First Revelations
Dante
The conference room door closes behind us, and Bianca immediately turns to me, furious.
“Why are you leaving them alone together? She’s going to try to manipulate him.”
Her voice has lost every trace of softness, bordering on hysteria, the voice of someone who feels the situation slipping out of control.
I don’t answer.
I’m trying to contain my rage.
The urge to put her in her place hits hard.
And yet I don’t forget who she is.
My fucking fiancée.
With a shaky hand, I pull out my phone and check our schedules, a gesture that buys me a few seconds to choose my words.
“You have a meeting in five minutes.”
My voice stays calm despite the emotions tearing through me.
I need her out of here. Now.
Before I say something I can’t take back.
“Dante—”
“Go to your meeting,” I cut in. “Then go home. I’m sure you still have a lot to finalize for Saturday.”
The mention of the wedding calms her instantly.
I see it on her face, that release of tension, the way she clings to that date like a lifeline.
“You’re right. We’ll talk later.”
She rises onto her toes to kiss me.
I take a step back, cutting her off mid-motion.
Understanding the message, she withdraws.
As she disappears down the hallway, unease grows inside me.
This woman who stood by me at my lowest point — the woman I’m supposed to marry in three days — suddenly feels like a stranger.
Between the tears that ring false and the way she keeps trying to discredit her former friend, another side of her personality is beginning to emerge.
And that slap, out of nowhere, tells a story I’m afraid to hear.
Did I ever really know her?
My phone vibrates.
“Yes.”
“The bodyguard’s been restrained. Two agents are injured, but it’s handled. We’re bringing him in.”
“Perfect.”
It’s time to get real answers from my wife.
*
When I open the conference room door, the sight that greets me stops me cold.
Andrea is still kneeling in front of Valeria.
One hand tangled in her hair, the other holding her hands, their foreheads pressed together. He murmurs something too softly for me to hear.
A sudden, irrational fury detonates in my chest.
Andrea straightens when he hears me enter. One look at my face, and he raises both hands, palms open in a calming gesture.
“Don’t say anything you’ll regret,” he warns.
I clench my jaw and inhale deeply, fighting the urge to punch him in the face.
Then my gaze lands on Valeria.
She’s sitting there with her shoulders slumped, eyes closed. Silent tears slide down her cheeks unchecked. She’s trembling slightly.
Not from fear. From pain.
My anger collapses instantly.
Something is wrong. Seriously wrong.
The door opens behind me.
Stephen walks in flanked by two of my security agents, both sporting bloody noses and split brows. Clearly, he hadn’t made things easy for them.
Even surrounded by armed security, he moves like a man still calculating his options.
The moment he sees Valeria, everything else ceases to exist for him.
He jerks free and crosses the room. Gently — infinitely gently — he cups her face in his hands and bends toward her.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” she whispers.
How many men are allowed to touch her like this?
The thought comes before I can stop it.
Stupid. Unfair. Cruel.
Stephen straightens and looks at me without even trying to hide what he thinks of me right now.
“She needs water.”
I signal one of the agents.
Thirty seconds later, he returns with a bottle. I open it myself and hand it to Valeria.
She drinks two small sips, and some color returns to her face.
“Where are your pills?” Stephen asks quietly.
“In my bag. In the lab,” she breathes.
“I’ll get them,” Andrea says, disappearing before I can object.
When he returns with the bag, Stephen searches through it, retrieves a bottle of pills, and hands them to Valeria.
“Thanks.”
She swallows them with water before closing her eyes again.
It’s not Tylenol.
Those aren’t ordinary painkillers. The gesture too practiced.
He knows her dosage. How many times has he taken care of her like this?
She never used to get migraines. What happened to her?
“She needs somewhere quiet,” Stephen says. “She needs to lie down.”
“I’ll be fine,” Valeria protests without opening her eyes.
Stephen shifts as though preparing to lift her into his arms.
“No.”
My voice cracks through the room, stopping him mid-motion.
We stare each other down.
Whatever he sees in my expression seems to satisfy him, because he steps back.
I’ll be damned before I let another man carry her in my presence.
I bend down and lift her into my arms.
