Chapter Text
Madrid, six months after the heist
For the first time since she first walked into a Madrid police precinct over twenty years ago, it was Raquel Murillo’s first day at work.
Her career in the police force and a lifetime of beliefs evaporated in the same moments the Professor and his gang vanished from the grid. After the heist, Raquel was unable to stomach her role in the system with indifference to the cutthroat, patriarchal environment, or to the injustice at its roots. The opportunity to resign quietly fell into her lap like a gift wrapped neatly with a bow, allowing her a way out without so much as a word uttered to the presses, who were famished for any comment from the tight-lipped Inspectora.
The quiet resignation salvaged her reputation enough to land her a position elsewhere in the criminal justice system. In a small office tucked away in the corner of the bureaucratic wing of the Alcalá-Meco prison, Raquel sat behind a barren desk that felt much too large for her. Far from the bustling police precincts where quiet could only ever be hoped for in rare bathroom breaks, the silence of her private office was deafening. Almost unsettling.
Raquel brushed that assessment off as nerves and focused on brightening up her surroundings. She assembled the few personal belongings she’d thought to bring along for her first day: a photo of herself, Marivi, and Paula, taken on one of her mother’s more lucid days; a drawing of Paula as a princess her daughter made last week at school; an array of pencils and pens that would inevitably fasten her bun eventually. This would have to do for now.
Next to the pens sat a folder for her first case for the day, a fifty-year-old woman arrested on drug charges set to be released in a few weeks. The woman had no family save a twenty-year-old daughter who had been removed from her custody as a child, no job to return to and felony charges that could make locating a new one difficult. And it was her task to ease the woman’s reintegration into society.
At first she disliked her new position being related to the criminal justice system at all, but that was exactly why Raquel made the transition from the other side of the law to this. Maybe instead of dehumanizing criminals from the moment they were arrested - not that Raquel had ever done so anyway, or so she liked to think - they just needed a gentle push of encouragement. Someone to have faith in them. And while she wasn't naive enough to think that kind words would solve all ills, it was a start. Nor would all criminals leave model lives once leaving prison, but her mind kept circling back to a certain criminal who she'd catalogued as a psychopath, who was a far cry from the label assigned to him based on the image the Professor persona conveyed. (The familiar twinge of pain shot through her heart, as it often did whenever her mind invariably returned to him.)
Sergio was right to point out the flaws in the criminal justice system. The line between the good guys and the bad guys never was easily decipherable, but maybe she could spin the pain of that week of memories around and make that line a little clearer. One ounce of good within the system wouldn't erase all the evils, but she could try.
The woman drew in a breath. As she flipped open the file, a sharp knock on the door announced the arrival of her first case. Raquel lifted a pen to fasten her hair into its trademark bun, reaching for another to take notes and straightening up in her seat. “Come in!” Here we go.
---
One year after the heist
Sometimes, it was difficult to imagine that more than a week passed since the heist on the Royal Mint of Spain unraveled her career and a lifetime of beliefs - especially when she could still sometimes feel the ghost of the lips of the man in charge on her own as they kissed fervently inside the dingy hangar that served as a control center for the heist operations.
Perhaps for lack of anything else to sensationalize in the moment, the international news media seized the opportunity to unearth memories of the heist as the first anniversary of the assault came around. Raquel’s throat felt dry as she saw her own image on a newscast despite the spoonfuls of ice cream that slid down.
It almost felt childish to sit on her bed with a pint of chocolate ice cream while regretting the end of a relationship that had barely gone anywhere. Raquel had started going to therapy in the past few months, which had helped her get past some of the darker demons from that period of time. So had it helped her mend from the trauma of her abusive marriage that a series of nightmares about the heist reawakened. Recovery was a slow, grueling process, but it was one that helped her regain control of her life, along with the routine of a new job doing work more rewarding than she’d imagined.
Still, no amount of advice or coping mechanisms could make her fall out of love. That was a difficult conclusion she reached when the satisfaction of rebuilding her life gave way to the emotions simmering underneath, ones that held less power over her now but nonetheless served as a nagging reminder of her ability always to fall for the wrong person.
That was what felt the most childish of it all - that her heart was unrelenting in its affection for a man she knew for five days amongst forty years, despite knowing his true identity for less than a day.
At first, Raquel argued she felt nothing but rage toward Sergio Marquina. Unswayed by the reddened face and impassioned tangents the thought of him sent her down, her therapist called her out on the spot, cautioning her against rejecting her true feelings. Pushing off the emotions was a futile cause that only shoved them deeper rather than made them disappear. Sure enough, they resurfaced again and again, like one of Paula’s toys that refused to remain under water in the bathtub for long. Raquel loved him, and a year apart wasn’t enough to dismantle those feelings, even after he’d disappeared without a trace and without a way of seeing him again.
