I would have her destruction.
EIGHT
VALENTINA MUNIZ
His words hit me like a blade—cold, precise—tearing through skin and reopening wounds I’d spent years convincing myself had healed.
For one long, agonizing second, everything around me froze.
I was back in that cathedral, standing on the altar in a perfect white dress, drowning in public humiliation under hundreds of eyes filled with judgment and pity.
His eyes most of all.
Cold. Cruel. Empty of any trace of the man I had once loved.
Tears burned behind my eyes, threatening to spill. I tightened my grip around the sign until the wooden stick bit into my palms, using the sting to anchor myself back in the present.
After all the years I’d spent erasing Enrico Ferrara—scrubbing him from my life, my thoughts, my feelings—he was here.
Right in front of me.
I had sworn I’d never allow that man to have power over me again.
And yet seeing him in flesh and arrogance, so close and so untouchable, made me realize how naive that vow had been.
One look was enough to make my legs tremble, my heart hammer too fast.
Enrico watched me with absolute cold, cruelty curled into the corners of his perfect mouth—exactly as he had on the day he destroyed me at the altar. He expected me to shrink. To crumble. To break the way I had before.
And every fiber of my body begged me to.
But I forced my mind to remember: I wasn’t that girl anymore.
I was a mother.
The mother of the daughter he rejected before she even took her first breath.
I squared my shoulders. Lifted my chin. I pulled courage from every place inside me where fear had once lived. My eyes still shone with tears I refused to shed—but my voice came out steady, clear, and defiant.
“And you’re exactly the same, Enrico,” I said. “Arrogant. Cruel. Incapable of seeing anything beyond your own ego.” I held his gaze, unblinking. “But this time you don’t win. Not here.”
A flash of surprise crossed his eyes—quick, almost invisible—before it was replaced by something colder.
Fury.
He wasn’t used to being challenged. Not by anyone he considered beneath him.
And especially not by me.
His expression sharpened into something dangerous. He took a controlled half-step closer, meant to intimidate, meant to make my instincts scream.
My heart pounded harder.
I didn’t move an inch.
“You still don’t understand, do you?” he murmured, his voice a low threat meant only for me. “There is no scenario in this world where you beat me, Valentina. Not in this. Not in anything.” His mouth curved, faint and cruel. “I exposed the fraud you are once. I won’t hesitate to do it again. Accept it. Save yourself the embarrassment.”
The words cut—but this time I used the pain like fuel.
