La bodega

Fermín Montenegro steps into the marble‑lit office of Dupont Hermanos, the famed Jerez wine and cognac house, a full hour late on a crisp Monday. The room smells of polished wood and faint incense, its towering gothic clock ticking over rows of dark cabinets and saint‑adorned calendars. Though he has spent fifteen years delivering letters and errands for the Dupont dynasty, the space feels both familiar and strangely new, as if he is seeing it for the first time.

That morning, the whispered return of Don Fernando Salvatierra catches Fermín’s attention. The once‑imprisoned revolutionary arrives in town, his calm demeanor belying a past of heated dissent and whispered legends among the elite. As Fermín watches the “saintly” rebel re‑enter Jerez’s streets, the clash between the genteel world of the bodegas and the restless fire of political upheaval begins to pulse through the very walls of the office.