The only souvenir left from the heist was a stack of postcards tucked away on a bookshelf in the corner of her living room, but the reminder of them had been too difficult to stomach. One of the more irritating bits of advice from her therapist echoed in her mind: the longer she avoided her feelings, the more the resentment surrounding them would grow.
Hesitantly, she rose from her bed before the grips of fear glued her in place. Before she reached the bookshelf, the sweet melody of Paula’s voice filtered in from the kitchen table.
“Mama! Look what Abuela and I drew for you!”
Raquel smiled, and her course diverted toward the kitchen. All thoughts of the task at hand vanished the moment her mother and daughter’s shining faces greeted her own. Pulled into a swath of coloring pages and half-finished drawings of unicorns and puppies and, finally, the three of them, she couldn’t imagine spending the rest of her afternoon anywhere but swimming in a sea of crayons with her two favorite people in the world. They were the only bandage that she needed to heal.
The postcards Sergio gave her in the cafe during the last few moments they shared of blissful ignorance, when running away to an island in the Caribbean was a possibility and not just a foolish fantasy, were left on the bookshelf to collect more layers of dust.
---
One and a half years after the heist
Raquel had a date.
A year and a half earlier, she would have laughed in her face if you told her that her first Friday night off in weeks would be spent at a mediocre Italian restaurant in the centre of Madrid with a man she suspected was just as mediocre. A year and a half earlier she also would have laughed in your face if you told her she’d end up falling in love with the most wanted man in Spain who led the same heist she was negotiating - and, well, look how that turned out.
She owed Santiago some credit. A widower and father of two girls, one of whom was in the same class as Paula at school, he had a certain charm that made Paula take a liking to him enough to tell him upfront that her mother would make a good replacement for his wife. And he’d been so polite when, four months after she rejected him the first time he’d asked following Paula’s not-so-sly attempt to set them up, she finally decided to take the leap. It wasn’t her idea - her therapist suggested she make new connections after session after session of spiraling down the same paths, many involving the same man her conscience refused to let go of - but maybe it would do her some good. The overwhelming feeling of nausea at the thought of connecting with anyone on that level had disappeared for the first time in several months, at least.
‘Some credit’, however, ended up being her only justification for the date. Like the pasta on their plates within moments of it appearing on the table, the conversation was tepid, managing to focus on their children rather than revealing any details that would get the other to know them better. And that was fine.
If anything, it confirmed a thought Raquel circled back to on more than one occasion during her therapy sessions: that a man she knew for five days during the case that destroyed a career of twenty years somehow became a benchmark for all of her other connections, and sometimes it felt that would never change. From the moment Santiago appeared in her front doorway, the comparisons to Salva - Sergio - had begun. How his suit didn’t fit him quite as well, how his square glasses felt just slightly off , how he seemed just as kind as the Salva persona but how he didn’t have that same quick wit that challenged and intrigued her.
The date ended with a chaste kiss to her cheek and a half-hearted promise to go for dinner again that both of them knew would remain unfulfilled. Raquel stepped through the doorway eager to let the vestiges of sleep claim her, but decided to duck into Paula’s room to check on her first. In the dim light from the hallway that shone into her daughter’s bedroom, she only saw the light illuminate her daughter’s sleeping figure at first. The sight never failed to bring a smile to her lips.
Raquel planted a soft kiss on Paula’s forehead and drew back. Turning away to leave the room, she stopped dead in her tracks instead. A red origami paper crane sat amongst her daughter’s school materials that she didn’t remember seeing before her date. She blinked as if the crane were a figment of her imagination that would disappear after a moment, but it materialized once more as her eyes opened. A tentative hand reached out toward it, still unsure if it were tangible. Her breath hitched as her fingers met paper, and a feeling of dread washed over her.
Certainly, there was no way this crane was connected to Sergio - it was probably just a craft from Paula’s class that day - but it was another damn sign in the universe pulling her toward the ghost of an impossible memory.
It was on nights like that, when every sign in the universe drew her attention back to him, that she found herself wishing futilely for any sign that would point her toward Sergio now. He’d left scars on the hostages, the Spanish police and intelligence, herself - but that seemed to be all that he left behind. Not a single indication or hint how to contact him despite having billions of euros to orchestrate something, anything. To think that this crane could be linked to him was nothing more than a childish fantasy. She owed herself more.
