Prologue
RAFAEL
The estate files spread across my mahogany desk carried the weight of an obligation I’d spent months avoiding.
Contracts. Property transfers. Corporate acquisitions. Endless pages of signatures waiting for my name like starving mouths.
For eight months I had ignored most of them.
Eight months of letting my empire continue moving without truly touching it. The businesses still ran because men feared disappointing me more than they feared God, but I had stopped caring about any of it the moment Loretta disappeared from my life.
Now I signed mechanically, one document after another, the expensive fountain pen gliding over paper with cold efficiency.
Every signature felt the same.
Dead.
Work had become my anesthesia. The only thing capable of numbing the rot inside my chest.
I’d convinced myself that if I drowned deep enough in meetings, negotiations, and blood-soaked business, I wouldn’t have to face the silence waiting for me in that enormous house every night.
Maybe I could forget her for a few damn hours.
But no. I couldn’t. Loretta haunted every corner of my mind like a curse I could not outrun.
Eight months had passed since she vanished from my life, and in her absence everything had fallen into disarray.
My days became hollow routines, my nights unbearable.
Every thought somehow led back to her. The possibility of seeing her again wrapped around my throat like a hand, tightening every time her memory surfaced—which was always.
“Boss.”
Ramiro stepped into the office again. Fifth interruption in less than ten minutes.
I didn’t bother looking up from the documents. “You’re becoming irritating.”
“My apologies.”
“Then stop interrupting me.”
He stayed standing there anyway. That alone made my irritation sharpen.
Ramiro was not a hesitant man. He was disciplined to the point of brutality. Almost impossible to shake.
Yet tonight his posture carried tension.
My pen continued moving across the paper. “Speak.”
“Your phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Twenty missed calls in four minutes is... excessive.”
“So?”
“I merely thought it might be important. Or urgent.”
I finally leaned back slightly in my chair, annoyance simmering beneath my skin. “Or another idiot who got hold of a number that should never have left this office.”
“Still... I think you should take it.”
