Chapter 3 - The Matriarch’s ShadowI unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open slowly.
Rowena Varden stood on the welcome mat, water dripping from the brim of her dark wool coat. She didn't smile, nor did she look frail. Despite her eighty-plus years, she carried herself with the terrifying, unyielding posture of an empress who had survived a century of corporate backstabbing.
“May I come in, Lucía?” she asked, her voice dry, gravelly, and entirely steady. “Or do you plan to leave me standing in the rain like Eduardo left your mother twenty-five years ago?”
Mom gasped from the living room, pushing herself off the sofa. “Rowena? My God... I thought you were—”
“Shut away in a sanitarium or dead of old age? That’s what Eduardo told the society columnists,” Rowena finished, stepping past me into the apartment with a sharp tap of her cane against the linoleum floor. She unbuttoned her coat and tossed it over a chair as if she owned the place. “It’s amazing what people will believe when you pay them enough to look the other way.”
I closed the door and locked it behind her, my mind spinning. “How do you know my name? How do you know where we live?”
Rowena turned around, her sharp, dark eyes sweeping over our modest living room before landing squarely on me. “I have been watching Eduardo and his pathetic excuse for a family for a very long time, my dear. And today, I watched from a parked car outside the Larkmore Grand as my grand-nephew Adrián proved himself to be just as rotten, spineless, and cruel as his father.”
She reached into her deep leather handbag and pulled out a digital tablet, tapping the screen twice.
The display lit up, projecting a live security feed of the Larkmore Grand’s bridal suite from just four hours earlier—specifically, the moment Camila chopped my mother’s hair and Adrián told me to get over it.
“I saw every second of it,” Rowena said, her lips thinning into a hard, dangerous line. “Eduardo thought he could bury the past by cutting off my funding and isolating me in the country estate. He thought the Varden name belonged to him and his greedy little wife Clara. They forgot one tiny detail.”
Rowena walked over to the coffee table and dropped her own manila folder right beside mine.
“The Varden empire was never theirs,” she declared softly. “It was built on stolen ground. And legally, it belongs right back where it started.”
Mom sank back onto the sofa, her hands trembling as she looked at the elderly woman she hadn't seen since she was a young girl. “Rowena... my father always said you disappeared after the audit. He thought Eduardo had protected you.”
“Eduardo didn't protect me; he locked me away the moment I tried to investigate the missing land deeds in 1999,” Rowena said, pulling off her leather gloves. “He declared me legally incapacitated with the help of a corrupt magistrate. But old age makes people careless, and wealth makes them arrogant. For the past five years, I’ve been quietly gathering every single signature, bank transfer, and forged document Eduardo used to steal your inheritance, Elena.”
She turned her gaze back to me, her eyes softening just a fraction, carrying a profound, heavy warmth.
“And you, Lucía. You walked out on that wedding with more spine than anyone in my family has shown in three generations. You dropped that ring on the floor like the piece of trash it was. That told me everything I needed to know.”
I crossed my arms, still processing the sheer magnitude of what was happening. “Why are you telling us this now? What do you want?”
May you like
Rowena smiled—a slow, fierce, terrifyingly joyful grin.
“I want to burn Eduardo’s empire to the ground,” she said simply. “And I want you, Lucía, to hold the match.”
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