Chapter 1: The Scent of the Cane

The road to the Hacienda Miraflores was not so much a path as it was a red-clay wound carved into the side of the island. To see it for the first time was to understand the sheer brutality of the sugar trade. On either side of the track, the dense, prehistoric island forest loomed—a wall of mahogany, banyan, and strangler figs so thick that the light of the Philippine sun barely touched the forest floor. It was a place of humidity and shadows, where the air tasted of rot and wet stone.

But as the track crested the final rise, the world suddenly opened, yielding to a vast, flat plain that looked as if it had been hammered flat by the hands of giants. This was the “cleared” land, an emerald sea of sugarcane that stretched until the heat shimmer blurred the horizon. The stalks stood ten feet tall, their silver-gray plumes hissing in the wind like a thousand dry whispers. In the center of this kingdom sat the industrial heart of the estate: the processing plant. Its tall brick chimneys belched a thick, oily smoke that stained the pristine blue of the sky, and the roar of the steam-powered rollers was a low, constant vibration that traveled through the soil and into the soles of a man’s boots.

Mateo stood at the edge of the harvest, his presence commanding the space around him. He was a striking man, standing a shade under six feet, a height that made him a literal head taller than the laborers who moved rhythmically through the cane with their heavy bolos. His hair, black as a raven’s wing and reaching past his shoulders, was pulled back into a tight, severe ponytail, baring a face that was a study in rugged, Spanish-Filipino symmetry.

He was handsome in a way that felt dangerous—not the soft, powdered beauty of the Manila elite who hid under parasols, but the hard, functional beauty of a man who knew the weight of an axe. His skin was a deep, scorched bronze, a testament to his refusal to sit in the shade. While other sons of wealthy landowners were content to manage their estates from the saddles of imported horses, Mateo was often in the mud. He was a creature of the fields, his broad shoulders and the muscles of his back hardened by the visceral labor of the season. To the eligible girls of the province, he was a prize; to his father, he was a tool of legacy.

But Mateo’s heart did not belong to the legacy. It belonged to the bamboo grove.

He turned away from the roar of the mill and walked toward a small house nestled in the shade of the tall grass. He remembered the day her father had given her to him, eighteen months ago. Alana had been fourteen then, a tiny, fragile-looking girl standing in the shadow of a tenant farmer whose gambling debts had finally outstripped his pride. Her father had offered her for “familial considerations”—a transaction born of desperation.