AND WHAT HE SAW STOPPED HIS HEART**
The sound of keys hitting marble echoed through the grand entrance hall like a gunshot.
But no one heard it.
No one… except Alejandro Vega.
He stood frozen in the doorway of his own dining room, unable to breathe, as ice rushed through his veins and fire burned behind his temples at the same time.
What he was seeing made no sense.
It had to be stress.
A hallucination.
Some cruel joke played by fate.
Alejandro had come home three hours earlier than usual—on an ordinary Tuesday—to grab forgotten documents before returning to his glass-and-steel office downtown. He didn’t expect anyone to be home. He didn’t expect warmth. And he definitely didn’t expect this.
At the massive imported mahogany table—unused since the funeral of his wife five years earlier—sat Elena, the twenty-year-old housemaid.
But she wasn’t cleaning.
She was sitting.
And she wasn’t alone.
Four small boys surrounded her.
Four identical boys.
Alejandro blinked, his mind struggling to process the image. The children couldn’t have been more than four years old. They wore blue shirts that felt disturbingly familiar, as if the fabric had been cut straight from his own past. Over them, improvised light aprons protected their chests.
They were perfect copies of one another—messy brown hair, large expressive eyes fixed on the young woman in the center.
“Open wide, my little birds,” Elena whispered softly.
Her voice hit Alejandro in the chest like a punch.
She lifted a large spoon filled with bright yellow rice, steaming and simple—an almost violent contrast against the fine porcelain dishes surrounding it. This wasn’t rich people’s food. It was survival food. Cheap rice dyed with turmeric or coloring.
But the boys looked at it like it was gold.
