Chapter 2
Ricardo’s hand remained frozen above Leo’s arm, the faint purple discoloration standing out sharply against the boy’s pale skin. The silence in the hallway stretched, thick and suffocating, broken only by the hum of the climate control system. Ricardo slowly stood up to his full height, towering over both his son and the woman he had trusted for five years.
“What is upstairs, Elena?” Ricardo asked, his voice dropping into a dangerous, controlled register. “Why does he look at the third floor like it’s a prison?”
Elena scoffed, locking her phone screen with a sharp click and slipping it into her designer handbag. Her red dress seemed to absorb the fading light as she stepped closer, her posture defensive yet carefully measured.
“You’ve been working seventy-hour weeks, Ricardo. You don’t know what it takes to manage a child with an imagination like his. He invents things. He finds dark corners and fills them with monsters because he hates discipline.”
“That’s a bruise on his wrist, Elena. Not an imaginary monster,” Ricardo countered, his eyes narrowing as he stepped between his wife and the trembling boy on the white carpet.
Leo clutched the small wooden toy house tightly to his chest, his knuckles turning white. He didn’t dare look at Elena, keeping his big hazel eyes locked entirely on the buttons of his father’s dark grey suit.
“Ask him why he was up there in the first place,” Elena demanded, pointing a manicured finger toward the curved staircase that wound upward into the darker recesses of the upper level. “Ask him what he was looking for in my private studio.”
Ricardo looked down at his son. Leo shook his head rapidly, tears finally spilling over his long lashes.
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“I wasn’t looking for anything,” Leo whispered, his voice trembling so hard the words barely formed. “I dropped my marble. It rolled through the door. I just wanted my marble back.”
Ricardo knelt back down, pulling the boy gently toward his chest. But as he wrapped his arms around Leo’s small shoulders, his fingers brushed against a thin, rigid strap running vertically down the back of the boy’s white shirt—a medical-grade harness that had definitely not been there when Ricardo left for his office that morning.
