergio often offered generous tips to locals, called it liquidity injection. She had to check if in the previous days he’d done something of similar sorts or if many people had checked-in today and calculate the probability that they would end up in the room next-door, which, for now, still seemed to be quiet. That’s how she would have her answers.

But before she lost herself in going through almost forty more hours of footage, she needed to put a few actions into motion.

Having translated and written down a few phrases she might need, she reached for the hotel phone and dialled the reception.

“Hotel reception, how can I help you” The voice on the other end of the line answered after two signals.

“Good evening, this is Inspector García, from room 102. I have a question. Do you print documents or photos at the reception?”

“We do. Do you have a pen drive, or do you wish to send it to us via e-mail address?”

“E-mail, preferably.”

The receptionist spelled out the mail address slowly, so that Raquel could write it down.

“I will send you an e-mail shortly,” Raquel continued, the phone squeezed between her ear and shoulder, as she pressed the combination of Win + PrtScn on her keyboard. “I need you to print the screenshot and call me if the man in the picture shows up in the lobby. He is important for the investigation.”

“Of course, will do.”

“Thank you.”

Raquel put the handset down.

A few minutes later the phone called again. Raquel jumped in her seat, her heart pounding and her hands trembling in anticipation.

“Yes?”

“I am really sorry, Inspector, but…”

The receptionist proceeded to explain something in fast, barely intelligible stuttering—Raquel only got the words “printer” and “broken,” then “shift” and “note”—but Raquel interrupted her in the middle of a sentence:

“Just make sure it gets done and I get the call if that man appears.” It’s not like she intended to come off as rude, but she also didn’t trust her language abilities to continue this conversation—especially with someone who was clearly anxious about talking with a “police inspector” and stammered in consequence, which of course normally wouldn’t be an issue to Raquel, but now caused more problems than she was capable of dealing with at this moment.

Raquel hung up, hoping that whoever starts the next work period—Raquel glanced at her watch with showed 10 p.m., meaning that it was very likely there was a shift change happening at this moment—would read the note left by the receptionist, fix the goddamn printer and spot Sergio on his way to his room. Because she couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to find him.

Then another, equally dreadful thought stuck her. It was 10 p.m.

Half an hour past Paula’s curfew.

And Raquel had forgotten to call her daughter to wish her goodnight.

“Fuck.”

What kind of mother was she? God, out of every time she’d let her daughter down, the past three days might’ve been one of the worst instances, comparable even to ruining her daughter’s normalcy in the aftermath of the Mint heist. She’d promised herself once that she’d do everything in her power to provide Paula with a stable home, and what did she do? She’d rashly rid her of a second parental figure—one she really needed at this stage of life, especially after everything she’d been through due to the divorce and then Alberto’s arrest—without as much an explanation, she’d distanced herself in the next hours in an attempt to shield her daughter from her own emotional turmoil, which had borne too much resemblance to giving Paula a cold shoulder, then she’d straight-up abandoned her by leaving out of the blue to go find the very man she’d thrown out of the house just two days prior, after merely informing her briefly about her plans. And now she hadn’t even called her goodnight.

Paula had been right when she’d thrown all those angry words in her face on Saturday at breakfast. Raquel had been failing as a mom, and she hadn’t even realised it.

She immediately reached for her cell phone. Maybe Paula went to bed without hearing her mother’s voice, but she would at least wake up to a text message from her, so that she knew Raquel loved her.

Goodnight, sweetie. I love you so much.
 I’m sorry I haven’t called you.
And I’m sorry for… all this.
I know this entire situation is
very confusing to you, and I promise,
I’m going to explain everything to you,
once we are back home.
I send loads of hugs and kisses ♡

To Raquel’s surprise, an answer came almost right away:

            Goodnight, mama

Raquel left out a worried sigh. Her daughter wasn’t asleep yet and was probably sitting on her phone instead. That was a terrible sign.

Why aren’t you sleeping, honey?
Is something wrong?

The reply appeared after a while that seemed like an eternity:

            Have you found Sergio yet?

No, no yet. Why?

            I miss him. The house was so
            weird without you or him today

I’m sorry, sweetie.
Do you want me to call you, so that
we could talk about this?

            Yeah…

Raquel quickly, with her heart aching for her daughter, wishing she could take her daughter’s struggles away from her, dialled Paula’s number.

“Hi, mom.”

“Hey, sweetheart. Are you… holding up somehow? Do you want to talk about how you’re feeling?”

There was a moment of silence.

“I’m sad. And confused. I just don’t really understand what’s going on with you and Sergio… Everything was fine, then suddenly it wasn’t, and you just broke up with him, and now you want to get back together with him…” Raquel had known Paula was affected by this entire ordeal, but she hadn’t realised how much it had really impacted her. Her stomach tied into a tight knot and flipped a few times, making her nauseous. “It’s… confusing.”

Raquel couldn’t blame her. From Paula’s perspective this whole situation must’ve been even more bewildering than to Raquel, who herself barely knew what was going on, with all those strong, constantly changing emotions that had messed up with her head and made her fell as if she’d been going nuts.

Paula had been right when she’d pointed out that Raquel had literally turned their lives upside down so that she could be with Sergio and her doing one-hundred-eighty on her opinion about him basically made no sense.

“I know, Paula. And I’m sorry. I— I made a mistake.”

God, why was it always so hard to admit it?

“Why would you just throw him out like that?” Paula went on. “He didn’t even say goodbye.” Her voice cracked. “Didn’t Sergio want to say goodbye to me?”

It felt like a punch in the gut.

“No, no, Paula, it’s not like that… It’s my fault. It was me who prevented him from bidding farewell to you, but I’m pretty sure he really wanted to.” In the past months Paula had become an important part of Sergio’s life. He’d gladly took the role of a caretaker and discovered he had a knack for being a dad, and while he hadn’t said so himself, Raquel could see that he’d already started seeing Paula as a daughter. Not being able to say goodbye must’ve additionally broken his already broken heart. But it’s not like Raquel could’ve allowed it then—not in her state.

“So… why did you?”

Raquel sighed.

“It’s… complicated. Look, once you’re older, I am going to explain this to you in more detail, but—”

“Or you can explain it to me now. I am big enough to know, you know?”

Raquel smiled to herself grimly. Her baby was bravely entering the stage in which she felt like she was capable of handling anything. And she most likely could handle most things, even those seemingly too big for her. But parents shouldn’t use their children as their shoulders to cry on.

“Nice try, little one. One day, I promise I will explain to you everything you want to understand. For now, all you need to know is that I was trying to make a decision that was best for all of us. I let the one mistake Sergio had told me about erase every good thing he’d done for me or for our family, which, in retrospect, was something I shouldn’t have done, especially without properly digesting the news and talking to him about it. Now I realise it was a wrong move, one made out of place of deep hurt and conviction that I was protecting you. That’s why I’m doing my best to undo my own mistake. Do you understand me?”

“I think so…”

“Then I’m glad. Is there something else you want to talk about? Something else that weighs heavily on your mind?”

“I don’t know, I think it was mostly that. Just… can you promise me that the next time you get so angry with Sergio or you two have a fight, you won’t immediately throw him out?”

“I— I promise.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay. Go to sleep now, then, sweetie. You being homeschooled and starting classes in the afternoon doesn’t mean that you can stay up all night on your phone.”

“Fine.” Raquel could picture her daughter rolling her eyes. “Mom,” Paula added after a moment of silence, “when you find Sergio, can you tell him that I missed him and our piano lessons?”

“Of course. Goodnight, Paula. I love you.”

“Love you too, mom.”

Raquel pressed the red button and put the phone down.

She then returned to going through the camera footage in search of any indicator which would suggest that Sergio hadn’t really checked out of the hotel yet and that there was a chance that their paths would cross again.

About forty-five minutes later, weariness started to overcome her. Her head was pounding again, dizziness came back, and her sight got blurrier and blurrier, and soon enough she was almost unable to focus on what she was watching.

She cursed her drinking spree, her hang-over and the pills she’d taken that hadn’t worked and made her only half as effective as she would’ve been on any other day.

She needed a cold shower. Maybe that would wake her up and let her work for a few hours more.

The shower didn’t really wake her up.

What it did, however, was muffle the sound of the door to the room 103 opening and closing, as Sergio returned from the gym he’d gone to at noon.

So, when Raquel decided to go to sleep—after an hour or two more of watching the camera recordings—she was totally unaware that the man she desperately searched for this entire day sojourned in the very apartment next door, the headboards of their beds adhering to the two sides of the same wall.

Without having this knowledge, she stared at the ceiling, praying to the universe which had been anything but kind to her today for a chance to find Sergio. She couldn’t bear being apart from him anymore. She longed for him, wished he was close to her, preferably on the same bed, spooning her and telling her they were going to be okay, because he loved her and knew she loved him, and whatever happened between them didn’t completely destroy the bond they shared.

It was the first night since Raquel had broken up with Sergio that she wasn’t falling asleep drunk. And now that the dust had settled, she was acutely aware how much she hated being in bed alone. Honestly, it was baffling to what extent she’d got used to sleeping in Sergio’s arms, or at least in his near presence, in just a few months. His absence simply felt wrong.

Raquel closed her eyes, hoping to find him in the ether. But he wasn’t there; she couldn’t sense him. During the year they’d spent apart, she’d often tried to reach him with her thoughts, and while she’d obviously couldn’t communicate with him, she’d always believed he’d been there, on the other end. It had given her hope. Now she felt nothing.

