Alejandro stared at the sickening brown puddle soaking into the pristine white marble. The pungent, chemical smell of industrial acid hit him instantly.
“I was almost finished,” Elena choked out, frantically scrubbing the ruined floor. She looked up, tears cutting through the grime on her face. “Is it really you?”
Before he could answer, Vivian’s heels clicked lazily against the modern glass staircase. She took an arrogant sip of her red wine. “You’re back,” she purred. She pointed her free hand at Elena with a smug, dismissive wave. “Don’t mind that girl, she’s too slow.”
Vivian smiled, convinced she held all the cards. For three years, she had kept Alejandro’s missing wife trapped in plain sight as a humiliated servant—the ultimate, cruel trophy of her hostile takeover. She thought Elena was just a broken maid failing at her chores.
She was wrong.
Alejandro’s eyes darted back to the acidic brown sludge. Half-dissolved in the mess was a steel syndicate ring. The exact ring worn by Vivian’s top enforcer—the assassin secretly hired to ambush Alejandro tonight.
Elena hadn’t spent three years scrubbing floors. She had spent three years learning Vivian’s blind spots, waiting for her husband to walk through those doors. She wasn’t trembling from fear; she was trembling from the adrenaline of quietly butchering the man sent to kill him.
The pieces violently snapped together.
Alejandro’s shock hardened into pure, lethal rage. He stepped past his kneeling wife and marched straight toward Vivian. He stopped inches away, his eyes locked onto hers with terrifying, ice-cold intensity.
He tapped the hidden comms unit in his ear.
“Destroy everything,” he commanded.
Vivian gasped violently, her eyes wide with absolute horror. She finally realized the truth: Elena was never her prisoner. She was her Trojan Horse.