Chapter 9 - THEY WANTED ME TO SNAP
Rosa had insisted we eat at her table instead of going out.
Mateo had refused to serve himself even after I asked twice.
Diego had told me three times to obey his mother.
Rosa had called my upbringing trashy, mocked my dead father, and finally shouted that women in the Vargas family served men.
Then Diego grabbed my wrist.
Then he slapped me.
And somewhere inside that sequence, they expected me to break.
I had.
I felt ashamed.
“I threw hot soup at him.”
“Yes. And we deal with that honestly. But we also preserve what happened before it.”
The problem was proof.
Rosa’s dining room had no visible cameras.
Then Tasha called.
“You need to see something.”
She sent me a link.
Mateo had deleted his livestream from that night.
But one of his gaming followers had clipped thirty-seven seconds because the family argument happened in the background while Mateo’s stream was still running.
The video showed almost nothing useful visually. Mateo’s game filled the screen.
The audio was different.
Rosa: “Serve him. That’s what women do here.”
Me: “He has hands and feet.”
Diego: “Elena, just do it.”
Me: “No.”
Then the scrape of a chair.
My voice: “Let go of my wrist.”
Diego: “I told you—”
A sharp slap.
Silence.
And then Rosa’s laugh.
A small, satisfied laugh.
My stomach twisted.
The clip ended before I grabbed the soup.
Thirty-seven seconds.
Enough to destroy their clean version of the story.
But Tasha was not finished.
“There’s a longer recording,” she said.
“Where?”
“The streamer who clipped this says Mateo’s account automatically archives broadcasts for thirty days.”
“Can we get it?”
“Maybe.”
Then Tasha lowered her voice.
May you like
“But Mateo just posted that his account was hacked.”
And someone was already deleting the archive.