She felt hopeless.

On the footage she’d watched, Sergio hadn’t appeared anymore. She’d been watching the videos in reverse, and not once had he shown up in the lobby the entire Sunday. Her only hope remained on the recordings from Saturday, the day he’d checked in, but in all fairness, she wasn’t feeling optimistic about her chances.

She feared that she’d lost him for good. That he’d really left the hotel without intending to return and now was on his way to some distant place where nothing could remind him of them.

She couldn’t know she was completely wrong about this.

At least for now.

him

Tuesday, 5:46

He couldn’t sleep. Guilt and self-reproach were eating him alive, making it impossible for him to simply close his eyes and drift away into slumber. Because each time he did it, he saw Raquel, and he simply couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear the sight of loathing in her eyes, the cold look that said that he deserved prison for everything he’d done to her, or worse, the sight of her gazing at him lovingly, as if nothing had ever happened, as if they were still happily together, because remembering her made his heart bleed.

It was enough he’d been seeing Raquel throughout the day—he’d seen her in the crowd and at the market and outside the gym he’d gone to; he’d seen her in the faces of women who bore even the tiniest resemblance to her. He knew he couldn’t have possibly spotted her, but it still felt as if she’d been haunting him. And no matter how hard he would try to remember that it was all just in his head, his entire body wouldn’t hear it.

He wondered if he would ever be able to stop seeing her everywhere.

With each passing hour he became more and more reassured in his decision to turn himself in. It was killing him—not being able to escape Raquel, regardless of if it was the memory of her lingering or her voice reverberating in his ears, and then the endless staring into the ceiling, as Raquel’s voice echoed. The pointlessness of his existence overwhelmed him, and his helplessness, his inability to pull himself back together, were only making him feel like there was no other way for him, than to orchestrate his own arrest, somewhere far, where no one would be able to connect him to Raquel and her family back here.

So, as soon as it started to get bright outside, he took this things and left. He had a plan to set into motion.

her

Tuesday, 7:51

The alarm rang at 7:30, and around twenty minutes later, Raquel, freshly showered, was heading downstairs, dressed as if she were a police inspector, just like she had yesterday, ready for another day of hunting.

“Anything?” She asked the receptionist. This time it was a man in his early thirties, one she hadn’t seen in the recordings she’d gone through.

“Pardon?”

Raquel sighed.

“I am inspector García, from criminal unit.” She showed off her badge. “Yesterday, I asked another receptionist to print a picture for me and call me if the man from it appeared in the hotel.”

“Oh, yeah… Ana mentioned something about the printer being broken, as she went off the night shift. She said that it had taken her an hour to fix the old thing, and still it didn’t print properly—the colours are all messed up. So, we keep the tab with the photograph you sent us open on our computer at all times, so we could easily switch between work and the image and check if someone who enters or leaves resembles the person in the picture, but, you know, it’s not the same as if we had it physically in front of us.”

(Of course, Raquel didn’t understand the man completely, but she was capable of figuring out from context what he was talking about—or at least most of it—and that was what she assumed he’d just said.)

She released another sigh, this time one of helplessness. This was just fantastic, she thought with bitterness.

“Can you at least tell me if the room 103 is still booked?” Maybe a different receptionist would be a bit more favourable to her and give her a scrap of information. This one didn’t seem nearly as spooked by the presence of a police inspector as the one Raquel had contact with previously. “You don’t have to tell me who has booked it, I’m interested in just the dates.”

“Yes, I think I can do that.” He typed a few commands on his computer. “And yes, the room is still booked, for ten more days.”

“Since when?”

While the answer didn’t match precisely the day of their break-up, Raquel suspected that Sergio had attempted to book a room not long after he’d left Kanda’s shop, which had been hours before the hotel day began, which meant they must’ve added the previous one to his bill. So, it was technically still probable that Sergio could return to his room.

“Please, let me know if the man from the picture comes back. It’s important. Call this number.” She wrote down the digits to her cell phone and then left.

12:14

As the hours went by, her search for Sergio continued.

Around noon, Raquel finished watching the footage she’d received at the reception yesterday. She found nothing of value there, just the moment in which Sergio had booked a room for himself, meaning that for two entire days he hadn’t left the hotel. It left a bitter taste in her mouth. She hoped he had at least got out of the room, instead of staying in bed without moving an inch of his body, though she knew the chances of that were so low they were close to non-existent—she’d read his letters, after all, and was perfectly aware of his coping mechanisms, or rather lack thereof.

She wondered what it was that had prompted him to depart from the hotel, and for so damn long on top of everything, especially if he hadn’t actually checked out. House hunt? A random need for a change of scenery? Or something else completely; something she would’ve never thought of?

Pondering about it wasn’t getting her anywhere. And she had tons of work for today, work she needed to get done, before she would return to their island, so that she could eat dinner with mom and Paula. Because while finding Sergio was her top one priority at this moment, she wasn’t abandoning her daughter the way she’d done yesterday ever again.

20:21

“How were your lessons today, Paula?” Raquel asked over dinner.

“They were fine.” Paula answered without raising her head, too busy nibbling on her food. She looked distressed and not hungry at all—the way she’d often been like back in Madrid.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

Raquel reached to her daughter’s face and raised her chin up and then delicately cradled her cheek. Paula only rolled her eyes.

“Same as yesterday?”

Paula looked down and slowly nodded.

Shit.

“Paula… I know you’re sad that I didn’t find Sergio yet, I am too, but I am doing everything I can to…”

“And what if you don’t find him?”

“Find who?” Raquel’s mom suddenly asked. Raquel turned her head in her direction, for a quick second disoriented by this question, but then she quickly realised her mother was likely having one of her moments of confusion. “That bearded guy with glasses? The one who stayed the night and baked Paula a cake? What was his name? Something on S…”

“Sergio, grandma. Yes, we’re talking about him.” Paula often offered to help explain something whenever Marivi got lost in the past. She’d started doing that more frequently once they’d moved to Palawan, and not because Marivi’s condition had gotten worse—quite the opposite, life in beachy, sunny paradise, different culture and vibrant culture she’d fallen in love with had actually contributed to her improvement—but because she’d been mimicking Raquel and Sergio both. “Mom’s looking for him, because they had a fight, and she wants to have a serious conversation with him, and if they figure everything out, they will be together again.” Paula repeated what Raquel had told her yesterday, before she took the boat to the mainland.

“You should definitely go get him back, Raquel, once we’re back home in Madrid from holiday.”

“Mom, we aren’t here on holiday,” Raquel explained calmly, with tons of patience in her voice, when in reality, she was feeling anything but patient. She wanted to scream.

All those problems and now this… As if she didn’t have enough on her plate!

The worst part about all this was that it could very well become her reality now. If she didn’t find Sergio, she would be navigating her life alone again. And life without Sergio meant facing challenges on her own.

Of course, it had crossed her mind that she would be forced to relearn how to be a single parent and teach herself how to best take care of her ill mother, now that Sergio was no longer her by her side to relieve her of some of those hardships, but it had been rather far on her list of thoughts and worries. When she’d been breaking up with Sergio, she’d seen him as an immediate threat to her and her family, so getting him out of their lives had been the top priority to her. She hadn’t cared about anything else. She hadn’t been allowed to care about anything else, including her own discomforts that would be unleashed upon her now that she was, once more, the sole caretaker, because they were an intrinsic part of being a mother and a daughter to an elderly, ill woman.

Had she not regretted breaking up with Sergio—knowing now that he was, in fact, not a threat to them—she probably wouldn’t bat an eye. Working twice as hard was the price she would’ve been willing to pay for her family’s safety. She’d done that once before, after all, when she’d left Alberto. She could do it again.

The familiarity of Raquel’s thoughts and feelings caused a chill to come down her spine. It made her uneasy that she’d been in a very similar position before. And knowing that she could bounce back into navigating her life—since it would probably be like hopping on a bike after a few years of not using it; her procedural knowledge guiding her through her struggles that it knew all too well—on her own didn’t really help.

Because being aware of something doesn’t always mean you believe it with your whole heart.

And right now, Raquel was too tired and too stressed to believe things were going to be okay without Sergio with her heart that was breaking a hundred little times over and over again at the thought that they could not be reunited.

No wonder she felt on edge.

“What do you mean we aren’t here on holiday?” Marivi inquired, her brows frowned in confusion.

“I moved us here, mom. This is our home now.”

“Maybe your home,” Paula mumbled.

“Oh…” Marivi winked a few times. “It’s probably for the better, anyway. Madrid was awful, I liked it better in Almazan.”

“I’m glad you’re saying this, mom,” Raquel answered through a squeezed throat. “And what do you mean, Paula, that Palawan is a home just for me? Do you really think that?”

Paula nodded.

“I want to go back to Madrid, if you don’t find Sergio.”

Raquel cursed internally.

“We can’t go back to Madrid, Paula.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Everything is complicated to you! You never tell me anything.”

“And you tell me everything?” Raquel turned the conversation around. “Since when you don’t like it here?”

Paula’s attitude disappeared completely. Raquel struck a chord.

“Paula, you can’t just drop a bomb like that and not explain why you’re feeling the way you are. You seemed to be really happy here. You like the beach and the sea, you never once complained about your tutor, even though you had always complained about school and homework, and you look way less stressed out now than you did back there. What’s wrong?”