This sort of train of thoughts was dangerous, too. Pining over a man she barely knew in the grand scheme of things, whose attraction to her had only ever harmed them both was unhealthy. (Accepting her feelings and pining were two different things, she maintained; the latter was toxic.)
He claimed to love her - and maybe he did - but Sergio had been impeccably clear when he said he was screwed even if she didn’t turn him in because they could never see each other again. Continuing whatever they had during that week was out of the question, and Raquel needed to drill that into her head.
In her most desperate moments, Raquel entertained thoughts of purchasing one-way plane tickets to any of the islands they talked about escaping to and searching under every rock for him. Only that was just the sort of ridiculous romanticization of their affair that had to stop. The way that a wave of nausea overtook her as she slinked into bed without bothering to unzip her dress, the way that every aspect of her date reminded her of him and that damned crane only seemed to taunt her - all of it did no good for her, and at some point, it had to stop.
Raquel owed it to herself - and to the ideal of Sergio she’d cultivated in her mind who was probably nothing like the real man - to move on.
---
Two years after the heist
As it turned out, moving on was easier said than done.
But, slowly, Raquel was managing.
There wasn’t a second date with Santiago, but she didn’t mind. Realizing her attraction to him was only surface level was a step in the right direction, even if the destination was still unknown. Moving on , for now, meant accepting the current impossibility of getting rid of her feelings and accepting them as they were. It meant letting herself heal from the pain instead of dwelling on how his (expected) silence hurt her.
The second anniversary of the start of the heist passed with much less fanfare than the first. The media still milked it for what it was worth - naturally - and she couldn’t turn on the television that day without hearing one analyst or another speculate about where the assailants were now. Wouldn’t that be nice to know, Raquel thought to herself as she stirred the batter for Paula’s favorite breakfast, glancing at the television in the living room from her place in the kitchen.
“Mr. Roman, you’ve spoken at length about your experience with the gang, which now may include your ex-secretary, Monica Gaztambide, who disappeared with the rest of them. I take it you haven’t been in contact with her in the past two years?”
“No. No, not at all.” Raquel stirred the batter with a little more force as the familiar voice grated in her ears when his face flashed across the television. She’d never forgotten the look on his wife’s face when he accidentally referred to her as his lover before the surgery to remove the bullet to his chest. It almost made her glad he was the hostage they’d shot. Almost . The memoir and ridiculous speaking engagements that followed weren’t worth it. “You know, I guess running off with a band of terrorists makes you too busy to write, doesn’t it?”
The other correspondents did not find the joke as funny as Roman seemed to.
“So you have no idea in the world where they could have gone? Where Monica may have wanted to go?”
“I mean, you can go anywhere in the world if you seize the mint and print yourself up a billion euros. Hopefully they didn’t end up in some backward third world country like Indonesia where there probably wasn’t even a hospital to birth our son in, am I right?”
“Seriously?!” Raquel’s shock drowned out the grinding laughter emerging from the television. A thick silence onscreen stilled the house save for her furious steps toward the living room in search of the remote with the batter bowl still cradled against her hip. The last image on the screen before it went black was the other analysts’ faces, which were equally as horrified as her own.
Unlike Roman, she had zero desire in profiting from the celebrity that came with involvement in the heist. Hell, Raquel had received a number of invitations to participate in similar panels herself, but each one remained unopened in her email inbox. In fact, she despised the holes into which speculation dragged half the Spanish population for the second year in a row; Raquel had spent enough time lamenting over the radio silence from the gang, and she certainly didn’t want to spend her Sunday morning reopening the wounds that felt like they’d only just healed.
“You’re making pancakes!”
Somewhere on her journey from the kitchen to the living room, a still sleepy Paula had emerged from her bedroom. The realization of the bowl against her mother’s hip was the burst of energy the girl needed to wake up, and the bright grin stretching across her face was infectious. Raquel grinned back at her daughter and crossed the short space between them to plant a kiss on her forehead. “I am! Do you want to help me?”
Paula nodded. “Can we add chocolate chips?”
“Of course. Come on.” Linking the girl’s hand in her own, they entered the kitchen to add a mountain - if Paula got her way - of chocolate chips into the pancake batter.
Two years ago, the man she loved disappeared and had never reached her again. But preparing breakfast with the most important person in her life, sliding around the floor in the slippers they wore and giggling loudly as they did, made her forget all about the man at the focus of all of the discussions on television today. Heart full and eyes shining with affection for her daughter, Raquel felt lighter than she had in years.
---
Two and a half years after the heist,
Six weeks before Hora Cero
There was something odd about the message Angel sent Raquel that she couldn’t place. Nothing about the message itself was immediately strange: Hey, Raquel. It’s been a while. Can we talk? Yet the way he posed the final question set off alarms in her head that something was off, and her investigative instincts kicked in even as she typed an agreement to meet for dinner that night.
