What They Forced Me to Do to See My Husband in Prison

Success had been a fast-acting drug with a devastating hangover. With Kuroda’s injection of capital, channeled through the impeccable Octavio Belmonte, Damián’s real estate project took off like a rocket. For eight months, growth was meteoric. The figures in the reports danced green and upward, investors came swarming like flies to honey, and the name of Grupo Rivas echoed through financial circles with an aura of invincibility.

Damián, swollen with ambition and blinded by praise, began making ever more reckless decisions. Octavio, from his silent post as a ghost adviser, watched with a cold smile. He offered no warnings. He only facilitated more connections, more “opportunities” that tightened the rope to the limit.

The collapse was as sudden as it was brutal. A bad stock bet, a hidden debt that came to light, an adverse rating report from an agency. The domino effect was set in motion in a matter of days and confidence evaporated. Grupo Rivas’s shares, which had touched the sky, began a free fall. From stratospheric value to irrelevance in less than a week. The headlines were merciless: “The Real Estate Icarus,” “The Ambition That Devoured Rivas.”

Damián was singled out as the sole responsible party. The mastermind, the public face, the perfect scapegoat. They arrested him in his own office, in front of his stunned employees. They raided the family home with humiliating thoroughness, agents sliding their hands over the furniture I had chosen with such care.

I, thanks to a shrewd separation of assets that Octavio had suggested months earlier, was kept beyond direct legal reach. I was not guilty in the eyes of the law, but I was the wife of the man most hated by the small investors he had ruined. The public scorn, the looks in the street, the journalists camped outside my door, all of it became unbearable. With the little I could salvage, a disguise and a borrowed car, I fled.

I took refuge in the only possession that still felt untouched by the nightmare: a small, rustic wooden cabin that had belonged to my parents, hidden in a fold of the mountain an hour from the capital. There, silence was absolute, broken only by the wind through the pines and the creaking of old wood. I spent the first two days in a state of numbness, sleeping for hours, eating as little as possible, staring at the fireplace without seeing it.

***

On the third day, at dusk, while the sky over the peaks turned orange and purple, the disposable phone I thought I had abandoned forever vibrated on the pine table. A phantom heartbeat in the silence. With hands that took their time obeying me, I picked it up. The screen showed an encrypted number and a message signed with two initials: OB.

The rigors of the law also apply to conjugal visits. I read it twice, as if the words might change shape. Tomorrow. Visiting hours for high-security detainees: from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. You must be there at 1:45 p.m. Dress code: discreet but unquestionable elegance. Black dress, moderate neckline, knee-length skirt. Fine stockings. No jewelry. No handbag. Report to the main entrance of Aguasvivas Penitentiary and ask for Sergeant Vega. That is the only instruction you will give. The rest, you will obey.

The message continued, and every line felt like a finger tightening around my throat. Remember: any deviation and the photographs from the Astoria suite, along with the full breakdown, will be sent to the prosecutor’s office as additional evidence of the defendant’s character. And to every media outlet. Your cooperation is the only currency you have to buy silence. And, perhaps, a little mercy for Damián.

I put the phone down on the table. There was no rage and no tears. Only a deeper emptiness. Octavio was not finished. Damián’s fall was not the end; it was a new stage, even crueler. The prison. The rigors. And me, as always, the instrument.

***

The next day I followed the instructions to the letter. I put on a simple black wool dress, with a V-neck that barely revealed my collarbone. The straight skirt fell just below the knee. Opaque stockings, almost governess-like. Closed-toe low heels. I gathered my hair into a severe bun. In the cabin mirror I looked like the widow of a criminal, a figure of mourning and penance.

Aguasvivas Penitentiary was a fortress of gray concrete, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. The cold mountain air blended with an almost physical oppression. At the main gate, a guard with a bored expression looked at me distrustfully.

“Name?” he asked without quite lifting his eyes.

“Mariela Rivas. I’m here to visit my husband, Damián.”

“Visiting hours don’t start until two. Wait over there.”

I took a deep breath before voicing the line I’d been ordered to say.

“I must ask for Sergeant Vega.”

The change in the guard was immediate. Boredom vanished, replaced by immediate curiosity and a flash of something else, something expectant. He nodded, picked up an internal phone, and murmured a few words. Minutes later, a woman came out through a metal door. Sergeant Vega was stocky, with a hard face and small eyes that raked over me from head to toe without bothering to hide it. Her olive-green uniform was impeccably pressed.

“Mrs. Rivas. Follow me.”

There was no greeting and no explanation. I followed her down a long, dim corridor, walls painted a faded hospital green. The sound of my footsteps echoed in the emptiness. We were not heading toward the general visiting rooms. We veered off into a side corridor until we reached an unmarked door that Vega opened with a key.

