Two Hours Before My Wedding, My Fiancé Let His Best Friend Butcher My Mother’s Waist-Length Hair—When He Told Me Not to Make a Scene, I Took Off My Ring and Walked Away… / Chapter 3 / 68

Chapter 3 - The Ledger in the Safe

The penthouse smelled of cedarwood, expensive cologne, and the white lilies Adrián had ordered to be delivered this morning as a hollow romantic gesture. The grandeur of the open-concept living room, with its floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the smoggy skyline of the capital, felt utterly repulsive to me now. Every piece of imported Italian furniture had been chosen to flatter his ego, not our home.

I kicked off my soaked slippers and went straight down the long corridor toward the master study. My primary goal was my father’s hand-bound textile ledger—an ancestral record of traditional weaving patterns and dye formulas that had been passed down through four generations of our family, the very basis of my high-end sustainable fashion brand. Adrián had insisted on keeping it in his biometric fireproof safe "for insurance purposes."

I kneeled before the heavy black safe hidden beneath the mahogany credenza. I pressed my thumb to the scanner.

*Access Denied.*

A cold knot tightened in my chest. Adrián had told me months ago that he had programmed both of our biometrics into the system. He had lied.

I took a deep breath, forcing my hands to stop shaking. Adrián was an arrogant man; his creativity was notoriously limited. I reached for the digital keypad under the sliding panel and punched in Camila's birthday: *0-9-1-4.*

*Click.*

The green light illuminated the dark recess of the safe.

A bitter, humorless laugh escaped my throat. Not our anniversary. Not his mother’s birthday. Camila’s. He had used her birthday to lock away the treasures of our shared life.

I swung the heavy door open. My father’s ledger was there, its weathered brown leather spine instantly recognizable. But as I pulled it out, my fingers caught on a thick manila folder labeled in bold, red marker: *PROJECT MARIPOSA – PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL.*

Mariposa was the brand name of my independent fashion label—a venture I had built from nothing over the last six years, which had recently secured a multi-million-dollar distribution partnership in Paris. Adrián had offered his firm's legal team to finalize the international incorporation papers.

Curiosity, dark and sharp, pulled at my fingers. I flipped open the folder.

The first document was not an incorporation charter. It was an irrevocable deed of transfer.

My eyes scanned the dense legal jargon, my breath catching in my throat as the words rearranged themselves into a nightmare:

*“...hereby assigns all intellectual property, proprietary weaving techniques, pattern archives, and international trademark rights belonging to Lucía Morales to the holding entity Navarro-Vega Ventures S.A., effective upon the solemnization of marriage...”*

Vega. That was Camila’s family name.

I flipped the page frantically, my heart thumping against my ribs so hard it bruised. Attached to the back was a personal promissory note signed by Adrián and Bruno Vega—Camila’s brother.

Adrián had run his boutique real estate development branch into eight million dollars of debt through reckless speculative buying in Tulum. To cover the shortfall and prevent his father from discovering the catastrophic loss, he had entered into a private agreement with the Vega family. The terms were spelled out in cold, unfeeling black ink:

The Vega family would clear Adrián’s personal liabilities. In return, upon our marriage, Lucía Morales’s luxury label and patent portfolio would be absorbed by Navarro-Vega Ventures, with Camila Vega appointed as the lifetime Creative Director and sole signatory over the European licensing contracts.

The hair. The dress. The endless micro-aggressions over the past six months.

Camila hadn't cut my mother's hair out of petty spite alone. She had done it to break her spirit. They wanted my mother humiliated, silenced, and driven out of the business before the vows were even exchanged. They wanted me isolated, broken, and legally bound to a contract that would reduce me to an unpaid artisan while Camila paraded my family's heritage down the runways of Milan and Paris.

"You bastard," I whispered to the empty room, tears of fury finally spilling over my lashes, hot and stinging. "You miserable, soulless bastard."