Chapter 6 - The Shadows of the Past
Alejandro closed his eyes, his broad chest rising and falling as he fought a losing battle against the ghosts of his past. When he finally opened them, the raw agony in his dark irises made me flinch.
"Clara..." he whispered, his voice cracking with an emotion I had never heard from him before.
"Do not call me that," I snapped, the betrayal turning my blood to ice. "Not if you are going to stand there and continue to lie to me. Tell me the truth."
The blow of my words physically hit him. I saw it register in the tight clench of his jaw.
Seeing the fracture in our armor, Valeria stepped forward, victorious. "Your husband didn't choose you out of nowhere, Clara. He chose you because his family spent over a decade hunting you down."
The murmurs in the crowd swelled into a chaotic roar. The French Ambassador’s wife gasped. Alejandro's mother, sitting frozen at the head table, pressed a trembling hand over her heart. Carlos Mendes stared blankly at the red envelope, finally realizing that his daughter hadn't just exposed me—she had detonated a bomb that would destroy them all.
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Slowly, Mr. Lu walked toward us. The untouchable patriarch looked like a man who had suddenly aged twenty years in twenty seconds. His shoulders, usually set with aggressive authority, sagged under a heavy, invisible burden.
"That envelope," the old man said, his voice raspy, "was never meant to be opened in a place like this."
