In a world where everyone tried to escape the cold…
no one seemed willing to help a little girl freezing in it.
Then she remembered her mother’s whisper one night:
“If you’re ever scared and I’m not there, go to the big house on the hill.
The man living there always helps the people from our neighborhood.”
His name was almost a myth:
Alejandro Duarte.
Wealthy. Widowed. Owner of several companies.
A man known by some as “the boss,” and by others as the stranger who once paid for every family’s heating one brutal winter without ever asking for thanks.
For Lucía, he was something simpler:
He was her last hope.
So she climbed.
The wind shoved her backward. Snow slipped into her socks. Her hands stopped responding inside her soaked gloves. But she kept going—because a child doesn’t understand shifts or burnout or corporate failures.
She only knew her mother was missing.
When she finally saw the house—huge, warm, glowing through golden windows—it felt unreal. Like a place that didn’t belong to the same world as her fear.
She reached the iron gate on trembling legs, noticed the small security camera, and stretched on her tiptoes with a tiny hand raised toward it.
—“Please…” she whispered, her voice nearly swallowed by the storm.
A violent gust knocked her to her knees.
The cold wrapped around her like a slow, dangerous lullaby.
Her vision blurred.
Her body failed.
She curled into herself, chasing the last bit of warmth she had left.
And then…
Click.
The gate opened.
Lucía didn’t know it yet, but that sound would change everything.
A man rushed down the steps—tall, expensive coat, hair messed from hurrying, eyes filled with worry and something deeper. He knelt in the snow without hesitation.
—“God… sweetheart, are you okay?”
She tried to answer, but the words froze on her lips.
With the last of her strength, she whispered:
—“Sir… my mom didn’t come home…”
And she fainted.
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