The music was so loud inside the private club in San Pedro Garza García that the walls seemed to breathe with the bass.
Champagne bottles sweated across the VIP table. Neon lights slid over black leather couches. Laughter bounced from one corner to another. The whole room smelled like expensive perfume, tobacco smoke, mezcal, and the kind of bad decisions rich men make when they think nothing can touch them.
And Mateo sat in the center of it all like a king.
His jacket was open. His tie was gone. His glass was never empty. Valeria, his mistress, was curled against him with one manicured hand resting on his chest, smiling the way women smile when they know a man is trying to impress everyone except the one person who matters.
Around him, his friends kept raising their glasses, feeding his ego, laughing too hard at everything he said.
Then his phone lit up on the table.
Wife.
Again.
It was the tenth call in less than thirty minutes.
Valeria let out a dramatic sigh and leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear. “Are you seriously not going to answer? She’s been calling all night. That ringtone is ruining the mood.”
Mateo looked down at the screen and laughed.
Not nervous. Not guilty.
Cold.
Careless.
“Leave her,” he said, taking another drink. “She’s dramatic.”
The men around him chuckled.
Mateo leaned back deeper into the couch, completely relaxed, completely certain the world would still be waiting for him tomorrow.
“You know how women get when they’re pregnant,” he said. “Everything is a crisis. She probably wants tacos at midnight or wants me to come home and rub her swollen feet.”