“I don’t have any friends, mom.”

“What do you mean you don’t have any friends? What about that girl you’ve been hanging out with a lot?” Raquel asked, having searched her mind for someone with whom she’d seen her daughter in the past months. “Dayang? Isn’t she your friend?”

Paula blushed.

“She’s way too cool to be my friend,” she grunted. “And she’s so… overawing! Everyone wants to be friends with her, and she’s friends with everyone too, so she can’t be that ‘my’ person.”

“From what I see, she still makes time to hang out with just you…”

“Whatever…” Paula rolled her eyes.

“Alright, if not Dayang, then there are still other kids that play with you all the time, even despite a slight language barrier. Not to mention that you learn Tagalog way quicker than I do, so that never seemed to be an issue.”

“But they aren’t my friends. Not like Nadia was my friend back in Madrid—through thick and thin, even when others stopped talking to me. Not like Sergio was a friend to me. He was the only one who didn’t treat me like a kid, and I really liked how he was teaching me piano and Tagalog, and how he discussed everything with me.”

It was true. While Sergio had never attempted to take Alberto’s place, never once insisted upon becoming Paula’s father, he’d done his best to get close to her, to become a mentor or a friend, someone Paula felt safe with. He’d been teaching her everything he knew, from origami to driving a boat, and Raquel loved to observe the two of them bonding over an activity or a book.

Though she wouldn’t lie, hearing that in Paula’s eyes Sergio was the one person she could discuss everything with because he was the only one who wasn’t treating like a child she still was hurt quite a bit. Raquel had always believed she did a decent, or more than decent, job as a parent—despite often omitting certain truths Paula asked about—because she tried to include Paula in decision making regarding most matters that were about her directly, of course to a capacity suitable for her age and maturity, and never talked down to her. She’d wanted her daughter to feel heard. But maybe she wasn’t doing enough or in the right way; maybe she wasn’t the kind of mother Paula needed.

A pang of conscience hit her. About not considering how Sergio’s absence could impact Paula—not that it would’ve changed anything, but still. About coddling, smothering even, Paula too much whenever she believed her little girl was too little to know the entire truth about something, while her daughter wanted to be treated as an adult in a smaller body and not as an innocent child.

“And now that he’s not here, I don’t have anyone to talk to,” Paula finished her rant.

“You have us, Paula,” Raquel reminded her daughter firmly. She needed her daughter to know how loved she was.

“Yes, exactly. You can talk to us about everything,” Marivi added.

“But it’s not the same…”

Raquel sighed. She knew her daughter needed friends her own age, and she felt terrible that the girl couldn’t really bond with kids from the mainland and started treating Sergio, an adult, like her “go to” person whenever she needed someone to talk to as a replacement for connection with her peers. Or as a replacement for her; her mother who should be there for her and actually listen to what she was saying.

“So, is this whole thing really just about this? You don’t miss anything else from Madrid? I mean… besides your father and aunt Laura, but that we’ve already discussed.”

“Yeah…” Paula finally confirmed.

There was a moment of silence.

“Would it help if I tried to enrol you in a local school before the next semester starts?” Raquel asked after a while.

The original plan for Paula’s education was that for the first year of living in the Philippines she would mostly be learning languages—English and Tagalog—so that she could be signed up for any school in the area, instead of restricting the choice to private schools catering to the elite which included Spanish in their curriculum. But maybe this plan could be adjusted.

“Then,” Raquel continued, “you’d meet more people your age and you could make more friends, since you feel like you don’t have any, which, for the record, I think isn’t entirely true.”

“I don’t know… Maybe?”

Raquel nodded to herself.

“Alright, so here’s the deal. This week, I will keep looking for Sergio. I will come back to dinner and to give you a goodnight kiss, but I will mostly spend time on the mainland. I will ask Ganda or Bayani to keep an eye on you, it’s a ten-minute drive by boat for them, so I don’t think it will be a problem to them. But regardless of whether I find Sergio or not, next Monday, I am going to pick a school and try to enrol you in ASAP, and I am going to do my best to get someone, a translator for example, to help you keep up with the rest of the class, in case you don’t understand something. Okay?”

“Okay.”

23:56

Raquel stayed home with her family until her mother was feeling better again. In the meantime, she tucked her daughter in and read her a chapter of the book they’d all been reading together before bed—without Sergio she had twice as much work with changing the voices, but she had fun anyway. Acting like a mother again, after a few days of missing out on her duties, made her feel fulfilled. She’d really needed it after blaming herself for failing in her role in the past few days.

When everyone was sound asleep, Raquel took the boat and drove back to the mainland, to the room 102, where she lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, figuring out her plan for the next days.

him

Wednesday, 1:37

He couldn’t sleep again. He’d thought that him traveling since early morning hours, then  running around all day, setting everything into motion, would tire him up enough to let him fall asleep easily, but he’d been mistaken. Maybe it was the heat, as it had been particularly hot and muggy today, the way it usually was in this region in March, and late hours provided no relief.

Sergio tossed and turned in his sheets, unable to find a comfortable position for himself, acutely aware that there was something missing. Another night without Raquel felt like torture. He sensed her absence with every inch of his body, and it was making him absolutely crazy. He yearned to touch her, to be able to snuggle into her back and take in her scent, to cover her body with thousands kissed and path with them his way to the warm place between her legs. The longer he went without her, the worse his longing became, and now that he had nothing to do with himself, all he could think about was her… Raquel, naked, bathed in light of the first morning sunrays; Raquel, wearing his shirt that she took without asking, beaming at him with the most radiant smile later that day, as he was serving her breakfast; Raquel, telling him what she was going to do to him at night, once they were home from a social gathering, with that mischievous look in her eye.

Oh, how he would humble himself before her—on his knees, begging for forgiveness, and doing so with his tongue, his mouth not uttering a single word, but moving in a more convincing way than any, even the most talented orator was putting their own into use—to see her glance at him warmly just one more time…

He needed to stop.

He should take a cold shower, wash off his wicked thoughts and wrongful desires. Raquel was no longer his to perceive like that, he should feel ashamed for thinking of her in those scenarios, no matter how “chaste” they would seem to any other person. Because while he’d outgrown the concept of a sin—he hadn’t been raised religious per se, but the nurse who had been taking care of him at the hospital in his youth had put Christian ideologies into his head—he had his own incredibly strict moral compass that told him fantasising about Raquel was simply wrong.

He really needed that shower.

After he came out of the bathroom, he was still feeling restless. He knew he wouldn’t sleep, and he knew that as soon as he lay down on the matters he would start daydreaming about Raquel again. He needed a distraction—to go for a walk or…

Sergio’s eyes lay on the desk in the corner of the room. There was a stack of papers on it: his  plans and calculations, everything he would need for the upcoming days preceding his completely accidental arrest on his way from East Timor to Australia. Some of those paper sheets were empty, a perfect way for him to pour his heart out and perhaps get some of his thoughts out of his head.

He sat down and started writing.

The page quickly filled with words, and the more Sergio wrote, the more he wanted to put them into something more cohesive. A letter perhaps, maybe more than one. He could thank Marivi for her kindness and express his gratitude for raising Raquel to be such a strong woman. He could tell Paula he was keeping his fingers crossed for her, and that he wished her the best in life. That he arranged for the best manufacturer to design a new piano for her so that the instrument was crafted for her size any time she would need it—she just needed to call them—because he hoped their lessons made her fall in love with classical music and wish she could learn more.

He could explain to Raquel what he hadn’t gotten the chance when she’d been rightfully breaking up with him.

He scrunched up the paper and discarded it onto the floor. And then he wrote.

Dear Marivi

I count that this letter finds You in good health, of which there’s an abundance, hopefully. I do hope there are many good days and way more coming, too, and that the climate and culture here will continue to help You improve your overall well-being.

I write You this letter, because I wanted to thank You, and do so personally, or at least as personally as I’m able to, without standing in front of You, for everything You’d done—and not just for me but also for those closest to my heart. I will be eternally grateful for the warmth you showed me; for all Your advice, which often was the wisest thing I’d heard; for listening to my worries and struggles whenever I needed someone older and more experienced to confide in. Thank you for accepting me into your family, for accepting ME in spite of who I am and how much I’d hurt your daughter, and for supporting our relationship during all those beautiful months—they were certainly the best of my life. Thank You for nurturing Raquel into this wonderful, fierce person she is today. I have no doubts that the best parts of her she got from You.

The three of you brought such an immense change into my life, and I have no words to properly express how much it means to me. Even if Raquel and I are no longer together, I will always cherish those few months I got to spend with her and You and Paula. She will forever be a part of me—the best one, actually—and you two, by extension, will as well.

I’m not sure if Raquel would want to read a letter from me (I wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t), so in case she tore down the envelope and threw it in a trash, please tell her that I will always be sorry for the pain that I caused her and that she is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Once more—thank You for your benignity and acceptance. I will always admire you for those traits and for showing be that you can remain kind and open even when life gets cruel.

Sergio

Dearest Paula

I want to start this letter with a request, something only a young, but mature for her age, girl like You can handle. Please, don’t be angry with Your mother. You might be frustrated and confused because of the choices she made, but You need to understand that everything she did was because she wanted to create the best and the safest possible life for Your family. I will always respect her decisions, even if one of them led to the circumstances in which she and I are not together anymore, and I hope, in time, You’ll accept them too.

