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"Did he say anything about...?" Rachel couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't voice the hope and fear that wrestled within her.
"Enough," Aunt Sarah cut her off, rising to her feet again. "I'll show you." She retreated to a bookcase, empty of any books. Aunt Sarah returned from the shadows, an old camcorder clasped in her hands like a relic of a bygone era.
"Watch," was all she said, her voice a gravelly command that brooked no argument.
The static hiss of the footage crackled through the room as Aunt Sarah pressed play. The grainy image fluttered onto the screen — a man bound to a chair, fear etched into his features. Rachel leaned forward, her breath caught in a net of anticipation.
"Your mother," Aunt Sarah began, the words carving into the space between them.
Rachel's eyes flicked from the screen to her aunt, then back again. The man's voice trembled through the speakers, broken Spanish spilling confessions, truths Rachel had never dared to imagine.
"El cerebro... La matriarca..." His words twisted in the air. The man on the screen nodded, sweat glistening on his brow under the harsh light of interrogation.
"Si, la matriarca del golpe." The mastermind behind the heist.
"He's lying," Rachel said.
"He isn't," Sarah replied. "He knew things about her. I questioned him... thoroughly."
The room tilted, reality skewing as the words sank their claws deep into Rachel's psyche. She watched, heart thundering, as the man recounted tales of meticulous planning, of a native woman orchestrating the heist.
"Impossible," Rachel breathed, her voice a wraith in the charged atmosphere.
But the footage rolled on, relentless, the man's hoarse voice weaving a narrative that ensnared her mother in a web of damning evidence. Each syllable a stitch in the fabric of betrayal that now cloaked Rachel's understanding of her past.
"Mom was..." The sentence hung unfinished, torn from her lips by a surge of emotions too potent to name.
"More than we knew," Aunt Sarah supplied, her tone devoid of surprise.
"More than anyone knew," Rachel corrected, a bitter taste of truth on her tongue.
She stared at the flickering screen, the image of the cartel man blurring as her eyes stung with the beginning of tears. In this grainy tableau, her mother emerged anew — not just the woman who had tucked her in at night, but a mastermind cloaked in suburban banality.
"Rachel," Aunt Sarah's hand found her shoulder, a grounding presence amid the storm brewing within.
"Mom..." Rachel tried again, the word a foreign thing, unfamiliar and treacherous.
"Was brilliant. Deadly," Aunt Sarah finished for her.
"Deadly," Rachel echoed, the word slicing open a chasm in her heart — for the mother she thought she'd known, and the stranger who now took her place.
The cabin's walls seemed to close in around Rachel, the once comforting scent of pine now sharp as needles in her nostrils. Aunt Sarah's face was etched with the hard lines of truth as she turned away from the static-filled screen.
"There's more he told me. When the camera wasn't running."
"What?" Rachel said.
"Someone targeted her."
"Who?"
"Someone on the reservation..." Her aunt's voice trailed into the silence, a hook cast into murky waters.
Rachel's pulse quickened, waiting for the pull of revelation.
"Caught wind of your mother's... ambitions." Aunt Sarah's eyes were steady, her words deliberate, like stones laid across a river. "They didn't take kindly to it."
"Retribution?" The word tasted like ash in Rachel's mouth.