It was a small, white, cold room. More like an exam room than anything else. In the center stood an examination table covered with disposable paper. A surgical lamp hung from the ceiling. In one corner, a stainless-steel sink.

“The high-security conjugal visit safety procedure is strict,” Vega said, her voice flat and bureaucratic. “We must ensure you are not carrying any prohibited object. You will strip completely. Put your clothes on that tray.”

She pointed to a metal tray on a side table. I looked at it, panic beginning to climb my throat.

“Naked? But… I’m only here to…”

“Those are the rules, Mrs. Rivas. Comply, or the visit is canceled. And your husband does not get to see you. Nor the small improvement in his situation that your cooperation could generate.”

Her gaze was impenetrable, but the message was clear. Octavio had spoken to her. This, too, was part of the rigors.

With clumsy movements I started undressing. First the shoes, then the coat I’d worn over the dress. The sergeant watched, motionless, arms crossed. The sound of the zipper was shrill in the silence. The black garment fell to my feet. Then, with numb fingers, I took off my stockings and underwear. I stood there holding my black panties, feeling Vega’s stare drilled into the patch of warm dampness staining the inside — anticipation had wet my cunt without permission —. I let them fall onto the tray, my face burning. I felt absurdly vulnerable, standing in the center of the cold room, under the harsh white light. My skin prickled all over, my nipples shrank, hard as stones, and I felt the cold air slip between my thighs, brush my shaved sex lips.

“Get on the table. Gynecological position.”

The words struck low. I hesitated, but Vega’s gaze left no room for argument. Face burning, I climbed onto the cold paper. I lay back and, feeling as though each movement were a betrayal of myself, placed my feet in the metal stirrups, spreading my legs wide open. The paper crinkled under my ass. I felt my cunt obscenely exposed to the white light, lips parted, clit in the open. The humiliation was so sharp it blurred my vision for a moment.

Vega approached. She put on a pair of latex gloves with a snap that sounded like a gunshot. She said nothing. Her hands, strong and impersonal, began the inspection. First she checked my hair, behind my ears, inside my mouth, forcing me to stick out my tongue and touch the roof of my mouth with its tip. Two gloved fingers went into my mouth to the uvula, making me cough. Then, with appalling coldness, she examined my breasts, taking them fully in her hands, weighing them in her palms, squeezing my nipples between thumb and forefinger until I let out a soft moan. She pinched them as if they were buttons to be tested. I held my breath, staring at the white ceiling, trying to detach from my own body. But the cold and nerves betrayed me, and I felt my nipples harden even more against her gloved palm, giving me away.

“Well, well,” Vega murmured, and it was the most human thing I heard her say all morning. “Your tits get hard for nothing.”

Then she focused on my pubic area. She parted my outer lips with two fingers, pulling them apart until I felt the skin stretch tight. The inspection was meticulous, invasive, obscene. She traced my inner lips one by one, gently tugged the hood of my clit, exposing it. An electric jolt shot through my pelvis. I tried not to let it show, but my hips made a small involuntary movement against the air. She inserted one finger to the knuckle, moving it roughly, searching for some imaginary object. I swallowed a groan, from pain and from a shame so deep it burned inside me. The finger came out shining, wet. Vega looked at it for a second under the light, then slowly wiped it on the table paper, right between my spread thighs, so I would see. After that she put in two fingers, scissorsing them inside me, searching with the pad of her finger for the rough spot at the roof of my vagina, pressing. A gasp escaped me. My nipples were throbbing. My cunt was tightening, traitorous, around her foreign fingers.

“Wet,” Vega declared out loud, as if recording a note in a report. “Very wet, Mrs. Rivas. Mark that down, if necessary.”

No one else was in the room. She said it for me. To sink me another inch.

The exam continued. Vega ordered me to turn over and get on all fours on the table. With my ass in the air and my knees apart, she made me lower my chest against the paper so she could offer up my backside. I felt her fingers spread my buttocks apart. My asshole was exposed, shriveled by cold and fear. A gloved finger, slick with something cold — lubricant, I don’t know where it came from — pressed against my ass. I clenched by reflex.

“Loosen up,” she ordered. “Either you loosen up or we put in two.”

I obeyed. The finger went in all the way, turning inside my ass with methodical slowness. I bit down on the disposable paper so I wouldn’t scream. Beneath my stomach I felt my thighs tighten, and the wetness from my cunt was running down the insides of my thighs, betraying me again. The finger came out with a wet smack. Vega said nothing. She tugged at the nonexistent elastic of the air where my underwear no longer was, then delivered a sharp slap to my right cheek that echoed through the room.

“You can get down.”