It pains we deeply that I didn’t say goodbye to You, but believe me—it’s for the better. This way we can only remember the happy times and not a hurtful farewell.

I am really glad we could create those cheerful memories. I will be forever grateful for our conversations—for Your insatiable curiosity and all those questions. I will be forever grateful for our piano lessons as well. Know that it made me feel like the luckiest man in the world to be able to share my knowledge with someone so eager like You. I hope classical music will remain in Your life and that You’ll remember us playing together with fondness. If You wish to continue Your teachings, then I arranged for one of the best players in the area to tutor you. Also, I contacted a few people to design an instrument specifically for You and Your size. The contact details will be attached on a separate page, feel free to give them a call anytime (or better ask your mom or grandmother to do so.)

Paula, I wish you the best in life. Never stop being Yourself, never stop pursuing knowledge, never lose your interest in the world around. Learn languages, read poetry, experience everything life has to offer—just carefully and wisely.

Thank You for everything

The (Piano) Professor

Sergio smiled, as he signed the letter, recalling the first time Paula had called him “the Professor.” He remembered the overwhelming terror that had shaken him when he’d heard it, preparing himself for the worst—that, somehow, Paula had learnt the truth about him. But it had quickly turned out the explanation to why the girl had referred to him in this way was way more innocent. The explanation was that he’d owed this pseudonym to all those hours he’d spent teaching her how to play the piano.

He sighed, shrugging the memory off. Nothing good would come out of reminiscing about those happy times.

He put the pen down and got up to pour himself a glass of water. His hands were trembling more and more with each second.

Because now came the hardest part—writing a letter to Raquel.

He crossed a few beginnings, unsure how to refer to her now that they weren’t together. Calling her his “dearest” or even “dear” seemed inadequate, something she would hate. Eventually, he settled for simply “Raquel,” even if to him it was way more than just her name.

Raquel

If by some miracle You’re reading those words, I want to let You know that in the letters I wrote to your daughter and mother I hadn’t disclosed any details about why You’d broken things between us—this is Your story to tell. Of course, You don’t owe me relaying those messages to them, but in case in an act of benevolence You’ll decide to give them the envelopes, and do so without reading the letters yourself first, I want to ensure You that You have nothing to worry about.

And now a few words to You. I want to apologise, again, for every hurt that I caused you. I’m sorry for lying to You, for hiding the truth and deceiving You for months. I’m sorry I allowed You to invite me into Your home and Your family, knowing damn well it would backfire sooner rather than later. I’m sorry I created the circumstances in which You uprooted Your life and left everything behind. I was a coward for not telling You everything sooner and for not stopping You when You decided to stay in Palawan with me. I was selfish. And if there was a way to make it up to You, I would’ve done anything—not because I want You to forgive me or because I want anything in return, but because Your well-being and happiness are the things that matter to me the most.

I’m sorry for building our life here on a lie. The months we shared together were a dream, a closest thing to the Paradise that human beings could experience while still on Earth. You’d made me the happiest man alive. You probably don’t share the sentiment, and I understand. I understand You’d rather forget we’d ever happened, and I would never blame You for it.

However, if there’s even the slightest chance You would want to remember me, I hope you’ll think fondly of the time we’d shared together.

Eternally grateful for everything

S.M.

Raquel

I go back in my head to that moment when You’d told me you brought Paula and Your mother with You. I remember how excited you were, how excited I was as well, even if my own elation was hidden underneath lots of fear—fear that you would quickly realise you’d made a mistake, fear that I wouldn’t handle the responsibility of caring for them. And mostly, the indescribable terror caused by being aware that I would have to confess all my sins to you before you would re-introduce me to them (provided that you wouldn’t want to drown me in the ocean or call in Interpol first.)

I wish I could’ve told you everything then. Not doing so was a grave mistake, which is something I should’ve realised sooner. When you arrived on Palawan and announced you were here to stay, I idiotically assumed I could get away with hiding such a terrible secret from you. I acted selfishly and let you invite me into your life, because I wanted you too desperately to let you go. But after months of lying to you I understood, I couldn’t keep living like this with a clear conscience. You didn’t deserve to be treated like that. Which is why I decided to tell you everything, figuring that hurting you with this confession was still kinder than continuing my deception. I was hoping it would come off as an ultimate act of love, me attesting that my affection and respect for you were greater than my desire to be with you. Before today I believed that revealing the truth to you alone was one of the biggest proof of regard I could show you. But now I realise that if I had really wanted to prove my love to you—if I had really wanted to show you how much I loved you—I would’ve let you go immediately, instead of fooling you for months. This is the first time I’m willing to accept my fault and admit that it would’ve been better if I’d told you the truth before I allowed myself to dream of a future with you. Because giving up on it is harder than I expected—but it’s still the least I can do to make everything up to you.

I’m sorry I’d been a coward.

S.M.

Raquel

I want to start this third letter by disclosing that you don’t owe me hearing my explanations and reasonings. What I’d considered doing, what I’d nearly done, is inexcusable and unforgivable. However, if there’s a part of you that is curious about it, from a strictly scientifical point of view, you will find the “why” and “how” here.

As I began telling you, your mother had called me at around 11:15 that Monday. She told me there was an urgent message from detective Rubio, but that she couldn’t get through to you. She read me the message: “we have him, we have the fucking guy who’s helping them from the outside. It’s the one that makes cider, the one in the wreck yard, the one who threatened the Russian, his fingerprints were in the patrol car. We have him. I’m on my way to the tent, and I’ll tell you everything.”

Sergio stopped writing for a moment, overwhelmed by the memory of hearing those words. They’d engraved in his brain with no way to erase them, their echo haunting him in perpetuum until he himself was dead. His memory was good on its own, he’d always prided himself on being able to remember anything in detail, but the having great memory meant that the worst parts of his life would forever remain with him—the flashing images, even those distorted and misplaced, of the day he’d almost taken a human life especially.

I hoped there was a way to avoid it—taking your mother’s life. But I couldn’t think straight, for the first time in my life I couldn’t focus. And then you called me, asked me to get you out of the police tent, and all I knew was that I needed to get to your mother before you did. This was the most cold-blooded I’d ever been, because I knew that if I put it off any longer, then the entire endeavour was lost. This is no excuse, as I’m painfully aware now, but that was all I was thinking about.

I drove to your house—the worst forty-five-minute ride of my life, I think I black out for most of it, which means now I can’t even remember how I got hold on the dioxin I was meant to use—and basically invited myself in. I noticed your mother was having coffee (she proposed to make me one as well); this was where I would pour 2,5 mg of the poison. I would wait for the heart attack to occur and vanish without a trace. That means I was supposed to completely cut you off afterwards. I knew I had to disappear from your life, because I was already in too deep, so there was no way for me to continue this relationship.

I did put the dioxin into your mother’s coffee. She brought a cup of coffee for me. We chatted, she got out of me that we’d been together and that we’d made love. She told me you needed someone to love you, make you feel cherished—a good man. She then said that I looked like a good man, that she could see it in my eyes.

That was what made me realise I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take a life, couldn’t take your mother’s life, couldn’t do something like this to you. Not because I believed myself to be “a good person,” but because I realised how much hurt I would cause you and your family. It hit me that I’d fallen for you deeply and that you usurped the top place on the list of my priorities. I didn’t care about the plan; honestly, I was prepared to stop this madness and then disappear and leave everything and everyone behind, even if that meant all hell broke loose.

I knocked the cup out of your mother’s hand before she took the first sip.

I didn’t know about Marivi’s Alzheimer’s. I think you’d mentioned something about your mother having troubles with her memory, but I hadn’t remembered that then. Only when she reacted weirdly to the cup shattering—she acted as if it was her fault—I started connecting the dots: the sticky notes all around the place I hadn’t paid too much attention to before, your comment, everything… So, I played along, behaved as if I hadn’t just made an attempt on her life, helped cleaning up the mess, got rid of the message (both on your house phone and on Marivi’s sticky note), then went to pick up some flowers for you, vain attempt to silence my conscience by cheering you up.

I didn’t know if deleting Angel’s message from the recorder would be enough. I hoped it would. (You never mentioned that your mother had told you about that day, so I assumed she hadn’t and that everything worked out in my favour.)

But none of that matters, ultimately. I almost caused a tragedy, and I cannot erase that, I’m fully aware.

S.M.

her

Friday, 17:25

Raquel had spent three days vainly looking for Sergio.

She’d gotten in touch with another of Sergio’s contacts, spoken to multiple realtors, gone through hours of security footage… everything she would’ve done in her police inspector days. If this had been a case, it would’ve been managed with the utmost diligence, and yet she hadn’t found a lead. It looked as if Sergio had vanished into thin air.

She was about to lose all hope—not that she was planning to abandon her search, but this whole situation looked overwhelmingly pessimistic, and Raquel started to realise she would most likely have to get used to living without Sergio—when her phone rang.

“Yes?” She answered with a pounding heart.

“Inspector García? This is Ligaya, from the hotel reception.” Raquel recognised the young receptionist’s voice. “The man you are looking for has just entered the hotel.”

him

Friday, 17:25

Frankly, he had no idea what he was doing back on Palawan.

