My knees gave out, and I hit the floor beside the cut-open mattress. The damp, sweet stench of decay poured out in thick waves, but the icy shock running through my veins washed away the nausea entirely.
The woman’s name on the identity document was Elena Morales. The issuance date was only three years old—five years after Alejandro and I had exchanged our vows at the altar.
I pulled out the remaining gray adhesive packages hidden deep within the mattress foam. Inside the second bundle were bank ledgers, offshore account transfer slips, and a second set of keys to an address in Monterrey. But it was the third package that made my heart completely stop.
Inside was a sealed plastic bag containing a small bottle of heavy, metallic-scented oil, a set of keys to a local storage facility, and a second passport under Alejandro’s name, listed as married to Elena. Attached to the passport was a police missing person report from six months ago—bearing Elena’s face, with a handwritten note clipped to the corner: Case closed / Unidentified remains.
My hands shook so violently the documents scattered across the carpet. Alejandro hadn’t just been cheating on me during his frequent business trips to Monterrey and Puebla. He had built an entire second life, married another woman under a legal loophole, and when she threatened to expose his financial fraud and bigamy, she had vanished without a trace.
The damp, bitter smell wasn’t coming from a rotting object inside the mattress. It was the synthetic chemical preservative he used to clean the evidence he was slowly moving into the storage locker—a smell that had seeped into the fabric and stayed there.
Suddenly, the heavy metallic click of the front door echoing downstairs shattered the silence of the house.
Alejandro was back.
To see the confrontation when Alejandro realizes the mattress is open, continue reading below for Part 3.
