We walked down the quiet, tree-lined streets of Polanco in total silence. The morning sun was crisp, filtering through the jacaranda trees, but the air felt heavy, almost suffocating. Alejandro was wearing nothing but his slacks and the button-down shirt he had hurriedly grabbed, his feet bare inside his loafers.
He was a prince who had just walked out of his castle, and I was the girl who had accidentally torn it down.
“Alejandro,” I choked out, stopping on the sidewalk. The tears were burning my eyes. “What did you do? Go back. Please, go back. You don’t know what it’s like to have nothing. You don’t know what it’s like to wonder if you can afford the metro, or if your family will have enough to eat. I can’t let you do this for me.”
He stopped, turning to face me. He didn’t look back at the mansion. He looked down at our joined hands, his thumb gently wiping away a tear falling down my cheek.
“I didn’t do it for you, Carmen,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “I did it for me. For five years, my mother has used that inheritance like a leash. She chose my career, she chose my friends, she was currently choosing a woman for me to marry just to merge two corporate boards. If I stayed in that house, I would have died inside. Last night… last night was the first time I felt alive.”
But reality is a cruel master, and it didn’t take long to find us.
By midday, Alejandro’s phone died. Not from a lack of battery, but because Doña Beatriz had remotely deactivated his corporate account and cut his service. When we went to a bank to withdraw whatever personal savings he thought he had, the teller looked at Alejandro with a mixture of pity and fear.
“I’m sorry, Señor Mendoza,” the teller whispered, looking around nervously. “The primary accounts are tied to the family trust. Doña Beatriz placed a legal freeze on them two hours ago. We cannot authorize any withdrawals.”
Alejandro stood frozen in the pristine bank lobby. For the first time, I saw a flicker of panic in his eyes. He had no cash. No working phone. No car.
We had to take the crowded, suffocating collective bus back to my tiny, rented room on the outskirts of the city. It was a world Alejandro had only ever seen through the tinted windows of his armored SUV. The smell of exhaust, the loud vendors, the crushing weight of the working-class crowd—he looked like an astronaut who had suddenly dropped onto a foreign planet.
Yet, he didn’t complain. Not once.
When we got to my room—a space barely large enough for a twin bed, a small stove, and my business textbooks—he sat on the edge of the mattress and looked around.
“It’s small,” I said, a deep sense of shame washing over me.
“It’s quiet,” he corrected softly, looking up at me with a tired smile. “And my mother isn’t here.”
For the next three weeks, we lived a life born of pure survival. I went back to my night classes, and during the day, I managed to find a temporary cleaning job at a local hotel. Alejandro, a man with a master’s degree in corporate finance from Europe, spent his days walking the pavement of Mexico City, submitting resumes.
But Doña Beatriz’s shadow was long, and her malice was infinite.
Every time Alejandro made it to a second-round interview at a major financial firm, the offer would mysteriously vanish by the next morning.
“Your mother’s maiden name is on the building of the regulatory commission, Alejandro,” a sympathetic hiring manager finally confessed to him in secret. “She made a call. She told the partners that if anyone hires you, she will pull all Mendoza Group assets from their portfolio. You’re blacklisted in this city.”
When Alejandro told me that night, sitting at my small wooden table over a plate of simple beans and tortillas, my blood ran cold.
“She’s going to starve us out,” I whispered, my hands trembling. “She wants to watch you break so you’ll crawl back and beg for her forgiveness. She wants to prove that I ruined you.”
Alejandro looked at his hands, rougher now than they had been three weeks ago. A dark, dangerous look crossed his face. “She thinks money is the only language that matters. She forgets that I am the one who designed the Mendoza Group’s overseas investment structure. I know where the foundations are buried.”