He could arrange money transfers and devolution of properties from Dili or Suai, two cities included in his plans, he didn’t need to travel all the way here for just a day, but he felt like there was something calling for him, luring him back, on the outskirts of Puerto Princesa. And even if it was only due to his own vain sentimentality, he truly wanted to return.

He really didn’t have a plan, and it felt weird to operate without one. Spontaneity didn’t become him. On his way to Palawan, he’d been thinking how he wished to relive some of his best memories: order a drink at the bar he’d waited a year for Raquel, go for a long walk at the beach and watch the sunset, buy some fresh fruits from the market—it was Friday, the day they had usually gone shopping, after all—maybe try to observe Raquel, Marivi and Paula from afar, to enjoy the sight of them, one last time. But now that he set a foot in Palawan sands, he really have no idea where he should go.

Maybe besides returning to the hotel and dropping his things there. And having a shower—he really needed a refreshment, his skin sticky from the damp air and his own sweat.

And so, he walked back to the Hotel Three Roses.

her

Raquel’s breath caught at the news.

Finally, after what had seemed like ages of searching for him, Sergio was back at the hotel. This was her chance to talk to him, to get him back.

“Can you go after him and tell him that Raquel wants to talk to him and that it’s urgent? He will understand this message.”

“I am currently in the middle of checking someone in, and besides, I am not allowed to leave the desk unattended—we have a strict policy. I am really sorry. I can send Ana as soon as she’s back from her break.” Raquel understood maybe seventy percent from what Ligaya was saying, but the message was clear: there wasn’t much the young receptionist could do without getting in trouble for abandoning her duties, and if Raquel wanted to let Sergio know she wanted to talk to him, she might as well just show up at his doorstep and tell him this in person.

“Can you at least call his room?” She tried, nonetheless. She couldn’t allow him to slip away from her again. “He’s staying at the 103.”

“Yes, that I can do.”

No sooner had the call ended that Raquel rushed towards the hotel. She had around twenty minutes of walking distance to cross, but she could make it in fifteen. She as good as ran there and managed to get to the establishment in less than twelve minutes, years of running for fun and of trainings to remain in shape giving her the effects she needed in that moment.

There was a queue at the receptionist’s desk, four adults with three children and tons of luggage blocking the way, and one of the men was clearly arguing with Ligaya about something. Raquel tackily jumped-the-line and interrupted him in the middle of a sentence, as if she owned the place.

“Did you call him?”

The man behind her blurted an insult in a language that sounded like Chavacano, but Raquel only raised her badge without looking him in the eye and continued to get the information she needed from the receptionist.

“I did, and he didn’t pick up. Ana’s not back from her break, but I asked one of the cleaning ladies to knock on the door of the room 103, and she said no one answered, but that she heard a shower run.”

“Okay, thank you.”

She then walked past the arguing tourists and straight to the elevators.

At that moment, neither Raquel nor Sergio could know that for a short moment the only thing that was separating them were the metal walls of the elevators.

Because while Raquel took the lift upstairs, to the first floor where their adjusting rooms were set, Sergio, fresh out the shower, took the other downstairs, ready to spend the evening and night bidding his farewells to the place he’d lived in for a year and a half; a place he, at some point, had started calling home.

(Though, his first real home was with Raquel by his side, but that is beside the point now.)

Unbeknownst to them, they missed each other by mere seconds: the doors to one of the elevators closing right as the ones of the second elevator opened.

her

Raquel banged on the door to the room 103, calling out Sergio’s name and for him to open. No one answered, only silence—there wasn’t even a sound of water running coming from the inside.

She cursed and, once again, took out a hairpin out of her pocket and started breaking into Sergio’s room.

It was empty.

His things were there, and there was noticeably more of them than what he’d left their island with, unlike a few days ago, but the room was still empty. He left, and she missed him, this time not by two hours, but by two minutes. Two fucking minutes.

She wanted to scream in fury.

Except, another sound reverberated in the quiet of the room 103 before her roar could: her phone.

“Inspector, the man from the room 103 is just leaving,” Ligaya panicked on the other end of the line. “Sir! Sir, there’s an important message to you!” The young receptionist shyly called after Sergio. Not loud or desperate enough to Raquel’s liking—knowing him, Sergio was deep in thought and might not pay attention to someone calling after him, or, if he was in a rush, which he likely was considering he’d spent less than fifteen minutes in his hotel room and then immediately left, having just taken a quick shower, he would just fob the receptionist off, saying he was too busy at the moment. “Sir, please wait! I can’t run after him, Inspector, I can’t leave the desk, or I will get fired! What do I do?”

“Try calling him again, tell him Raquel needs to speak to him. I am on my way.”

Raquel didn’t bother calling the elevator—as soon as she barged out of the room, she located the nearest staircase and ran downstairs, two or three steps at the time.

When she got into the atrium, the only people there were the guests at the reception desk from minutes before and Ligaya, standing a few steps away from her post, close enough to quickly get back to her previous position, were she to be surveyed by a higher-up, still calling behind Sergio, who was nowhere to be seen behind the glass entryway door.

Raquel wasted no time and ran out of the hotel as fast as she could.

To no avail—Sergio had already got lost in the crowd, and no matter how hard she tried to spot him, she had no idea which way he could’ve gone.

She roamed around the area, hoping to catch just a glimpse of him so she could follow him, but minutes, then quarters passed, and there was still absolutely nothing.

Disappointed and angry, she returned to the hotel.

“I am so sorry, Inspector,” Ligaya stood up from the chair, when Raquel entered the atrium. “I tried, but it was as if he didn’t hear me at all. He left in such a rush…”

“This is not your fault,” Raquel calmed the girl down. She couldn’t blame her for not running after Sergio immediately—she was at work after all. “Just… keep an eye on the entrance and give me a call in case he comes back.”

Having said so, Raquel walked back to Sergio’s room. Just in case he came back quickly. In the meantime, she could go through his things and see if she could find something that would tell her what his intentions and plans were. She still, for the life of her, couldn’t figure out where he’d been in the past six days and why he’d returned to this hotel. There was something off about his behaviour, and even if she was happy to know he was within her reach again, a vague sense of dread lingered and breathed at her neck, like an annoying boss telling her off for not cracking the case yet, as it was about to be too late for that, and scolding her for missing something important.

Well, now she was about to check whether she still had a chance to “crack this case” and get Sergio back.

She went through his bags, now two of them, first. In the beginning, she didn’t find anything interesting—just his clothes, neatly folded, then supplies, mostly chocolate bars and some crackers, his electronics, like his laptop she’d packed him, and a few burner phones she didn’t recognise, likely bought in the recent days. Then an envelope, fat with banknotes. Nothing weird or overly suspicious, just the things she’d expected to find. But nothing that would answer any of her questions.

And then something else fell into her hands.

Déjà vu struck her.

Another stack of envelopes. One addressed to her mother. One to Paula. Three to her.

Raquel opened them one by one, and then she started reading. With each sentence her breath became heavier. Her stomach tied into a knot, and there was a lump in her throat that made it harder to swallow. Tears filled her eyes, as she cursed his name. Damn him and his care for them all!

When she finished reading, she put the pages down with a heavy sigh. She was trembling, she realised, that’s how touched she was by Sergio’s letters. But this time, there was no anger in her, not like a few days ago, only affection and understanding. Reading those letters only cemented her decision to forgive him. It filled the blanks she’d been wondering about and explained what she couldn’t decipher herself.

She wanted to tell him that.

And so, she waited in his room for his return, hoping that soon she would be able to.

him

He waited, before he re-entered the atrium of the hotel. He wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be spotted either by the guests coming to or from the restaurant, or the receptionist, worried that if he was seen here, his entire plan would go to naught. Even if it was late, individuals were still buzzing in the lobby or around the elevators, so Sergio proceeded with caution, watching the reception from the shadows on the other side of the street. He wasn’t supposed to leave traces on Palawan, especially if he’d had the crumbs that the police would follow left hundreds of kilometres from here, and coming here was enough of a risk. Being recognised after the incident earlier today—or technically, yesterday—was something he couldn’t let happen.

Of course, Sergio had no idea what had actually happened when he’d been leaving the hotel to go on his last stroll around the familiar places on Palawan. But he’d heard the word “police” uttered by one of the guests standing near the receptionist’s desk, and that had been enough to startle him, so he’d walked out of the atrium in a rush, ignoring the lady at the reception calling after him. Frankly, he’d barely heard her, as the blood had rushed to his ears and muffled the surroundings, the adrenaline and his past instincts of someone used to living as a ghost kicking right in.

The crisis had been averted then, but he wasn’t going to risk it again. And so, he walked in only when he was sure there was no one who could see him enter the lobby and walk towards the elevator.

He walked towards his room warily looking around, but there was no one around and nothing that would bring his attention and make him anxious.

That is, until he put his key in the lock and realised the door was open.

He would’ve never left the door open.

His throat became dry. Cold sweat ran down his spine. It didn’t take a genius to decipher there was something wrong about this situation. He must’ve been careless and made a mistake; it didn’t matter now when and how—the point was that this situation was unusual to the point that the only explanation he could find was that somehow he’d been discovered. And while the endgame would be the same as in his own plans, he didn’t like it one bit.

Was it too late for him to retreat?

If they’d found me, it means Raquel must’ve helped them. She’s the only one who could do it, he thought to himself and found comfort in this realisation. Because maybe he would see her, one more time.

