Alejandro didn’t rush to his wife.
He didn’t drop to his knees.
Instead, his eyes locked onto Vivian.
Vivian took a slow, arrogant sip of her wine. “Right under your nose, Alejandro. For three years, the ghost you’ve been hunting was scrubbing my boots. Poetic, isn’t it?”
Elena stayed frozen on the marble. She looked up at Alejandro, her eyes begging for the salvation she had prayed for every single night in the dark.
“Is it really you?” Elena whispered, her voice cracking with desperate hope.
Alejandro took a slow step forward.
Then another.
But he didn’t reach for Elena.
He lunged at the stairs.
In a blur of black leather and sudden, explosive violence, Alejandro’s gloved hand shot out, seizing Vivian by the throat.
Vivian’s smug smile instantly vanished. Her eyes bulged in pure, suffocating panic. She choked, knuckles turning white as she desperately gripped her wine glass.
Alejandro leaned in, his face inches from hers. The look in his eyes wasn’t the relief of a loving husband. It was pure, cold-blooded murder.
“I didn’t spend three years and ten million dollars searching for a maid,” Alejandro hissed, his voice dropping to a lethal, bone-chilling whisper. “I paid you to bury her.”
Vivian’s face drained of color. The horrifying truth clicked. She hadn’t captured a prize to mock him with. She had kept alive the one witness Alejandro needed dead.
Elena stopped breathing. The husband she thought had come to save her was the monster she had tried to escape.
Alejandro leaned even closer, his tone sinister and absolute.
“Destroy everything.”
He violently shoved Vivian away and walked out the front door. Vivian staggered, gasping wildly for air, paralyzed by absolute terror, knowing the men waiting outside were about to burn the mansion to the ground—with both women inside.