(Raquel was filled with a brief dread that he thought this would be a date, as it was their first official reconnection since Mari Carmen left him. She only hoped her years of fending off his advances had been clear, else they might need to invent a clearer material than crystal, or at the very least upgrade his glasses prescription.)
“Why are we here, Angel?” Raquel’s first question came out as more of an accusation thrown at her friend with a pointed look as she found the booth her friend already occupied in the Hanoi cafe near the mint. The cafe was casual enough to avoid a romantic atmosphere that suggested a date, yet it was also the location of her first date in years. With Sergio, no less. Entering the cafe had been like thrusting her head into an icy pool of water, jolting awake all of the memories of the moments spent in here that had remained dormant. Whether the location choice was by design or another casualty of Angel’s tendency to ignore reality when it came to her, she wasn’t sure.
His brow furrowed, and he seemed confused. So the latter. “I thought you’d like somewhere familiar. Easy.”
The memories associated with Hanoi weren’t easy , especially as they sat at the exact same booth as her first date with Sergio by unfortunate coincidence. And the cafe sure as hell wasn’t familiar, at least not anymore. Raquel had no reason to visit Hanoi in the past few years, and the memories unearthed after a few moments of entering reminded her why she hadn’t gone out of her way to do so.
She owed him the effort of response, because behind his blunder of a restaurant choice was a thoughtful gesture she was confident he made in the best of intentions. Raquel struggled what to say for a moment, mouth hanging open while no words emerged.
Angel picked up on her look of disbelief, or perhaps he was just tired of the silence. “How-- how are you, Raquel?”
You couldn’t have asked six months ago? A year ago? she wanted to say, but instead Raquel gave a weak smile as she exhaled. “Good. And yourself?”
The plan was dinner, but Raquel suddenly didn’t feel hungry when the waiter approached for their orders. She asked for a cider first, frowned, then changed to a whiskey.
“I’ve been better.” Angel laughed, and silence quickly descended between the distant pair of friends again. Raquel was half tempted to make an escape and break open the bottle of red wine in her fridge instead. For better or worse, Angel didn’t let the silence last long. “Been a while since you’ve been here, right? I don’t find much reason to come to this corner of Madrid these days.”
“Almost three years.”
For a moment, she could see the gears turning in his head as he struggled to do the math. Then, with eyes slightly wide as it dawned on him, “Oh.”
He realized she hadn’t been here since the heist, then. Good. The waiter returning with their drinks was a savior slicing through the uncomfortable air between them; she’d never been so grateful for a whiskey, even as it wasn’t her usual drink.
“There are places closer to my house, and too many memories here.” Raquel finally conceded, admitting only enough to prevent silence from enveloping them again.
“I understand.” Angel nodded. He paused, but the way his lips hovered open suggested he still had more to say. “And… have you heard anything since then? From him?”
Raquel frowned, crossing her arms to her chest as she stared him down with an apprehensive gaze. Whether this was bait to confirm her suspicions something had prompted his sudden invitation to dinner or an attempt to fill in the blanks of a friend’s life, she wasn’t sure. “Are you asking as a sub-inspector or as my friend, then?” Raquel was inclined to believe the former.
“Raquel--”
“Because as my friend, you should have been concerned about this two and a half years ago when I was at my lowest.” Instead, she’d left her career at the police, and they grew apart.
Angel let out a sharp breath and refused to meet her gaze. “I know. I’m sorry, Raquel, I really am. I didn’t realize you loved him that much.”
“Neither did I.” She laughed dryly. “But the feeling isn’t mutual.”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t heard from him.” She shrugged. “I know just as much as you do about where he is now.” It was the first time that she’d approached any of this outside of therapy - let alone mentioned Sergio. What should have felt freeing to mention instead weighed down on her chest, heartbeat picking up under the influence of that strange cocktail of anger and affection, as it often did whenever she thought about him for too long.
Something stirred in Angel’s eyes, and he shifted in his seat almost imperceptibly. To a former inspector’s keen eye that was on edge and alert for the slightest hair out of place, it was impossible to miss.
“I’m sorry, Raquel.” Again with the apologies that she didn’t want. Raquel brushed it off with a casual wave of her hand, downing the rest of the contents of her glass.
“Sorry enough to drop this and talk about something else?” Even unbearable silence was better than digging up the past she wanted to forget. Raquel smiled wearily to lighten the air. She had hoped that part of the evening would involve rekindling a friendship that had at one point been dear to her, and maybe it wasn’t too late for that.
