Valeria smirked. “So needy.”
Mateo picked up the phone, rejected the call, switched it to airplane mode, and tossed it onto the couch like it was nothing.
Then he tightened his arm around Valeria’s waist and lifted his glass high.
“To my last night of freedom before becoming a father.”
Everyone cheered.
No one in that room knew that several miles away, inside a silent mansion in the most exclusive part of the city, his wife was lying at the bottom of a marble staircase fighting to stay alive.
Camila was eight months pregnant.
She had only gotten up for a glass of water.
One dizzy step.
One hand that missed the railing.
One violent fall that turned the whole staircase into a blur of white stone, pain, and panic.
Now she was on the cold floor in her nightgown, her hair half across her face, one slipper missing, her phone cracked in her trembling hand.
Her body hurt in places she couldn’t even name. Pain kept tearing through her abdomen in brutal waves. Her baby, who had always kicked with a steady rhythm, was moving strangely now—jerking, then going still for terrifying seconds that felt too long.
“Mateo…” she whispered, barely able to breathe.
She pressed call.
Rejected.
She called again.
Voicemail.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Each failed call felt less like neglect and more like a sentence being handed down.
Tears slipped into her hairline as she tried to drag herself across the polished floor, but the pain shot through her so sharply that she cried out and nearly blacked out.
The mansion around her was enormous. Beautiful. Expensive. Empty.
The walls were high. The windows were sealed. The staff had been dismissed for the weekend because Mateo wanted privacy. Even the security gate was locked on night protocol. No ambulance could enter unless someone opened it from inside or remotely.
And Mateo was not answering.
Camila lay there shaking and understood something no wife should ever understand.
She might die in the house he had bought to impress other people.
Alone.
Begging for the man who had abandoned her.
With numb fingers, she unlocked her phone again. Her vision kept swimming. Her breathing turned shallow. Blood had started to spread beneath her hip in a dark, slow stain that made her heart pound harder.
She opened her contacts.
Names blurred.
Then one name came into focus.
Alejandro.
Mateo’s former best friend.
