Chapter 135

Chapter 135

Victoria’s POV

The coffin was dark mahogany with silver fittings.
My father chose it because my mother couldn’t get out of bed, and because I refused to take part in the details of burying my younger brother when I still hadn’t fully processed that he was dead. Dark mahogany, because William Harrington believed even death had to be elegant—and because the name demanded a funeral worthy of it, even if the man inside was a rapist with a bullet in his head.
The church was empty.
Not truly empty. There were pews, an altar, flowers someone ordered without asking me, and a priest paid well enough not to question the reputation of the deceased. But empty of people. Empty of the ones who should have been there—if Dante had been the man he pretended to be at galas, business dinners, and on the covers of financial magazines.
No one came.
Not my father’s partners, who had toasted with Dante for years at parties where he drugged women in the next room. Not his college friends, who thought he was the life of every gathering, unaware of what he did when the party ended. Not the so-called friends who were really just circumstantial accomplices, who disappeared the moment the Harrington name stopped meaning power and started meaning scandal.
It was just the three of us. William, Margaret, and me. What remained of the Harrington family, sitting in the front row of a Park Avenue church that charged ten thousand dollars for a private ceremony—and accepted because money has no smell, even if the dead man did.
My mother cried through the entire service. Silent, constant tears streaming down her face, never bothering to wipe them away, her eyes fixed on the coffin as if she could force it open with the strength of her grief and pull Dante back out. Margaret Harrington, who all her life had been the perfect wife to the perfect magnate—decorative, invisible, voiceless in family decisions—reduced now to a broken woman mourning a son the world saw as a monster, but who to her would always be the boy who asked for bedtime stories.
My father didn’t cry. William Harrington didn’t cry because he considered tears a biological weakness men in his position couldn’t afford. He sat upright in his black suit and silk tie, his jaw clenched so tightly the tendons in his neck stood out like steel cables, staring ahead like a general who had just lost a battle—but was already planning the next one.
The priest spoke for twenty minutes, saying the things priests say when they don’t know the dead and are paid to pretend they do. Dante as a beloved son, a devoted brother, a man who fought his demons and lost. Empty words that bounced off the church walls without landing in a single heart.
When the service ended and the funeral staff carried the coffin toward the hearse, my mother turned to me with eyes I didn’t recognize.
They weren’t Margaret Harrington’s eyes—the woman who smiled at galas and served tea at four and never raised her voice. They were the eyes of a mother who had just buried her son and needed someone to pay for it.
—This is your fault —she said, her voice sharp as shattered glass.
—Mom...
—You gave him that apartment. You told him to fake insanity to get into Silver Pines. You planned every step of his escape—and then abandoned him when he chose to stay for that woman. If you had protected him, if you had made sure he left the country like your father planned, he’d be alive. He’d be on some island breathing and living instead of inside that box.
—You can’t blame me for Dante’s choices. I told him to leave, I begged him to forget Gabriela and—
—Don’t you dare say her name! —Margaret shouted, her voice echoing through the empty church—. That family killed my son. The Morettis, the fiancé, all of them. They executed him like an animal and now we’re burying him like a criminal.
—Margaret, enough —my father cut in, his voice steel—. Not here.
—Then where, William? Where am I supposed to grieve my son? In the mansion they’re going to take from us? In the company that’s collapsing? Where?
My father took her arm firmly and guided her to the car without answering, because there was no answer that could satisfy a mother’s grief—and William knew it, even if he would never admit it.
We drove home in silence.
The Harrington mansion now had half the staff, because we could no longer afford them all—and it felt twice as large because of it.
My mother went straight to her room and slammed the door so hard the sound echoed through the second floor. I heard the lock click, then the muffled sound of her crying seeping under the door like water through cracks.
My father went to his study.
I followed, because I knew this wasn’t over—and because important conversations in the Harrington family always happened behind closed doors, with whisky in hand.
William poured himself a drink without offering me one. He sat behind his desk and looked at me with eyes identical to mine—except now there was something new in them.
Defeat.
He didn’t admit it in words or gestures or anything that could be photographed or quoted. But it was there—in the slight inward curve of his shoulders, in the lines that had formed around his eyes in recent weeks as if carved by stress, in the faint tremor of his hand as he lifted the glass.
—The Morettis will pay for this —he said finally, his voice rougher than usual.
—How? —I asked, sitting across from him—. We have no company, no allies, no reputation. Gabriel has every document needed to destroy us in court, and Gael has thirty years of information on your business dealings he can use whenever he wants. With what weapons do you plan to fight?