I climbed down from the table shaking. When it seemed she was finished, the sergeant moved to the door and opened it without letting me dress.

“They may enter.”

Two other guards came in, young men with expressions caught somewhere between curiosity and badly concealed lechery. They stopped beside Vega, staring at me while I remained naked and exposed, standing on the cold tiles, with not even an arm to cover myself, because Vega had gestured for me to keep my arms against my body.

“Security inspection complete, negative,” Vega said, as if issuing a report. “Only the final visual verification remains, by protocol. Spread your legs, Mrs. Rivas. Hands behind your head.”

It was a brazen lie. No protocol included this. I raised my hands and crossed them behind my head. The gesture lifted my breasts, offered them up. I spread my legs until I felt my thighs tremble. The guards ran their eyes over every inch of my body, their gaze stopping on the erect nipples, on the neat patch of trimmed pubic hair, on the wet shine of my lower lips, exchanging complicit looks. One of them cleared his throat. I saw the youngest one’s pants bulge at the crotch, with no effort at all to hide it. The other smiled faintly, his tongue passing over his lower lip.

“Turn around slowly,” Vega ordered. “And stay there. Three seconds per side.”

I turned. I felt their looks sticking to my ass, to the red mark Vega’s slap had left on my cheek, to the moisture shining between my thighs. The seconds stretched into an eternity of obscene exposure. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I felt their stares like dirty hands on my skin, invisible fingers opening me, pressing me, entering me.

“Good. You may dress,” Vega said at last, with contempt. “You’ll be taken to the special room. You have twenty minutes.”

***

I dressed with shaking hands. My panties were soaked, the fabric sticking to my cunt with a small wet sound. I felt as if the dress no longer covered me, as if the humiliation had soaked through everything, as if the three pairs of eyes that had seen me open were now following me beneath the black wool.

The guards escorted me down another corridor. One of them — the youngest, the one with the bulge — walked directly behind me. Near a corner without cameras, I suddenly felt his right hand slide up under my skirt, slip along the inside of my thigh, and two thick fingers shove the damp fabric of my panties aside. The middle finger drove into my cunt in one hard thrust, all the way to the knuckle, one violent pump. A gasp escaped me. It was so quick I almost doubted it had happened. The guard pulled his finger out, put it in his mouth without breaking stride, sucked it clean, and whispered in my ear while gently pushing me forward:

“The lady’s tasty. Come back soon.”

I kept walking with my heart battering my ribs and my cunt throbbing against the wet fabric. No one would believe me if I told them. No one. And I wasn’t going to tell anyone either.

The room was small, divided by thick, scratched glass, with phones on each side.

On the other side of the glass Damián appeared, escorted by a guard. I barely recognized him. He had lost weight alarmingly. The suit that had once fit him perfectly now hung off his shoulders. He had deep dark circles under his eyes, a grown-out, unkempt beard. But the most devastating thing was his eyes: once full of ambition, then of confusion, now reflecting only animal fear and absolute defeat.

When he saw me, his eyes widened. He sank into the chair and brought the phone to his ear with trembling hands. I picked up mine.

“Mariela…” His voice broke, a thin thread of sound. “Are you… are you okay?”

I nodded, unable to speak, my throat closed by a knot of conflicting emotions: pity, rage, disgust, and a strange, distant compassion. Beneath the skirt, my cunt was still contracting in tiny spasms around the memory of the guard’s finger, and I felt the revulsion at my own body churn in my stomach.

“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… I ruined everything for you…” he began to sob, his body folding in on itself. Tears ran down his face uncontrollably. “I’m dying in here, Mariela… I can’t… They’re animals… They make me suck the guy in the next cell off, Mariela… every night… they shove it in my mouth and I can’t… I can’t…”

I watched him cry, that broken man, that husband who had once been my accomplice and my executioner, now reduced to a terrified convict confessing in a child’s voice that other men shoved their cocks into his mouth every night. His tears were real, the crying of a lost child. And in that instant I understood that Octavio had achieved his masterpiece. He had not only destroyed our life, our marriage, and Damián’s body. He had crushed his spirit too, leaving him like this: a man weeping behind glass, with other men’s dicks marking his mouth, while I, his wife, carried on my flesh the fresh mark of a guard’s finger in my cunt and a sergeant’s open palm on my ass, another humiliation designed by the same architect of our ruin.

The rigors of the law were harsh, yes. But Octavio Belmonte’s rigors were infinite. And I, on the other side of the glass, with my panties soaked and my nipples still hard beneath the dress, could only watch the final shipwreck, knowing that my own submission had paved the way to that cell, and to that table, and to the guard’s finger in the corridor. The twenty minutes passed in silence, broken only by Damián’s sobs, until a guard touched his shoulder and signaled that time was up.