She’s too light. Far too light for someone her height.
My chest tightens so violently I can barely breathe.
“Wait,” Andrea protests. “Bianca’s really not going to appreciate this when she finds out. Let me carry her.”
Bianca.
The thought of hurting her doesn’t sit well with me. After everything she’s done for me, she doesn’t deserve that.
But nothing — absolutely nothing — is going to make me hand Valeria over to another man while she’s trembling in pain against me.
“I’ll deal with Bianca.”
Valeria protests weakly.
“Put me down, Dante.”
“Never.”
I tighten my hold around her and carry her toward the elevator, Stephen and Andrea following close behind.
Inside the elevator, no one speaks.
Valeria’s body, tense at first, slowly relaxes against mine. Her fists remain clenched against her chest, as if she’s physically stopping herself from grabbing onto me.
That simple gesture destroys me.
The doors open onto the twelfth floor.
I address Sandrine, my assistant.
“No interruptions.”
I carry Valeria to the sofa in my office and lay her down carefully. Then I head into my private bathroom and retrieve a blanket and pillow.
Gently, I slide the pillow beneath her head and cover her with the blanket.
My fingers brush her temple. Her skin is too cold.
I lower the blinds. The office falls into darkness, shutting out the rest of the world. I’m about to leave when her voice stops me.
“Thank you.”
Two words. Barely audible.
“We’re right next door,” I tell her. “Get some rest.”
My voice comes out low, restrained, almost tender.
I’m beginning to understand there’s far more behind Valeria’s disappearance than I wanted to believe.
I linger for a few seconds, just looking at her, before forcing myself to leave.
The glass door slides shut softly behind me.
Stephen and Andrea are already seated in the adjoining conference room. Sitting around the glass table, speaking quietly.
The moment I walk in, silence falls.
Stephen studies me as though assessing whether I’m a threat.
I sit beside my brother, across from him.
“It’s time to put all the cards on the table.”
Stephen leans back in his chair, letting the silence stretch between us.
“He has a right to know,” Andrea says.
Stephen locks eyes with me.
“Does he?”
He’s looking for a reaction. He gets one.
“I just caught your employer sabotaging data belonging to my company,” I say coldly.
“If you really believe that, you’re even dumber than I thought.”
“Stephen,” my brother interrupts calmly but firmly, “we genuinely care about Valeria. She told me part of what happened, but we’re still missing the rest.”
She talked to my brother. Not to me. The thought burns like acid. But I remember something else too.
He knelt in front of her. He held her without hesitation.
Me?
I accused her. Attacked her. Said unforgivable things.
I never once gave her space to explain.
Not once.
Remorse closes around my throat.
“Believe it or not, I really do care about her,” I say. “Do you honestly think this situation isn’t destroying me? One of us has to take a step toward the other. I’d like to do it, but I don’t know how. Because none of you are telling me anything.”
Stephen hesitates, draws a deep breath, then he says:
“Two years ago, Hugo Perez and his family pulled Valeria half-dead out of the Seine.”
The words hit me like a high-speed train.
“She jumped into the water when she realized both exits were blocked. One by the fire. The other locked from the outside.”
Andrea and I both jerk at his words.
“You heard that right,” Stephen says. “Someone locked her inside and set the place on fire.”
For a moment, I stop hearing anything at all.
Someone tried to kill my wife and I never knew.
If I hadn’t already been sitting down, my legs would’ve given out beneath me.
The scene comes rushing back in full, brutal.
The moment the fire alarm went off, panic spread through the guests.
My first instinct was to look for her. Bianca told me she’d seen her on the other side of the reception hall.
I searched everywhere, scanning every face, shoving people aside without apologizing, before doubling back and checking every room again.
I knew she wouldn’t leave among the first.
That wasn’t who she was.
She was the kind of person who stayed behind to make sure everyone else got out safely.
But as the boat emptied, as face after face passed by without ever being hers, panic started rising inside me—slowly at first, then until I could barely breathe.
Bianca was panicking beside me too.
“Where is she? Oh my God, where is she?”
Despite the smoke and flames, we got close to the burning kitchen, but there was no sign of her.
We kept searching until the firefighters and police arrived.
