My daughter.
My chest tightened violently around the words.
There was no denying it.
It took seconds—one glance at those gray eyes, identical to mine—for certainty to slam into me. The child had my features. My face, stamped in miniature. A delicate, innocent version of myself.
Daughter.
Valentina had a daughter—mydaughter—and she had hidden her for five years.
The fury she ignited in me was indescribable. A scorching heat flooding my veins, hatred burning like hot iron.
But beneath it… something even more dangerous.
A deep, vicious pain.
The cruel memory of everything I had once felt for her.
I had loved Valentina with the desperate intensity of foolish, naïve men.
Back then, I believed she was the only real thing in a world built on masks and illusions. She was truth. Light. Clean air in a suffocating room. Bright color in a world I’d only known in shades of gray.
I was obsessed with her.
Completely. Recklessly.
And all of it had been a lie.
A con, executed by the only woman I had ever allowed into the deepest parts of me.
My mind snapped back—painfully—to five years ago.
The morning of my wedding.
A morning that had started perfect. I’d woken up happy, in love, certain of the future we were about to build.
Until my grandmother walked into my room.
Her expression was so hard it made my hands freeze on my tie as I stood in front of the mirror.
“What is it, Nonna?” I asked, alarmed, when I saw the thick envelope in her aged hands.
She didn’t answer right away. She simply held it out, eyes steady—filled with that cold arrogance that belonged to her alone.
“I wish I didn’t have to do this,” she said at last. “But you left me no choice. I warned you—countless times. And still, like afool, you insisted on going through with this absurdity, risking the humiliation of our family name.”
Something cold spread through my chest before I even opened the envelope.
Then I pulled out the photographs.
The printed messages.
And my entire life collapsed in seconds.
Valentina—my Valentina—in another man’s arms.
Messages between them. Explicit conversations about money. About the “idiot in love” who had fallen for it. About how she would secure the future she wanted with my money.
