For twelve years, Mateo had lived in darkness. No one suspected the horrifying secret hiding inside his eyes.
Ricardo, his father and a technology tycoon, had tried everything: elite specialists in Switzerland, cutting-edge experimental treatments, even jungle shamans. Nothing worked.
His son—the heir to an empire—was blind. The diagnosis always read the same: unexplained, incurable blindness. Eventually, Ricardo had resigned himself to watching Mateo stumble through life, surrounded by wealth he could never truly enjoy.
Then, one afternoon, while Mateo played piano in the garden, a little girl appeared on the property.
Her clothes were ragged, her eyes impossibly large and watchful. Sofía—a streetwise girl who begged for coins at the city’s corners—stood quietly, observing. The security guards moved to chase her off, but Mateo raised a hand, and they froze. There was something… different about her. Something that pierced the silence of his dark world.
She didn’t ask for money. She stepped closer and said, with the blunt honesty only a street child could possess:
“Your eyes aren’t damaged. There’s something inside them stopping you from seeing.”
Ricardo’s face hardened. A poor little girl claiming to know more than Harvard-trained neurosurgeons? Ridiculous.
Yet Mateo reached for her hand, guiding it gently to his face. Her small, grimy fingers rested against his cheeks. Calmly, almost ritualistically, she slid her fingernail beneath his eyelid.
“Get your hands off him, now!” Ricardo barked.
But Sofía was faster.
In a single, swift motion, she pulled something from Mateo’s eye.
It wasn’t a tear.
It wasn’t dust.
It was alive—dark, glossy, and writhing in her palm.
Ricardo went pale.