—With whatever we have. Your mother is right about one thing: we can’t let this go. They killed my son, Victoria. Executed him in a cabin and dressed it up as self-defense when we both know it was an execution.
—Alejandro Ferrer shot Dante because he was on top of Gabriela with a gun. Any court in the world would call that defense of another.
—Defense. My son with a bullet in his head and the world applauds. Is that justice?
—Dante kidnapped her on her wedding day, drugged her, and chained her in a cabin. If you ask me, justice was lenient with him.
My father looked at me like I’d spit in his face.
—He was your brother.
—He was my brother. And I loved him. But I’m not going to pretend he was innocent, because he never was—and we both know you didn’t believe that either. You paid off his scandals for years. Silenced five women with money. Bought his way out of Silver Pines. You protected him until protection became complicity—and complicity became this.
I gestured vaguely toward the door, as if Dante’s coffin were still on the other side.
—If you want revenge for Dante, go ahead. But don’t count me in. I’m tired of cleaning up this family’s mess while pretending we’re the victims when we’ve been the executioners.
—Then what do you propose? That we sit back and do nothing?
—I propose we fight—but intelligently. Not for Dante. For us. For what’s left of Harrington Energy and our assets. And I have something that could change the entire board.
My father’s eyes sharpened.
—What do you have?
—Gabriel Moretti has a son he doesn’t know exists. A three-month-old baby with a nurse in Boston named Lucía Sandoval. I have photos, an address, and confirmation the child is identical to Gabriel.
Silence followed—the kind that comes before an explosion.
My father set his glass down slowly.
—A son?
—An heir. Born while Gabriel was married to me. The press would tear him apart. Lawyers could reopen the divorce citing concealed information. And Gael Moretti—the great patriarch preaching family and loyalty—would discover his son has a bastard child with a nurse making thirty dollars an hour.
—Do you have solid proof?
—Photos of the baby—he’s Gabriel’s exact copy. Lucía’s address in Boston. And confirmation she left New York as soon as she found out she was pregnant to hide the baby from the Moretti world.
My father leaned back—and for the first time since the church, I saw something familiar.
The strategist. The predator.
—We don’t use it now —he said—. Right now they’re in hero mode. Public opinion loves them. If we strike now, we look like villains kicking the wounded.
—Then when?
—When they feel safe. When they think they’ve won. When they let their guard down and start rebuilding their perfect lives, believing the Harringtons are finished. Then we release the child.
—And what do we gain?
—Chaos. Inside the Moretti family, the discovery of a secret heir with a woman from a different social class will fracture things even Gael can’t control. Between Gabriel and Lucía, it creates a public scandal. And in court, it gives us leverage to reopen every agreement.
—That’s long-term.
—It’s all we have left. We don’t have an army for open war anymore. But we have a secret worth more than any army. And secrets, when used well, destroy empires.
I stood and walked to the window, looking out at the Harrington mansion grounds—already showing signs of decay. The grass too long. The roses untrimmed. Leaves gathering in a fountain that no longer worked.
Everything was falling apart.
But in my bag, I still had the photos of Lucía Sandoval and her son.
My father was right. It wasn’t time to strike. The Morettis were at their peak—shielded by public sympathy and the narrative of a family surviving a monster.
But peaks don’t last.
Sympathy fades. News cycles move on. People forget.
And when that happened—when Gabriel believed he could finally breathe, go find his nurse, and build the life he always wanted—I would be there.
With the truth about his son.
Like a ticking bomb.
I wasn’t doing this for Dante. My brother was dead, and no revenge would bring him back.
I wasn’t doing it for my father. Or the company. Or the name that had already become synonymous with disgrace.
I was doing it for me.
Because Gabriel rejected me. Because he looked at me with disgust every morning of our marriage. Because he made me feel like I wasn’t enough—like I would never be enough—that no woman who wasn’t Lucía Sandoval deserved even a fraction of his affection.
And that doesn’t go without consequences.
Not today. Not tomorrow.
But soon.
I left my father’s study and went up to my room, locking the door behind me. I took out my phone and opened the encrypted folder.
Lucía leaving the hospital with Matías in her arms. The baby turning his head toward the light, revealing that unmistakable Moretti jaw. The face of a child who had no idea his existence was a weapon in the hands of the wrong woman.
I closed the phone and slipped it into the drawer beside my bed, next to the bottle of anti-anxiety pills the clinic had prescribed—pills I took every night just to sleep.
Outside, the afternoon faded over Manhattan, golden and indifferent.
Somewhere in this city, the Morettis were celebrating. Dante was dead. Gabriela was safe. The monster had fallen.
Let them celebrate.
Let them toast, cry in relief, and hold each other thinking the worst was over.
Because Victoria Harrington had nothing left to lose.
And they did.
Everything.