Chapter 55

Alejandro’s POV

I gave it four minutes.

Four minutes of standing in that room while people I barely tolerated reached for my hand and offered congratulations on an engagement I had zero knowledge of. Four minutes of watching my father work the crowd from across the room like a man who had just made a very elegant chess move and was simply waiting for the board to catch up.

He didn’t look at me once.

That was intentional. Everything James Montenegro did was intentional.

I set down my glass and crossed the room.

He saw me coming and made that small adjustment his posture always made when he was bracing for something, shoulders squaring beneath his jacket, chin lifting just slightly. He murmured something to the couple beside him and stepped toward the corridor before I could reach him in front of witnesses, which told me he’d already calculated exactly how this was going to go.

We ended up just off the main hall. The noise of the room dulled behind us.

“How long,” I started, keeping my voice low and flat because I’d learned around age fourteen that the quieter I got the more it unsettled him, “have you been planning that announcement?”

“Long enough to know you wouldn’t have agreed if I’d asked, besides I told you to dump that girl.” he replied with the infuriating steadiness of someone who had rehearsed this conversation.

“So you didn’t ask.”

“The Reeves partnership is worth forty million to this company. Candy is a suitable match and this merger strengthens us in three separate markets.” He clasped his hands in front of him like a man presenting facts to someone too emotional to find them alone. “This was never about sentiment.”

“Nothing with you ever is,” I said, and I watched that land somewhere because his jaw tightened briefly before it smoothed out again. “That’s always been the problem. You made decisions when mum was in that hospital bed too, from boardrooms and hotel rooms and anywhere that wasn’t beside her.”

“That is not what we’re discussing,” he replied tightly.

“You announced my engagement to a room full of people. To me. Alongside everyone else, like I was a guest in my own life.”

He studied me with that clinical look I’d been on the receiving end of my entire life, the one that made you feel like a variable being weighed against other variables rather than a son being spoken to.

He used to look at my mother that way near the end, standing in her doorway, calculating how much of himself he could afford to give.

I hated that look more than almost anything on this earth.

“This is about the Martinez girl,” he said flatly.

“Her name is Mira,” I replied. “Use it like you know that.”

He held my gaze for a beat, then moved into the small office adjacent to the corridor. I followed because whatever he thought he had, I needed to see it.

He opened the desk drawer and placed a folder between us without any particular hurry, like a man who had left it there earlier and always known this moment was coming.

“What is this,” I demanded.

“The day I hired her I did what I always do when someone enters this family’s orbit,” he answered, watching my face carefully. “I had her investigated. I’ve had this since before she walked through your door, and I kept it because I know you, Alejandro. I knew eventually you’d need to see it more than you’d want to.”

I opened it.

The photograph hit me first. Dark red club lighting, her face younger and her eyes holding something exhausted and carefully closed that I had never seen on her before. It took me a moment because she looked so different, like someone who hadn’t yet learned how to breathe properly, but it was her.

I turned the page.

Employment records. A club called Scarlett’s. Shift after shift recorded in dry, bureaucratic detail, stage names printed alongside her real one.

I turned another page.

Her stepfather. A police report she’d filed then withdrawn, and when I registered the dates and calculated how old she would have been when it started, something in my chest went very quiet in a way that had nothing to do with indifference.

I closed the folder.

“She is not who you think she is,” my father declared with the certainty of a man delivering a verdict.

“She is exactly who I think she is,” I replied, my voice scraping against the quiet. “Someone who survived things that would have destroyed most people, alone, without a single person to catch her. That is who she is.”

“She is a liability to this family’s name.”

“She is mine.”

The words left my mouth before I’d assembled them and they sat in the air between us, blunt and absolute, and I watched the calculation move behind his eyes.

“You’re willing to put this family’s reputation beside that history,” he pressed.

“Call off the announcement,” I told him.

“Half the city’s business community witnessed it.”

“Then correct it,” I shot back, “or I will, and I promise you my version will be considerably less diplomatic.”

The silence stretched between us, the kind he used as a weapon, waiting for the other person to crack and fill it. I had spent enough years on the receiving end of that technique to simply look back at him and wait.

“You are making a catastrophic mistake,” he told me finally.

“Then it’s mine to make.”

I turned for the door.

“That folder goes to every publication in this country if you push this,” he called after me, his voice dropping into something quieter and more deliberate. “Every board member. Every business associate.”

I stopped and turned around slowly.

“If you do that,” I replied, holding his gaze across the room, “you won’t just lose me. You’ll lose my shares, my signature, my name on every document keeping this company alive, and you know exactly what that number looks like. So think carefully about whether that folder is worth it.”

I watched the calculation move behind his eyes one more time.

Then I walked out and didn’t look back.

The corridor was cool and bright and I stood in it for a moment pressing one hand flat against the wall, just breathing, pulling myself back from an edge I couldn’t afford right now.

Mira.

I didn’t need to return to the main room to know she was gone. I felt it the way you felt a drop in temperature, sudden and wrong and impossible to ignore.

I pulled out my phone and typed two lines.

Where are you?

Then, because I was done pretending I was anywhere near composed:

Come back to me.