Victor sighed.
“I did nothing to your daughter.”
Dad looked at Elian.
Elian immediately raised both hands.
“She’s twisting this.
We had an argument.”
Mara flinched.
My mother saw it.
She stood too.
“What did you do?” she whispered.
Elian looked around at the guests as though he could recruit them into his version of events.
“She was hysterical.
I tried to calm her down.”
Mara’s face changed.
Fear did not disappear.
Something else simply became stronger.
“You held me against the bedroom door,” she said.
Elian stared at her.
“You told me nobody would believe me because everyone knew how lucky I was to be marrying you.”
“Mara—”
“You took pictures afterward and told me I looked dramatic.”
His mouth closed.
Victor turned sharply toward his son.
That was interesting.
Until that moment, I had wondered how much Victor knew about what Elian had done physically and how much he had chosen not to ask.
His reaction answered part of the question.
He had known enough to threaten Mara into silence.
Maybe he had not known everything.
It did not make him innocent.
It only made the family uglier in a different way.
Victor recovered quickly.
“Everyone needs to leave,” he announced.
Nobody moved.
The wedding guests had come expecting champagne and vows.
Now they were watching a powerful man discover that authority works only when people agree to obey it.
Victor turned to my father.
“You and I have contracts that become very uncomfortable if this continues.”
There it was.
Not in a private office.
Not buried inside an email.
In front of a room full of witnesses.
Dad stared at him.
“You are threatening my company because my daughter won’t marry your son?”
Victor gave a thin smile.
“I am reminding you that business relationships have consequences.”
I almost wished he had stopped there.
Instead, arrogance did what arrogance usually does when frightened.
It kept talking.
“You owe more than you can repay without our cooperation,” Victor said.
“Your largest contracts rely on relationships I control.
If Mara wants to cause a scandal, your family should understand the cost.”
A man near the back of the room stood.
Victor saw him.
The color drained from his face again.
The man had not arrived as a wedding guest.
He was one of the people who had returned my call in the middle of the night.
