He opened his eyes just a few centimeters, enough to show half his face and start to say something, but he couldn’t manage to utter a single complete word.
The door exploded inwards with a dry crash, and Alex’s figure burst into the house like a force that had already decided not to negotiate.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, with that presence of a man who had seen too many ugly things in life to be scared of one more.
His gaze swept across the kitchen for just a second, and I saw how he registered everything with cold precision, impossible to deceive by familiar discourse.
He saw the stick in Victor’s hand, he saw my body lying on the ground, he saw the blood on my leg and the way he hugged my belly.
The silence that fell afterwards was not empty, but a lethal suspension, as if all the people in the kitchen felt at the same time that something irreversible had just begun.
Alex didn’t shout, didn’t make threats, didn’t ask anything necessary, because men are really dangerous, didn’t waste air when the truth is already in front of them.
He only uttered a brief, icy, and perfectly articulated phrase, asking who it had been, as if that answer could reorganize the universe in the following seconds.
Victor took a step forward with arrogance and began to say that that was his house, that Alex should leave before anything happened.
He didn’t finish the sentence, because Alex hit him with a single punch, clean, direct and devastating, a blow that slammed him against the table like a sack.
The plates broke as they fell, the glass shattered on the floor and Helepa let out a hysterical scream, more of indignation than of real fear.
He yelled at Alex that he was crazy, but nobody in the kitchen had the moral authority to name him crazy after what he had done to me.
Raúl attempted to step in, maybe from habit or mere instinct, still under the illusion that a few of them could manage this crisis the way they manage the casual humiliations of daily life.
Alex pushed him against the wall with astonishing ease, as if the other’s weight meant nothing to the force that night brought.
He told him not to dare touch him, and there was something so severe in his voice that even Raúl, used to intimidating, chose to back down.