He put his trembling hand on the handle and pushed the door open.

His heart skipped a beat.

She was there, standing a few steps away from the bed, closer to the entrance. Her chest rose and fell heavily, and the corner of her mouth quivered, not quite a smile, but rather an expression of someone about to burst into tears, though he would never be able to tell which tears they would be. She looked… as if she’d jumped out of his dreams, with her kind eyes, so different to what they’d been like the last time the two of them had stood face to face, and her wavy dark-gold hair framing her beautiful face he’d longed to cradle.

She was alone—no police officers or S.W.A.T. team in sight, but he couldn’t say it made him any less apprehensive.

“Hi,” Raquel finally said.

“Hey,” he answered, completely flabbergasted. “What— What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

Chapter Text

her

Almost a week post their breakup and after countless near misses in the past few days, Raquel and Sergio finally stood face to face. They stared at each other with a mixture of disbelief and longing, the weird, emotionally charged tension between them palpable. They both looked as if all they craved to do was to run into each other’s arm and join their mouths urgently, hungrily—no, famishedly—but none of them moved.

Raquel felt her heart, which seemed to want to burst out of her chest, pound nervously, making it hard to inhale and exhale properly, and she wondered if Sergio could hear it or see the way it pressed on her skin from the inside. A breath died on her lips—it’s like she couldn’t respire for what seemed like a whole minute, or more—that’s how taken she was by the glance they shared for the longest while.

It was as if time didn’t exist. It was as if their past didn’t exist. All they were now were people deeply in love with each other who shared a connection unlike any other, now finally reunited, after a week of sleepless nights they’d both spent tossing and turning in their sheets, unable to sleep without the other person by their side.

A corner of her mouth quivered, as she tried to hold back a beaming smile and tears of release from the anxiety she’d been feeling throughout this entire week. To say she was relieved would be an understatement. In all honesty, all she wanted was to throw herself at Sergio and tell him how happy she was to see him. But she knew she couldn’t do that—not before they settled everything, not before she told him that she was sorry she hadn’t heard him out and just ended things between them abruptly and that she’d forgiven him.

“Hi.” She broke the silence eventually. It seemed like minutes of just gazing at each other, taking in this moment and refamiliarizing each other with the other person’s presence after they’d both believed they’d been through, passed, even though it had been just a few seconds.

“Hey,” Sergio answered shily.

And then, suddenly, that special moment they shared was gone, and what replaced it was heavy atmosphere of post-breakup uncertainty and awkwardness.

Raquel looked Sergio up and down in this new light. He looked like a mess. Not in a stereotypical way, with a grown-out beard, unkept, unwashed hair and dirty spots on his shirt—no, Sergio presented himself as smart as ever—but from just one glance at him she could tell he wasn’t holding up well. His eyes were tired, swollen and red, his posture slouched, as if something heavy was weighting him down, and there was this overall aura around him that screamed he’d given up and that he didn’t care anymore about… well, anything.

“What are you doing here?” He went on, genuine curiosity behind the perturbation in his voice. He seemed to be truly, utterly shocked—startled more than pleasantly surprised—to see her here.

“We need to talk.”

He just nodded and shut the door behind him.

“What it is that you want to talk about?”

Déjà vu struck her—he’d asked a similar thing when she’d chained him in the house in Toledo and told him most criminals talked relentlessly and without purpose because of their own nervousness. Back then, he hadn’t said a word to her, guilt, shame and apprehension preventing him from opening his mouth, as he’d known that no matter what he’d tell her, it still wouldn’t have helped his situation. And besides, he had trained himself well to never show a sign of fear or lack of confidence. Raquel, however, had seen his anxiety all over him in that house in Toledo anyway, trained as well to always see through someone’s cracks. She could see that anxiety now too. She could sense the tense anticipation.

“I wanted to ask you to come back with me to our island,” she answered him, hoping her revealing her true intentions right away would ease Sergio’s racing mind that was surely already creating a hundred escape ways in case she was to trick him and usher in Interpol right after lulling him into false sense of security with her fake forgiveness.

He slightly shook his head. She could see a mixture between confusion and disbelief on his face. He looked as if he was about to bolt away. Before he could respond, she raised her hand and went on:

“I’m not trying to con you. And your mind isn’t trying to con you either, if you’re worrying about that. I’m here, because there’s a lot I need to tell you and even more we should discuss together, but my main goal is that I wanted to offer you my forgiveness and ask whether you’re willing to accept it and then return with me to our perfect island and nearly perfect life that we’d shared in the past few months.”

Sergio winced a few times, astounded. Raquel watched him, holding her breath.

“This is not a good idea,” he eventually mumbled.

She frowned. It’s not like she expected him to immediately move on from the pain of their break up and take her in his arms, then to bed to properly reunite their souls again, but seeing him blatantly reject her attempt at burying the hatchet makes her feel like something’s not right.

“Care to tell me why you think so?”

“You broke up with me for a reason, Raquel.”

“I also forgave you for a reason. I didn’t do it on a whim; believe me, I’ve spent hours questioning your motivations, analysing every single detail from the time we’d shared during the heist and contemplating my options, before I decided to do so. And I realised I know the real you, Sergio. I know you would’ve never hurt me or my family. You’re a good person. And I want you to be a part of my life again.”

She saw him swallow with difficulty.

“You’re making a mistake,” he eventually spoke again after a moment of silence.

“Am I?” She put her hands on her hips, immediately taking a defensive position.

“Yes. I have wronged you far too many times, and you understandably put an end to a relationship that had no right to exist in the first place. I am not good for you, nor for your family, which is something you must’ve realised when you were breaking up with me. And if you, for whatever reason, even after all this debating you did, still believe we’re meant to be, then I’m sorry, Raquel, but I think your judgement is clouded due to…” he suddenly halted, as if abashed by what he almost voiced aloud.

Raquel huffed. This was nowhere near how she imagined this conversation to go.

“Go on. Finish what you started.” She stared him at him challengingly.

“Forget I said anything. It was wrong.”

“Well, you thought it, so have the balls to admit out loud that you consider me incapable of making a right, informed choice of pardoning you for your past sins and going back to you, because of the domestic violence I endured in the past.”

“I don’t think you’re incapable of that, it’s just…” He took a deep breath. “I’m not sure if your decision-making isn’t influenced by the patterns of your past behaviour you developed during your abusive marriage to that man.”

Oh, how diplomatically he said it.

But, of course, he was diplomatic about it. It was Sergio, it’s not like he would blatantly tell her that he thought she was making excuses for him just like she had for Alberto and that was why she was able to exonerate him, or that she wanted to return to him because of toxic emotional attachment she had for him and because the familiarity of the known, even if painful, seemed safer than the uncertainty of a new life without him.

“Do you really think so little of me that you think that after everything that happened to me, and that includes everything that happened between us during the heist, after all that broken trust and betrayal, I would make such an important decision lightly? That I would let someone unsuited for it become a part of my family, even though I vowed to myself to never get trapped in a toxic relationship again?”

“What happened between us during the heist is precisely why I think that!” He snapped. “Your past was how I managed to get so close to you!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Sergio! You think I don’t remember?! You think I don’t get angry nearly every time I remember how we met: the ways you lied to me or the fact that you researched me? Because I do!”

Sergio must have no idea how much it had cost her to make peace with what had happened during and after the heist. To reconcile the man that had been the first in such a long time who made her feel safe and appreciated with the one that had humiliated her at work and made a fool of her with his deception. To accept that he’d left her with her career and reputation in ruins and was spending his days in some kind of paradise, while she struggled to pick up the pieces.

He must have no idea how many times she’d cursed his name for fucking up her life like this during the first month post-robbery, before the leak turned her whole situation around.

How many times she’d doubted her judgement and second-guessed her decisions, wondering if she’d made the right choice by letting him escape, the promise of “estoy contigo” as an expression of her forgiveness still hanging in the air between them.

How many times she’d analysed the days they’d spent together to figure out how much of their romance had been true to help herself cope and calm her conscience whenever the voice in her head that had told her she’d made a mistake had been too loud.

Then, after she’d found the postcards, how long she’d pondered if leaving her old life behind was a good idea—she’d have to uproot her life, and the lives of her mother and daughter too, for a man she had barely known, for the man responsible for destroying her sense of trust, her career and reputation, for creating the circumstances that had made it so much more difficult to rebuild her life after the heist.

She couldn’t have known what would happen had she been to drop everything and move to Palawan; whether Sergio would’ve turned out to be the person she’d fallen in love with or the master manipulator who had led her by the nose, possibly in more instances than she had been aware of. But she’d chosen to leave Spain anyway, her desire to be with him stronger than any hesitations, any lingering pain, deciding that what they’d shared during those short moments they’d stolen together was worth delving into, despite his lies and manipulation. She could’ve lived without him, he’d made sure of that, but she’d risked everything to take a chance and follow her heart, unable to shake him off.

But would she have done the same if she hadn’t been lucky enough to rebuild her life after the heist? If Sergio hadn’t leaked the recordings from Angel’s bugged glassed? If he hadn’t orchestrated Alberto’s arrest? If she’d been forced to drop the abuse charges and had to equally share custody over Paula with the man who’d made her life a living hell?

