Then she returned to the grotto, where the children slept peacefully, unaware. That morning, she made a decision: if they were to survive here, she had to know what lived below. She had to know if the curse was real or just words meant to scare thieves. And she had to know before Jacinto returned. If they came back and discovered the cellar, the coins, Catalina knew they wouldn’t leave her with anything. They would throw her out—or worse, accuse her of theft and imprison her—leaving her children alone, abandoned, starving in a town that had never wanted them.
The next day, Catalina left the children playing near the grotto, shaded under a withered tree, and returned to the abandoned house with a rusty pickaxe she had found and a determination she didn’t know she possessed.
She descended to the cellar, moved the crates, and began hammering at the adobe wall. The brittle wall crumbled with each blow. Soon she had made a gap wide enough to squeeze through. Peering cautiously, torch in hand, she saw the tunnel: narrow, dark, walls of packed earth supported by worm-eaten beams. The floor was littered with loose stones—and something else, gleaming faintly in the torchlight.
She bent down and picked it up. A human bone, small, perhaps from a hand or foot. She dropped it in disgust and continued, crouched, breathing heavily in the stale air. The tunnel turned left, descending further, deeper into the mountain. At the end was a small chamber carved into the living rock. There, in the center, was something Catalina would never forget.
A human figure sat against the wall, head slumped, hands bound with rusty chains still nailed to the stone. The clothes were tattered, caked in dirt. The skin clung to the bones like dry parchment. But the horror was not just the corpse—it was what surrounded it: dozens of wooden crates stacked against the walls, filled with gold and silver coins, ingots, jewels—a fortune buried deep, guarded by someone left to die, chained, forgotten.