“Of course.” His eyes stalled on her again for a moment, as if searching for something in her gaze. Raquel had no idea what he found, if anything, but she added the look to her catalogue of her suspicions surrounding the night.
The rest of the night passed in a blur that almost erased the uncomfortable silences and pointed questions of the first half, and it was easy to forget the growing expanse between them. By the time Raquel shut the door to her car outside her house and climbed the first few steps to her porch, she had managed to compartmentalize and store the memories dredged up inside Hanoi. In the same instant her eyes landed on a delicate origami paper crane in a strikingly familiar shade of red, all of that work unraveled. The woman let out a string of swears she hoped Paula was too far away from the door to hear. Then, she drew in a shaky breath.
First the crane found amid Paula’s school things she’d dismissed as a coincidence a year ago, and now this, on the same night Angel emerged out of nowhere to discuss the man her thoughts were immediately drawn to at the sight of the cranes.
Was Sergio back in Madrid? No, that was impossible. It was too risky, something only a fool would do, and Sergio was no fool.
(Why , then, were both of the cranes made with paper of the same shade of red as the jumpsuits the Dalis wore inside the mint?)
As she bent down to pick up the crane and brushed her thumb carefully across the sharp folds, Raquel was unable to dismiss the facts as pure coincidence. Two cranes and a dinner invitation to pry into a sort-of-ex - and while Raquel could dismiss Angel as jealous on a good day, his questions had felt more like a sub-inspector’s interrogation than a concerned friend’s attempt to reach out. Not to mention the way Angel squirmed in his seat when Raquel tried to turn the interrogation around on him.
The unsolved pieces of a puzzle left her mind reeling, but with another deep breath in, Raquel returned to her strategy of compartmentalizing. It wasn’t worth her energy to stress over an issue that couldn’t be solved tonight, though she knew that was easier said than done given how quickly her mind was racing.
For now, she focused on the present. Raquel entered the house, and she felt a smile creep across her lips that assuaged some of the tension building in her chest. The sight of Paula sound asleep on the couch while the last song of a Disney movie played in the background made her heart swell, shielding against any other worries that threatened to fight to the front of her conscience.
Before disrupting her daughter, Raquel made her way across the room to the bookshelf. Her smile faltered at the sight of the other paper crane, which sat on top of the postcards of all the islands they discussed moving to but never would. Untouched for two years, a thick layer of dust had settled over the top postcard: Palawan, of course, the one Sergio had chosen.
(It’s the first time she allowed another thought to surface, and this time, she didn’t fight it - whether that was where she should have started looking for him.)
Raquel fought the wave of nausea that rolled over her as she placed the paper crane in her hands next to the first. Perhaps the cranes were a subtle attempt by Sergio to contact her. More likely than not, though, it was just her mind looking for any sign to draw her back to an impossible love that she sometimes felt would never fully disappear.
Still, tears pricked at Raquel’s eyes as she swept Paula into her arms, careful not to wake her as she carried her to her bed and gently set her down underneath the covers. The little girl stirred, so Raquel was cautious as she lifted the blanket to cover her shoulders and bent down to place a soft kiss on her cheek.
As Raquel swung the door until it was almost shut, her mother emerged from the bathroom in her night robe. She flashed the older woman a teary smile she knew she would have to explain in the morning. And again. And again.
For now, all she wanted to do was close herself up in her room and sink into bed without thinking of him , or how different her life might be now if their last conversation in that bed were her current reality.
---
30 minutes after Hora Cero
The frantic commentary of the news station the television had been left on was too low to hear while Raquel retrieved a pint of ice cream from the freezer. After a brief debate between chocolate and dulce de leche, she returned to the living room futilely trying to shove her spoon into the still-solid chocolate ice cream. Able to hear the reporters’ clear intrigue and frantic discussions from halfway across the room, she’d rolled her eyes at whatever captured the media attention and resolved to find something better to watch during her afternoon off.
Until she glanced up to see the storm of fifty-euro notes ravaging the centre of Madrid.
Raquel didn’t need to see the Dali masks on the side of the blimps raining paper on the city to know who was responsible. To realize that their leader was back in Europe, if not Spain. To endure the same bewilderment and fury that left her reeling less than three years ago when she’d solved the puzzle, had her heart broken, solved another puzzle, and kissed him senselessly.
And, just like three years ago, she was afforded few moments to process her thoughts. Her cell phone’s ringtone abruptly drowned out the chaos on her television, and Raquel swore as she read the caller ID. Prieto.
“Raquel? We need you at the Banco de España.”