Wrong Marriage. Right Groom

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.”

“Ramiro. Block the line, and stop interrupting me with this.”

I could hear the faint ring of my phone on the desk, but I ignored it the way I had been doing all morning, keeping my attention fixed on the document beneath my hand.

Ramiro moved before I could stop him.

He crossed the office swiftly, picked up the phone, and I did not even look up.

“They sent a text message, Boss.” His jaw tightened faintly as he read the screen.

Before I could decide whether it was worth acknowledging or discarding, his voice changed.

“Boss...”

He hesitated, just long enough for the air in the room to shift.

“It concerns Miss Loretta.”

Everything inside me stopped.

The pen slipped from my fingers and hit the desk with a sharp clatter.

Panic cut through the restraint I had built over eight months. It was the first real news of her since she vanished from my life, and I could hardly remain steady.

My voice dropped, low and unsteady.

“Speak properly. Is she well?”

Ramiro swallowed once.

“She’s in labor.”

The words did not register immediately.

Labor.

“She’s having severe contractions. Active labor.” His eyes held mine carefully. “She asked the doctor to call you personally.”

For one brutal second I forgot how to breathe.

Loretta was... pregnant.

Pregnant?

The realization hit me like a bullet straight through the ribs.

My wife had vanished eight months ago with divorce papers on the nightstand and a warning written beneath her signature in elegant black ink.

Do not come after me.

I’m done.

If you try to find me, I will make sure you never see me alive again.

But I had gone after her anyway—hunted her across borders and silence itself, as though sheer will could drag her back into existence. And yet there was nothing. Not a trail. Not a shadow. Not even the faintest mistake left behind for me to follow.

I had wondered how she managed it so perfectly, so surgically precise that even men like mine—men who owned information, cities, silence—came up empty. A man like me, whose reach was supposed to be absolute, reduced to searching shadows.

Was she still in the city? Had she crossed borders I was never informed of? Had my own men failed me, or had she simply learned how to disappear from someone like me?

The uncertainty gnawed at me. Not finding her felt like a slow kind of hell.

And yet another truth lingered beneath it all, more dangerous because I had allowed myself to believe it.

That Loretta vanished because I had pushed her far enough—and when she could no longer endure it, she walked away.

That belief had destroyed me in ways no war, no business, no enemy ever could. Piece by piece, it stripped me down until I was nothing more than a shell moving through life out of habit.

Eight months of sleeping in a bed that still carried the faint trace of her perfume.

Eight months of waking in the dead of night with my hand reaching for a woman who was no longer there.

Eight months of wondering what crime I had committed that was terrible enough for her to erase me from her life entirely.

And now she was in labor, in severe pain, about to deliver a child... while I sat here signing property documents like a fucking idiot.

The chair shoved backward violently as I surged to my feet. It crashed against the marble floor hard enough to topple over entirely.

“Call the doctor back immediately,” I snapped. “I want the hospital’s name.”

Ramiro was already pulling out his phone before I finished speaking.

“We are leaving. Now.”

The air around me felt electrically charged as we stormed from the office.

My pulse thundered so violently in my ears it nearly drowned out the sound of our footsteps.

The estate staff scattered the second they saw my expression.

A maid nearly dropped an expensive crystal tray in panic before scrambling out of my path.

Two security men straightened immediately near the entrance hall, their hands clasping behind their backs with rigid discipline.

Men in my world learned quickly to distinguish between my anger and my fury.

Anger could be survived.

Fury usually ended in funerals.

Outside, rain hammered against the estate grounds in vicious sheets.

My matte-black Bugatti waited beneath the porte-cochère like a predator crouched for blood.

Normally the driver would already be standing beside it.

Tonight I didn’t have patience for formality.

I yanked open the passenger door and barked, “You drive.”

Ramiro slid behind the wheel instantly without questioning me.

The engine roared to life with a deep guttural snarl that perfectly matched the violence inside my chest.

Tires screeched against wet pavement as we tore down the private drive.

The massive iron gates of the estate opened automatically just before we hit them at dangerous speed.

Then we were flying down the highway.

Rain lashed violently across the windshield while city lights blurred into streaks of gold and white.

“Faster,” I growled.

My fingers dug into the leather seat hard enough to strain the material.

Restless energy vibrated beneath my skin like a live wire. Every second felt unbearable.

Every red light felt personal.

Every slower vehicle ahead of us looked like an obstacle begging to be destroyed.

The Bugatti weaved between vehicles with terrifying precision.

A horn blared behind us.

Another.

I barely heard them.

All I could see was Loretta alone in some hospital room in pain while strangers stood around her instead of me.

The thought made something savage claw up my throat.

My knee bounced violently before I forced it still.

Control yourself.

But control had become difficult the moment I heard the word labor.

Because suddenly, questions were everywhere.

Loretta had been pregnant for the entire eight months since she vanished, and she had not even bothered to reach out to me—let alone tell me.

My jaw tightened painfully at the thought, a sharp, controlled fury settling beneath my skin.

Nine months ago—on a desperate, emotionally brutal night after weeks of distance between us.

I remembered it too clearly.

