Elena's brother was missing three fingers.
She showed me the photograph in the laundry room, her hands shaking so badly she almost dropped it. A young man—maybe nineteen, twenty—with Elena's dark hair and soft eyes, holding up his left hand toward the camera. The stumps where his fingers used to be were fresh, still bandaged, still raw.
"They send one every month," Elena whispered. "Every month I don't deliver what they want."
I stared at the image. At the fear frozen on that young man's face. At the neat, surgical precision of the cuts—not savage, not angry, just businesslike. The work of people who understood exactly how much pain a person could endure before breaking.
"How long?" I asked.
"Two years." Elena's voice cracked. "Since I was sixteen. Since they took Teo and told me what
