Chapter 4 - The Investigation Begins
Inside the cool, marble-floored foyer of the villa, the luxury felt suddenly suffocating. Every expensive painting, every piece of designer furniture, and every marble archway now looked like a facade masking a prison.
I led Isabella upstairs to her bathroom, running warm water into the basin with meticulous care. Kneeling beside her, I took her small, ruined hands in mine. The blisters were weeping, the raw skin exposed and tender.
"Does it hurt, sweetheart?" I asked, my voice thick with a sorrow I struggled to suppress.
Isabella shook her head, staring down at the water. "I'm okay, Dad. Really."
"You don't have to be brave right now," I murmured, gently washing the dirt and grime away with a soft cloth. "Tell me how long this has been going on."
Isabella hesitated, her eyes darting toward the open door. "Ever since you left for Dubai. Beatriz... she said we needed to cut back on the household staff to save money. She fired the housekeepers and the gardener."
"And she made you take their place?"
"At first it was just folding laundry," Isabella whispered, tears finally slipping down her cheeks, catching in the corners of her mouth. "Then it was cleaning the floors. Then taking out the trash. If I made a mistake, or if I cried, she said she would call you and tell you I was a bad daughter, and that you would never love me again."
The rage building inside my chest was a living, breathing thing. It took every ounce of executive discipline I possessed not to shatter the glass mirror above the sink. Beatriz had not just exploited my daughter; she had systematically broken her mind, twisting a child's natural desire for love into an instrument of fear.
"Listen to me, Isabella," I said, holding her face gently between my hands so she had to look straight into my eyes. "Everything she told you was a lie. You could never be a bad daughter. I love you more than anything in this world, and nobody will ever hurt you in this house again. Do you understand?"
Isabella blinked, a fragile spark of hope finally breaking through the heavy shroud of terror in her expression. She nodded slowly.
Once she was bathed, dressed in clean clothes, and tucked safely into her bed with a comforting story, I walked down the grand staircase.
Beatriz was waiting in the study. She had poured herself a glass of scotch, her hands visibly shaking as she held the crystal tumbler. When she heard my footsteps, she turned around, her face instantly shifting into an expression of wounded innocence.
"Declan, please," she began, stepping forward. "You’re blowing this completely out of proportion. Children need discipline. They need structure. If you spoil her—"
"Save it, Beatriz," I interrupted, my voice dropping to a quiet, lethal register that made her freeze mid-sentence.
I walked over to the mahogany desk, pulling out my laptop. I didn't yell. I didn't threaten. I simply opened the security archive logs connected to the villa's high-definition internal and external surveillance grid—a system she didn't even realize recorded twenty-four-hour motion data to an independent cloud server in Madrid.
"For the past three months," I said calmly, turning the screen toward her, "while I was building a four-hundred-million-euro portfolio in the Middle East, my eight-year-old daughter was working an average of six hours a day. Scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets, hauling industrial garbage, and starving on scraps because you locked the pantry."
Beatriz’s face went chalk white. She stared at the screen, where a timestamped video loop showed Isabella dragging heavy bags across the terrace in the pouring rain weeks earlier, while Beatriz lounged on the couch eating grapes.
"You... you hacked the local system?" she stammered, her voice cracking.
"It's my house, Beatriz," I replied coldly. "Every brick, every wire, every security protocol belongs to me. Just like the accounts holding your personal allowance, your credit lines, and your vehicle registrations."
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Her eyes widened in sudden, stark terror as the reality of her position finally crashed down upon her. "Declan, you can't do anything rash! We’re married! We have assets together! If you pull this into a legal battle, it will ruin your public image—your company's stock will take a hit!"
"My company survived market crashes and hostile takeovers," I told her, standing up from the desk and towering over her. "Do you honestly think a social-climbing parasite like you poses a threat to my empire?"