Would she have come to Palawan then? Knowing her, she probably would’ve. She’d always been impulsive, headstrong, too convinced of her own righteousness for her own good, and if she set her mind to something, she wouldn’t stop until she reached her goal. She would’ve blown her life up for Sergio—she had nearly done that during the heist anyway—even if he hadn’t taken any action to help her rebuild whatever career prospects and reputation she had left.

What would that make of her?

“I hate that we have so much baggage between us!” she continued, frustration bursting out of her, trying not to dwell too much on whether there was some kind of merit to Sergio’s accusations. “I hate that when we reunited you deceived me again and made me believe we were building something true. I was so close to fixing my broken sense of trust, to healing from all your betrayals, and then you told me you’d been lying to me all this time!”

She was still scared that even if they managed to go back to what they’d been before, she still wouldn’t be fully able to trust him another time. That she would end up in another relationship in which she would have to constantly hold her breath, bracing for the worst. This was what had held her back the most—the fear of getting hurt for the hundredth time, the life of constant questioning whether Sergio wasn’t hiding something from her once more. Because her forgiveness was one thing, but the ability to truly put all of this behind her, behind them, was completely different.

She believed they could work things out, that months of stable, committed relationship would allow them to talk everything through and move forward, that she would be able to lean on him as she learned to trust again, but for now all this conversation seemed to do was to put doubts into her head and make her question if she really wasn’t making a mistake by forgiving him and inviting him back into her life. All because Sergio was an obstinate ass who would rather they both hurt by missing each other than accept that he could be exonerated. And it was killing her.

“You think it doesn’t break my heart that we can’t erase the hurt we had both endured? God, sometimes all I think about is that no matter how much I try to rationalise it and act like what we have isn’t unhealthy and full of issues, we do have serious problems, and all of them stem from the fact that our relationship began on deception. Everything would’ve been so much easier if we hadn’t met during the biggest fucking robbery of the century and didn’t have to continue to deal with all the messes we had made ever since!”

She couldn’t even begin to describe how conflicted she still felt about everything. On one hand, she’d long known that it was the way she treated herself after being hurt that determined how deep the scars went and not just the depth of the wound, on other, she couldn’t forget the pain she’d been in after realising she’d been fooled. Or after Sergio had told her he’d nearly killed her mother.

Her mother. The person who meant to her the most, next to Paula. She still wasn’t able to fully comprehend how the fuck he could’ve done that to her, even if she understood his motivations and was aware about how guilty he felt about this. It was the kind of bruise that would probably never disappear, even if it became so fade that it looked almost invisible in time.

Ultimately, her choice to forgive Sergio came down to what kind of person he was and how big of a change he’d brought into her life in the months they’d been together. That’s why, despite all this conflict in her head, all her doubts and worries, she was here, asking him to not let her go after all.

Raquel took a deep breath, before she continued in much calmer tone: “But I still want us, Sergio. I know we can’t change the past, but I want to give us another—”

“Exactly. We can’t change the past. The things I had done—all the messes I had done—are not something you should be able to forgive!”

“What are you trying to say, huh? That I should just let you go, then go back to the island we bought together so that we could build a life together and forget we’ve ever happened or pretend I don’t love you with every fibre of my being?”

He looked as if something had shaken in him; as if he was fighting an internal battle, unable to decide whether to cling to her love confession or try again to make her go home.

“Yes, I think it would be for the best,” he said eventually, and Raquel knew he was lying.

She huffed.

What the hell is going on with you? Why are you so willing to forsake our special bond, as if it meant nothing to you, when I know damn well how much you cherished it?

She knew he wasn’t telling her something, that it wasn’t only his guilt or shame, or even worry for her—who maybe indeed had once been more prone to accepting disrespect and excusing mistreatment, which meant that Sergio’s accusations weren’t completely unreasonable—holding him back. She just couldn’t say what it was.

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yes, I do.”

him

“Do you really mean that?”

Of course not.

“Yes, I do,” he answered as coldly as he could.

He needed her to understand he was doing this to spare her the life full of regret caused by ending up in another toxic relationship with someone who had hurt her way too many times. All he wanted for her was to live the life she deserved, and that life couldn’t include him, not when he’d nearly destroyed everything she’d ever held dear. And if providing this forced him to hide the truth from her again, then so be it.

Raquel just shook her head.

“Give one good reason for me to believe that you’re not lying to me.”

“I have already given you plenty perfectly logical arguments to explain why your idea for us to get back together is a mistake. It’s not my fault you’re not listening.”

“As if you were listening to what I was saying. I said that I love you, but you act as if you didn’t want to hear me.”

He flinched, unable to bear hearing those words. When Raquel had uttered those words earlier, it had left him in such a state of shock that he’d almost lost all of his composure—the only thing on his mind had been that he should abandon his plans and just clash their mouths together, sealing their reconciliation. But he wouldn’t have done that to her; he couldn’t have done that to her. He needed to stand his ground, make her see that her forgiving him just meant she didn’t see him for who he really was and was making excuses for him the same way she’d done with Vicuña back when they’d been married. Because someone like him couldn’t be pardoned; people like him should get punished, not exonerated.

“How can you even mean it after what you’ve learned about me?” Why couldn’t she get where he was coming from? “After everything I’d done? I tried to murder your mother, Raquel. I risked your freedom and your custody over Paula. I threw so many bricks at you that you made an attempt on your life…”

“Don’t do that, Sergio,” she stopped him harshly. “Don’t you dare weaponize my own suicide attempt to argue how you believe yourself to be undeserving of exoneration or unfit to be my partner. You have no right to use possibly the worst moment of my life to make a point. Especially when you’re so wrong about it.”

He looked away, embarrassed.

He wanted to ask her about it—ask in what ways he was wrong about it, what had really happened, why she would want to take her own life… But he couldn’t bear the thought of enduring this conversation, of imagining her in that situation. He kept his mouth shut.

“Also, I think you’re being full of shit,” Raquel went on. “And, frankly, you’re acting like a huge narcissist when you make everything about yourself, just to add to your own guilt, or when you absolve me of any wrongdoings during the heist or afterwards. My mistakes were mine to make, and I made quite a lot of them on my own, thank you very much. When you say that the things that happened between us were just your fault, you make me feel insignificant. You paint me as someone passive, incapable of making their own choices, and not someone who actively participated in everything that lead us to this moment, and that’s straight up insulting.”

He never meant to disregard her. He respected her to the point he’d been willing to risk—he’d been willing to forfeit—his dream life with her, so she could make an informed choice about their future, and told her something he’d known would change her perception of him. He hadn’t wanted his desire to be with her to take supremacy over her autonomy. And it pained him that she saw him taking accountability for his wrongdoings and his unwillingness to put the blame on her for all the problems they might’ve both caused, yes, but only because he had created the circumstances which had led them to doing something the two of them alike regretted, as him offending her.

It’s not that he didn’t see her as someone with agency; he just understood that Raquel’s options had been limited, and he had been the one responsible for it.

Though none of that made him not want to profoundly apologise to her for making her feel powerless and adding insult to injury when she was already annoyed. He crossed a line.

Before he could open his mouth, Raquel continued her speech:

“But I think you’re aware of that, deep down. Because you purposely dredge up the worst things from our relationship—no, no just relationship, our lives!—and do everything you can to hurt my feelings, so that you could push me away. You aren’t interested in hearing my reasonings, you’ve already made up your mind that us getting back together isn’t happening.”

Sergio still couldn’t meet her eye. He hated that she could read him like this, that she could see through his masks.

“So, tell me: what is it that you planned for yourself and simply can’t wait to do, that me appearing in your hotel room and asking to get back together ruined it?”

He swallowed with difficulty.

“I’m sorry, Raquel, but I can’t tell you that.” The last thing she should know was what he had planned for himself. He couldn’t burden her with it.

“No, I’m not letting you avoid answering this question. If you want for me to drop this topic and let you walk away from me, the least you can do is give me an explanation.”

“I can’t do that; not if I want you to retain at least a little bit of objectivity in this exceedingly difficult situation. If I told you the truth, you would act on impulse, instead of approaching it rationally. Which is why I’ll ask you to stop pressing. Please, just… drop it.”

Raquel just snorted in response.

“You know, for someone who’s trying to convince me that getting back together is a mistake, by refusing to do so, you’re making a different, way worse one yourself. Because I see the look in your eye, and I know for certain that you’re not holding up well. You’re punishing yourself for every sin you’ve committed, treating us like a mistake—”

“No, Raquel. I could never consider us a mistake, I could never consider you appearing in my life as a mistake.”

“Then why don’t you want us to give it another chance? What other life did you plan for yourself that you don’t want to go back to the one you shared with me? And if you’ve ever truly loved me, you will tell me the truth.”

“There is no other life,” he snapped. “There is no life without you, Raquel. This is the truth.”

He was hopelessly, irrevocably, achingly in love with her. It was the kind of affection there was no coming back from, one that changes your life so drastically that you can’t even begin to imagine going on without that person. The perspective of not seeing Raquel’s face again, of not hearing her voice again felt like a dagger running his heart through, but this was the price he had to pay for his mistakes.

Silence befell them, neither of them sure what to say next.

“You want to give yourself up,” Raquel eventually whispered. She took a step back, shaking her head in realisation.

He considered lying to her again. He would say that she was wrong about it or maybe would even reveal a part of the truth and explain that he had considered it, planned it in detail to take his mind of longing after her, however still wasn’t sure if he would go through with it once he stood at the dock where everything was to begin, but he knew she wouldn’t buy it. Not when she figured it out herself.