Loretta standing near the bedroom window in silk nightwear, arms folded tightly across herself while rain hammered against the glass outside.

We had barely spoken properly for weeks back then.

Not after the funeral anniversary of Zara—my first wife, my late wife.

The ghost that had poisoned everything.

I had drowned myself in work and violence after Zara died. I became colder. Crueler. Harder to reach.

Loretta—sweet, gentle, persistent—had tried to pull me back from the cold shell I had become, from the darkness I no longer bothered to hide. She wanted me to see it, to accept it... to heal and move on from Zara’s death.

But I pushed her away every single time.

Coldness was all I gave her. Distance. Silence. The kind of emotional absence that leaves no room for anything to survive.

And so she lived under the same roof with a man who refused to let go of his dead wife—who refused to move forward—while she endured him in silence, loving someone already buried beneath grief.

Until that night.

That night she finally snapped.

“You’re still loving a dead woman,” she screamed, tears falling freely, “after making me fall for everything you are—even your darkness!” Her voice shattered.

“And now you’re dragging me into the grave with you.”

I remember staring at her in stunned silence. Loretta almost never raised her voice, let alone screamed.

And I had never been in love with Zara, my late wife.

What I could not move past was not love—but the way she died. The brutality of it. The image of it burned into me in a way I had never been able to escape.

“You think I don’t understand grief?” she continued shakily. “You think I don’t understand pain? I do, Rafael. But at least I’m trying to live through mine instead of worshipping it!”

Then she cried.

God.

Loretta hated crying in front of people.

But that night she broke apart right in front of me.

And something inside me shattered with her.

I crossed the room, grabbed her face, and kissed her like a starving man.

Like if I didn’t touch her immediately I would lose her forever.

She cried against my mouth while I held her against my chest until dawn.

I thought we were healing. I thought we had survived the worst of it.

Then she disappeared three days later.

No goodbye.

No explanation beyond those divorce papers.

No chance to fix anything.

I had not known she was pregnant when she vanished.

The realization alone nearly split me open.

The Bugatti tore through Manhattan like a bullet.

My mind kept replaying the same horrifying possibilities over and over again.

Had she gone through this entire pregnancy alone?

Did she have someone taking care of her?

Or had she been stubbornly suffering in silence the way she always did whenever she was hurting?

The thought made my chest ache viciously.

The hospital finally came into view through the rain like a glowing beacon in the darkness.

Every muscle in my body locked instantly.

There.

She was there.

Somewhere inside that building.

The Bugatti had barely rolled into the emergency entrance before I shoved the door open and stepped out into the storm.

Rain drenched my coat instantly.

I didn’t care.

My shoes slapped hard against wet pavement as I strode toward the automatic doors with enough force that people moved instinctively out of my way before I even reached them.

Fear traveled faster than introductions.

And unfortunately my reputation often entered rooms before I did.

“Where is my wife?” I barked toward the reception desk.

The young receptionist behind it visibly flinched.

Her eyes widened as recognition crossed her face.

“Sir, I—”

“What ward?” I snapped again.

Ramiro stepped beside me smoothly before the poor woman completely dissolved from panic. “Ward nine,” he said quickly after glancing at his phone. “That’s the room they texted.”

I moved before the words had fully left his mouth.

My stride turned brutal and fast down the brightly lit corridor, long legs eating up the distance.

The sterile hospital smell clawed into my lungs.

My pulse pounded so violently against my ribs it almost hurt.

Loretta is here.

In pain.

And she asked for me.

After eight months of silence, she called for me.

We rounded the hallway corner sharply just as a doctor burst out of Ward Nine carrying a tray of bloodied surgical instruments.

The metallic scent hit me instantly.

Every instinct inside me detonated.

My walk turned into a sprint.

“What is happening to my wife?” I barked, fury and panic colliding beneath the words.

The sound echoed violently through the corridor.

The doctor looked up abruptly, exhaustion visible across his face beneath the surgical mask hanging loose around his neck.

“You’re Mr. Perez?”

“I am her husband,” I said sharply, losing the last thread of composure. “Why is there blood?”

The doctor immediately shifted sideways to block the ward entrance.

Bad move.

“Sir, you need to remain calm—”

I ignored the rest. One second I was standing there, the next I was forcing my way past him toward the delivery room.

The doctor grabbed my arm sharply. “You cannot enter right now. Your wife... she...”

I shoved him hard enough that he stumbled backward into the wall with a startled curse.

“Do not touch me.”

“Boss.” Ramiro’s voice came sharply behind me just before his grip locked around my arms from the back.

He was the only living man permitted to restrain me and survive it.

“It’s too late,” he said quietly.

“What exactly is too late?” I snapped, the restraint in my voice fracturing completely.

A sickening thought clawed through me then—that they knew something I did not. Something about Loretta.

I strained against Ramiro’s grip with growing violence, patience no longer existing within me.

Something dark and savage surged beneath my skin, and then I tore myself free.

This time nobody tried stopping me.

Not Ramiro.

Not even security.

I stepped toward the ward entrance slowly now, breathing hard, every heartbeat hammering violently against my ribs.

Then I heard a gunshot ring out.

And immediately after—an agonized scream rips through the room behind the door.