Andrea came. Then everyone started evacuating the docks.
Still no trace of her.
The divers arrived with floodlights and began searching the river.
That’s when I started understanding what it meant.
What I’d refused to admit until then.
They were looking for a body.
And by some miracle I still don’t understand, she didn’t die that night.
“Why didn’t they contact us?” Andrea asks, tension sharpening his voice. “Her face was everywhere.”
“She suffered a severe head injury and hypothermia,” Stephen explains. “They took her to their private clinic. Based on the few words she managed to say, they knew someone had tried to kill her.”
I feel stunned.
“But why?” Andrea asks.
“That’s not the question,” Stephen says. “The real question is: who benefits from Valeria’s death?”
A pause.
“And be prepared to accept the answers.”
The silence that follows is heavy with unspoken truths.
This is no longer confusion. It’s a horrifying reality settling into place.
Someone tried to kill my wife. And maybe someone still wants her dead.
“Why didn’t she contact me?”
My voice sounds so altered I barely recognize it myself.
Then a thought brushes against me, ice-cold.
“Unless she thought I was involved.”
“No, it wasn’t that,” Stephen replies, his voice now stripped of hostility.
“The truth is more complicated. She lost consciousness right after saying someone had tried to kill her. The doctors discovered internal bleeding and placed her in a medically induced coma to operate and help her recover for several weeks.”
My heart stops.
Even after grieving her, the thought is unbearable.
“And when she woke up, her body was extremely weakened and her memories confused. She suffered from vomiting, severe exhaustion, migraines, and memory gaps—to the point where she sometimes struggled to speak.”
With every revelation, my heart sinks a little further.
She went through hell. Without me.
“Her memory came back gradually. But the exact memory of that night only returned three months ago. The trigger was—”
“That’s enough,” Valeria cuts in.
None of us noticed her approach.
She stands in the doorway, pale and sharp as a blade, her gaze locked onto Stephen’s in a silent duel.
“He deserves to know,” Stephen says without backing down.
“No.”
Her voice doesn’t shake.
“It’s none of his business,” she continues.
I shoot to my feet so fast my chair scrapes violently across the floor.
How can she say that?
“What am I not supposed to know? What are you hiding from me?”
She turns toward me. Her face is completely closed off.
“You’re not entitled to anything from me, Dante.”
That’s the sentence too many. Everything I’ve been holding back for days explodes at once before I can stop it.
“So that’s really how you want to play this?”
My voice comes out too loud, too harsh, and I don’t even care.
“You don’t think I have the right to know what happened to you? I’m your husband, for fuck’s sake!”
“Dante.”
Andrea’s voice is firm.
A warning.
I know I need to calm down before I say something unforgivable.
I take one breath. Then another.
And swallow the rage crushing my chest.
“You’re not my husband anymore, Dante,” she replies, her voice so cold it cuts. “You’re marrying Bianca in three days. Remember?”
And then, out of stupidity, out of pain, out of that pathetic instinct that makes people strike when they’re bleeding, I say the worst possible thing.
“At least she doesn’t push me away.”
The silence afterward makes me instantly want to take every word back.
Her expression breaks for half a second. Then closes again.
But I saw the pain in her eyes.
Brief.
Blinding.
And I know I just shattered the fragile thing still holding us together.
“So what are you waiting for, Dante?” she says. “Go back to her.”
She turns toward Stephen.
“Come on. We’re leaving.”
I watch them walk out of the room.
I could stop her.
Apologize.
Find the words I should’ve said from the beginning.
But she’s locked inside that icy fury that lets nothing through, and I’m the only one to blame for it.
Talking to her about another woman. What the hell was wrong with me?
Because you’re hurting, a voice inside me answers—the one I wish I couldn’t hear. And you can’t stand the fact that she keeps you at a distance. So you strike before you can be struck.
Andrea stands too. He briefly rests a hand on my shoulder.
“You really know how to screw things up,” he says.
The memory of how light her body felt in my arms—and of the cruel things I said to her—leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.
Someone tried to kill my wife.
And I keep pushing her away.
In trying so hard to protect myself, I’m destroying the only thing I truly want to save.