“You weren’t supposed to find out,” he explained.

“Fuck, Sergio!” She started pacing around the room. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Or you know what? Don’t answer that, I can see you’ve clearly lost it.”

Sergio didn’t have an answer to that.

“What the fuck were you thinking?!” She went on, stopping in front of him.

She stood way too close now. He could inhale her scent, the fruity perfume she’d bought for herself at the market the first time they’d gone shopping together, and a tinge of her own smell he could identify even in the densest crowd. It was intoxicating.

“Tell me, were you really so stupid that you thought they wouldn’t torture you for information? To get out of you where your gang is, where I am, with my mother and daughter?”

“I would’ve never told them where you and your family are.”

“Like hell you wouldn’t. There are hundreds of ways to torture a person, and believe me, the physical aspect is actually the easier one to endure, compared to all the mental pain they can put you through.”

For a second, there was a haunted look on Raquel’s face.

“What if they tricked you into believing they were onto me? Or lied to you and said that I sent my mother and Paula somewhere safe, and they knew both of these locations, and you had to choose who to save? What then, Sergio?”

He lowered his gaze.

“Do you really have your head so deep up your ass that you thought that even with your elaborate plans to cover your tracks they wouldn’t get closer to the rest of us? Why the hell would you endanger everything the two of us had built together, or the freedom of the members of your gang? Why would give up on the life one third of your crew had died for? Especially after everything you’d done to ensure your success?”

“You know why, Raquel.”

He didn’t want her to pity him, to know how he considered himself undeserving of keeping the life he’d only got to have because of the atrocities he’d committed.

“Is this about your guilt? Your shame over attempting to kill my mother?”

Sergio nodded his head.

“God, Sergio… You have to stop berating yourself for things you’d done believing you had no other choice. I know you would’ve never hurt my mother, and while you almost killing her is not something anyone could excuse, I’m not going to act as if I don’t understand why you’d considered it. We all go to the extremes to protect those we care about, even if it’s deplorable or morally wrong. The most important thing is that I know what kind of man you really are.” She placed her palm on his cheek, and he fought the urge to take in the intimacy of her touch. “You aren’t some kind of monster who deserves to atone for his mistakes behind bars for the rest of his life.”

Except that he was.

He might not have fully been in his right mind when he’d orchestrated his own arrest and even now might not particularly long to spend the rest of his life in prison—aside from this one night when he’d decided it was something he should do in penance, he knew planning to give himself up was reckless, irresponsible and, simply, objectively stupid on its own; he’d just thrown himself in the work in order to distract himself—but he still could recognise that he was one of the biggest criminals in the world, which meant that “behind bars” was exactly the place he belonged.

But he would lie if he said that what Raquel just told him didn’t lessen his guilt a little bit.

“I can see you turning my words in your head.” She took her hand off his face. “I can’t say if you’re even remotely close to accepting them, but knowing you’re hesitating is what matters to me the most right now. So, if your mind isn’t set—and I don’t think it is, because you’re still here, debating me, when we both know you could just walk away at any moment—then I urge you to reconsider your decision. Please, tell me there’s still room for negotiation.”

There’s always a room for negotiation with you, Raquel.

He didn’t realise he said it out loud until he finished the sentence.

“Good,” she exhaled in relief. “And now, if you’re somewhat willing to listen to what I’m saying to you, I’m going to use the opportunity and make some things clear. And you will not interrupt me, understood?” She didn’t even wait for his response. “My choice to forgive you was based on hours of weighting whether your goodness and positive impact on my life and me accepting all of you were enough for me to let that go. I found your letters in the drawer in your office and studied them as if it was evidence in one of my cases…”

Sergio wasn’t surprised Raquel found his letters. He knew that sooner rather than later she would be getting rid of his things, and he guessed that this unsent correspondence fell into her hands as she was cleaning up his study.

He was surprised, however, that she’d read them, instead of burning them immediately.

“…I drew up a timeline of the events from the Mint heist, I analysed everything with utmost diligence, and in all honesty, even after all that, I still wasn’t convinced we could go back from everything that had gone down between us. I was actually so close to not being able to put the hurt you caused me behind. It was my mother who put some sense into me and made me see—”

“You told Marivi about this?”

Raquel nodded.

“She dragged the truth out of me after seeing me utterly miserable for days. And you and I both know she has a talent for getting things out of you.”

He remembered it all too well.

“She said she doesn’t hold it against you, so if my forgiveness wasn’t enough to convince you that you shouldn’t feel like you have to punish yourself in order to earn the right to continue living, maybe hers is.”

Sergio closed his eyes and forced his tears back. His chin quivered, as he took a long, deep breath.

He struggled to grasp the situation unravelling in front of him. He wanted to accept Raquel’s exoneration—he’d wanted it ever since she’d first said it—and simply drop everything, all his plans or reservations ignored, and just act on his deepest desires, take her in his arms and kiss her, kiss her so desperately, so hungrily, because he was starving, but he held back. Making decisions on an empty stomach was always a bad decision. And what he truly longed for was of no consequence.

He opened his eyes and stared into hers. She glanced at him with earnestness, with warmth—God, how much he missed seeing affection in the way she looked at him—and it made his heart miss a beat.

Despite everything, it seemed like she really wanted the same thing he did. He couldn’t understand why, couldn’t understand how she’d been able to say without feeling disgust that he was a good person, when he had so much blood on his hands and so many unforgivable deeds on his conscience.

“I know it’s hard to believe that we could have a future after all this,” Raquel continued. “Hell, even I still have doubts that our past won’t ruin it. But I still want to give us another chance. I want you, Sergio. I’d decided I wanted a life with you before I even moved here, before I got to know you without the pretences or anything else holding either of us back, because I realised I already knew who you were at your core. I still do. And yes, that life with you I wanted then, and continue to want now, includes our messy history.” She took a deep breath. “I know that to anyone who isn’t me my resolution to come here today may look irrational, foolish or even incomprehensible, however I’m one hundred percent certain that I’m not only making a decision that is true to my heart, but also supported by a long list of evidence proving that we should get back together. You didn’t force me to choose you or to go after you, so if you’re worried that there is some kind of coercion on your end, let me assure you again that I’m doing this on my own accord. And the letters I found in your bag only reassured me in my decision.”

He listened to her in complete awe. It was absolutely marvellous how strong, how brave, she was, fighting for their relationship when he had given up on his hope that they could ever get back together. It was a long time since he’d realised she was better than what he deserved—the universe proved that to him time and time again—and now was no different. He doubted he would ever be able to repay her for the way she’d saved him, for the way she loved him in spite of all his sins and flaws.

It was hard to breathe around her. The longer he held her eye contact the less he could think straight and after a few moments all he was imagining was him on his knees worshipping her and thanking her for coming here today.

He hadn’t thought he would be able to have this beautiful life with Raquel back—this life that felt like the first sunrays after being stuck inside some dark void—and so he hadn’t dared dream about it in the past days. But now, suddenly, it was within his reach. It was so temping to extend his hand and grasp it.

“I want us to try again,” Raquel concluded, and it was the first time since he’d seen her standing in his hotel room and thought she was just a segment of his imagination, he believed that what he heard was true—not just really happening, but also actually having a raison d’être.

He closed the remaining distance between them and pressed his lips to hers—one hand caressing her shoulders, the other her lower back—with urgency and desperation that could be only compared to the way he’d kissed her in response back in his hangar.

She reacted with ardour that matched his own. She slid a tongue into his mouth, crashed into him harder, as if she couldn’t get enough, and soon her body was pressed into his, her one hand in his hair, the other on his neck, causing a chill to come down his spine.

It felt like a thousand fireworks being lit up into the night sky, like a supernova exploding into the galaxy as vast as his love for her, and the euphoria that rushed through his veins surely seemed as extraterrestrially as it. He heard the chimes buzz in his ear, and the world around them quieten—it was as if they were the only people in the entire universe.

God, how he missed her.

“1:0, Professor,” she mumbled into his mouth in between kisses.

“What?”

“Nothing, just that I once again proved that I’m a better negotiator than you,” she pecked first his lips, then his nose and then the corner of his mouth, smiling.

Sergio cracked a shy smile, still struggling to believe that this was his reality again. He just kissed her one more time.

“I love you, Raquel,” he confessed, caressing her chin tenderly, his forehead pressed to hers. “I love you more than I could ever describe. And I’m so sorry for every hurt I caused you…”

“I know,” she interrupted him. “For what it’s worth, I’m also sorry. For yelling at you and throwing you out like that without giving you the chance to explain the entire story. I don’t remember if I called you names in anger, but if I did, I also want to apologise.”

“Out of all the words you said that were meant to hurt me, it was the absence of your voice that broke my heart the most. Whatever you told me then… You had every right to shout at me and break up with me. You were doing what you thought was best for your family.”

“And now I realise you’re a part of my family too. I love you.”

She lifted herself on her toes and pressed her lips against his. Without much thought, he deepened the kiss, and before they knew it, they were both undressing each other and leading the other into the bed, desperate to give in to each other wholly.

They both were perfectly aware they should probably finish talking everything through first, but neither of them could stop, too lost in pleasure of finally being able to properly reunite their bodies just like they did their souls. But it’s not like they had to—they had a lifetime to properly work things out, after all.

— the end