" By one in the morning" Brenna was on the phone with Lupita, pacing the length of her closet in her robe, voice pitched somewhere between rage and self-pity. "He wants a divorce," she said. "Can you believe the nerve of him?" There was a pause on the other end, and then Lupita's voice came through bright with delight. "Finally! Brenna, this is good news. This is the best news I've heard all month." "It is not good news, Lupita, he's trying to humiliate me—" "He's trying to get his hands on your money, is what he's trying to do." Lupita's tone sharpened into something professional now, the divorce attorney voice she used on clients twice a week. "Men like that always wait until there's real money on the table. Don't worry. I'll draft the agreement myself tonight. He won't see a single cent, I promise you that." Brenna exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. That, at least, was something to hold onto. Tomorrow she was set to sign the cooperation agree

Lupita had gone very, very still. "I don't—" she started, and then stopped, because nothing about the sentence she wanted to say made sense against what she was looking at. Six drivers, standing at attention beside six cars. A butler bowing to a man she'd just called broke to his face. An old man on the arm of a beautiful woman, calling him sir like it cost him something not to fall to his knees doing it. Adrian looked at her over Riley's head, and for the first time all morning, his voice carried something like warning. "If I ever hear you speak to my daughter that way again, I'll make sure you regret it in ways your law degree can't fix." He didn't wait for a response. He walked past her, down the steps, and the old man — Marcus, Lupita would later learn, though right now he was just an impossible stranger in an impossibly expensive coat — reached out both hands like he was afraid Adrian might vanish if he didn't touch him first. The convoy pulled away. Lupita stood alone on

"The real affair," Adrian said, almost gently, "is the one you're having with him. Aurelia and I met an hour ago. You'd know that if you'd bothered asking a single honest question in the last five minutes instead of performing for an audience." Something in Brenna's face cracked at the word performing, because it landed exactly where it was aimed. Of everything she could be accused of — greed, coldness, choosing a boardroom over her own daughter's bedtime — nothing frightened her quite like the word adulterer, spoken out loud, in a lobby full of people who'd repeat it by dinner. "Liar." Her voice pitched up, brittle at the edges. "You expect anyone here to believe you just met a Ramirez this morning and she's already hanging off your arm? What's your next fantasy, Adrian — that she's the one who invited you to dinner? Go on. Say it. Let everyone hear how far you'll stretch a story." "She is from the Ramirez family," Adrian said, unbothered, like he was correcting a typo rather t

Melissa didn't lift her head. She couldn't, not really — every part of her still braced for the possibility that she'd misheard, that Aurelia's name was some cruel coincidence and not the truth currently rearranging her entire career on the lobby floor. "Please," she said again, voice cracking somewhere in the middle of the word. "Mr. Ramirez, I'll do anything to make this right. Anything at all." Marcus looked down at her the way a man looks at a stain he's just noticed on an otherwise good coat. "You're fired," he said, flat, final, no cruelty in it because he didn't need any — the words did all the work themselves. "You put your hands on my granddaughter and disrespected the man I owe my family's entire fortune to. There's no version of 'making this right' that ends with you still holding a set of keys to my hotel." He didn't wait for a response. He turned instead to Adrian, and something in his posture folded, the swagger of five minutes ago replaced by an older man's genuine

For a moment Brenna genuinely believed she'd misheard him. She let out a short laugh, brittle at the edges, and glanced toward the cameras like she needed to confirm they hadn't caught whatever strange joke had just been made at her expense. "Very funny," she said, voice pitched for the room, still smiling the way she'd smiled all night. "You almost had me there. Let's not do that in front of the press, though — save it for after the signing." The manager didn't smile back. If anything, his expression hardened further, the last traces of the warm, flattering man from twenty minutes ago completely gone, replaced by something closer to contempt. "I'm not joking, Ms. Whitmore. The Ramirez family has decided to withdraw from the cooperation. Effective immediately." The room's temperature seemed to drop by degrees. Somewhere near the back, a photographer lowered his camera slightly, sensing that whatever story he'd walked in expecting to cover had just quietly become a different one.