Chapter 8 - WHY VALERIA WAS THERE
Alejandro asked Lucia and Sloan to leave the room. Valeria said they should stay because the truth would matter to all of them, but Alejandro refused. Whatever she was about to admit belonged first to the relationship she had built with him.
Valeria met Isabel three years earlier while working at Meridian Risk & Forensics. Isabel hired the firm privately after discovering irregularities in Mateo’s trust administration and possible undisclosed relationships between Sebastian and investors interested in Vega Hospitality.
The assignment lasted only six weeks.
Isabel terminated it abruptly after receiving her cancer diagnosis.
She told Valeria she no longer had energy to fight both illness and a family governance war. She wanted copies preserved but asked Meridian not to contact Alejandro because she feared he would dismiss the concern as another conflict between Isabel and Sebastian.
Valeria obeyed.
After Isabel died, the file remained archived.
“So how did you end up in my life?” Alejandro asked.
Valeria looked at him. “By accident at first.”
They met at a charity auction eight months after Isabel’s death. Alejandro approached her because he recognized Meridian’s name on her consulting biography but could not remember why it seemed familiar. Valeria recognized him immediately and said nothing about Isabel.
They met again.
Then again.
The relationship became personal.
“That’s when it stopped being an accident,” Alejandro said.
“Yes.”
“You dated me knowing my dead wife hired you to investigate my family.”
“Yes.”
The answer hurt more because Valeria did not qualify it.
She said she told herself Isabel’s old file was closed and that professional confidentiality prevented disclosure. Later, when Alejandro began experiencing memory gaps, she reopened her private notes and saw similarities with concerns Isabel had raised about unusual medical-capacity provisions.
Instead of telling Alejandro everything, Valeria investigated quietly.
The restaurant trap came from that decision.
Alejandro stood and walked to the window. He now understood why Valeria recognized the pattern before anyone else. It also meant she had been deciding, repeatedly, which truths he could handle.
The central theme of the conspiracy had reached their relationship too.
Lucia returned after Alejandro called her back. When Valeria explained Isabel’s original investigation, Lucia expected Alejandro to throw her out.
He did not.
He also did not forgive her.
“From now on, nobody protects me by hiding information,” he said. “Not Sebastian. Not Lucia. Not you.”
Valeria accepted it.
Then she gave them the part of Isabel’s investigation that created the midpoint reversal.
Three years earlier, Isabel did not believe Sebastian was acting alone.
She believed Lucia was helping him.
Lucia stared at her.
The evidence involved a series of votes Lucia cast in favor of expanding Sebastian’s trust authority. Isabel interpreted them as deliberate cooperation. Now everyone knew Lucia herself had unexplained periods and questionable signatures.
The old evidence had been misread.
Sebastian had been manipulating the siblings for longer than any of them realized.
One Meridian surveillance report showed Sebastian meeting privately with Dr. Paul Renner two years before the first known sedative episode. Another showed Thomas Keene, Sebastian’s driver, delivering sealed medical packages to a concierge clinic used by the Vega family.
Isabel had been close to the mechanism.
She simply interpreted the target incorrectly.
That changed Chapters 1 through 7. Lucia was not the sister helping Sebastian drug Alejandro so she could take control. She had been an earlier target whose compromised votes made Sebastian stronger.
The siblings had spent years blaming one another for decisions neither fully remembered making.
Sloan then found the financial connection Isabel had sought. Meridian’s archived notes referenced a Cayman investment vehicle called NLC Partners II.
The public name meant nothing.
The internal abbreviation did.
Northline Capital.
Sebastian’s family trust had committed money to NLC Partners II through a private feeder fund.
If Northline bought Vega Hospitality, Sebastian did not merely earn legal fees.
He participated financially in the buyer.
The sale he was engineering would make him extraordinarily wealthy.
More importantly, it would reward him for lowering the value and stability of the company he was supposedly protecting.
The objective changed.
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They no longer needed to prove someone was drugging Alejandro.
They needed to stop Sebastian from obtaining control before Monday’s incapacity review.
