My in-laws tore my clothes off in front of high society to humiliate the “peasant girl.” They didn’t know that my father, the man they called a “peasant,” would arrive in five minutes to ruin them forever.

Chapter 1: The sound of betrayal and the silence of a coward

The whisper of the emerald silk was the only thing that managed to silence the conversations in the main hall of the Montepegro mansion.

We were in the heart of San Pedro Garza García, Nuevo León. The richest municipality in all of Mexico.

 Uп lυgar doпde tυ valía como ser hυmaпo se medida por los ceros eп tυ cυeпta baпcaria, el código postal de tυ residencia y la apellido qυe figura eп tυ certificado de пacimiпto.

That night, the rain threatened to fall on the French tiled roofs of the house, but outside, the atmosphere was perfect. Too perfect.

It smelled like designer perfumes that cost what the average family earned in a year.

It smelled of exotic floral arrangements imported from Holland, white truffle capes and Dom Périgopo champagne that flowed like water.

I was wearing an emerald green dress that I had bought with my savings. It wasn’t from an ultra-luxurious European brand, but it was pretty, elegant, and, above all, decent.

 I spent three hours fixing my hair and putting on makeup, praying in silence that, please, that night my husband’s family would accept me.

What a beautiful place it was.

The snap of the fabric was a soft sound. It was a violet, sharp, and humiliating cry that pierced the classical music that was playing in the background.

Eп хпa fraccióп de secυпdo, marca el asesiпato de mi iпoceпcia y el fiп absolυto de mi digпidad.

I felt the air conditioning in the enormous living room, programmed to a frigid 18 degrees Celsius, hitting my bare skin.

The fabric on the back of my dress hung uselessly, torn from the neck to the hip by my own sister-in-law’s acrylic nails.

My hands, clumsy and trembling from the panic, moved impulsively towards my chest.

She crossed desperately, trying to cover the black lace bra and the skin of my abdomen that my mother-in-l

When our eyes crossed, the little air I had left in my lungs vanished.

His eyes, which once looked at me with tenderness, which promised to protect me from the classism of his family, were now completely dead. Empty. Icy.

It was the eyes of a strange calculator that had just realized that you had made a bad investment and needed to minimize the losses.

—Go away, Elepa —he murmured. His voice was dull, devoid of any emotion.

“Get out of my house right now, before my mother calls the police and you spend the next ten years rotting in Topo Chico prison.”

I felt the world stop spinning. I was overcome by vertigo.

“Leave?” I asked, my voice trembling, breaking with hysteria and disbelief, as I surveyed my own condition. “Alejandro, look at me… I’m practically naked! Your sister has ripped my clothes off! How can I leave like this?”

—That’s how you dressed this world, my dear, and that’s exactly how you’re going to abandon this house— interrupted Doña Graciela, taking a step forward and crossing her arms.

A smug, triumphant smile distorted his face, full of Botox. He had won. Finally, he had achieved what he had sought since our wedding day: to destroy me.

“You’re leaving with empty hands. Not a penny, not the jewels you pretended to steal, not the clothes my son bought you,” the matriarch continued, savoring every word.

 “Because that’s what you are and always will be… a pac.”

A damned and conceited village girl who thought she was Cenicieta’s tale and thought she could rub shoulders with the royalty of San Pedro.

He snapped his fingers in the air, a dry sound that echoed throughout the room, alerting the private security guards who were watching the large mahogany doors.

“Get her out of my sight!” Doña Graciela ordered, wrinkling her nose as if I smelled like garbage. “I’m disgusted to breathe the same air as her. And if she resists, throw her out.”

Two enormous security guards, dressed in impeccable black suits and arugula, approached me with heavy steps.

There was no delicacy. No consideration for my partial shamelessness. They grabbed my arms roughly, provoking a groan of pain, and lifted me from the ground as if I were a worthless sack of potatoes.

I tried to free myself. I fought with the few forces I had left, desperately trying to cover my torso with my hands while I dragged myself back.

“Let me go! You’re hurting me!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “Please, someone give me my coat! Alejandro, please!”

I begged for a blanket. I begged for a bath towel, for a waiter’s napkin, for the smallest and most significant show of humanity from the five rich people who were watching me.

Nobody moved.

The businessmen, dressed in suits, drank their glasses of champagne, pretending that the scene was a mere idyllic setting for their evening.

 The elegantly dressed ladies covered their mouths, laughed between their teeth, or averted their gaze with feigned modesty.

I was dragged through the long, cold marble corridor that connected the hall with the main entrance.

My bare feet slipped on the polished stone. Sobs choked me, closing my throat to the point of suffocation. My mind was a whirlwind of panic and pure pain.

The guards opened the heavy double door, solid and carved from oak, and if I improved my passage, they threw me out of the mansion.

Inexperience made me stumble. I fell face-first onto the sharp gravel of the long driveway that leads to the street.

The small gray stones pierced my palms and bare knees deeply. A sharp pain shot through my body and I felt the warm blood begin to seep from the wounds.

I stayed there lying face down.

I heard the electric whir of the heavy automatic motors. I raised my head just in time to see the enormous wrought iron gate of Montepegro’s property slowly close in front of me.

The metal bars clashed against the scepter with a loud crash, sealing themselves electrically. The sound of a gigantic fall that closed my entire life.

There I was.

Elepha.

 Doña Graciela and my sister-in-law, Camila, had just exposed themselves to the astonished gaze of more than five guests.

Fifty people of the Monterrey elite. Politicians, businessmen, heirs of centennial fortunes. All with their crystal glasses in hand, observing me as if I were a circus animal.

“Look at her!” shouted Doña Graciela.

His voice, normally a polite and passive-aggressive whisper, had become a sharp and theatrical shriek. His bloodshot eyes shone with pure malice.

With a sudden movement, Graciela raised the remains of my dress to the crowd, waving them like a war trophy that she had just torn from the body of an enemy.

“Look at the thief!” he roared, pointing at me with a trembling finger covered in white gold pins.

I felt that my legs were going to fail me at any moment.

There I was, in the pleio scepter of the great Italian marble hall, in outer clothing, humiliated to the core.

Tears began to flow without my permission. My eyes burned and ran thick down my cheeks, ruining the foundation and mascara that had taken me so long to apply, leaving black stains on my face, pale with terror.

Around me, the initial silence was broken. Laughter began.

It was cruel laughter, muffled behind impeccably manicured hands. I could hear the murmurs of disgust from the businessmen’s wives. It surrounded me like a flock of haute couture vultures, waiting to see me collapse.

—I told you, Graciela, that girl had the face of a dead fly—I heard a friend of my mother-in-law whisper. —Those ranch women have only come for one thing: to empty the safes.

Desperate, with my heart beating so hard I felt it would burst from my chest, my gaze swept around the room. I was looking for my friend. I was looking for my husband.

Αlejaпdro.

The tall, handsome, and captivating man who had sworn eternal love to me under the starry sky of my hometown.

The man for whom I had packed my life into a couple of suitcases, leaving behind the tranquility and the pure air of the Coahuila countryside to move to this cement jungle full of wolves in Ermepegildo Zegã suits.

I found it.

I was standing next to the enormous carved stone fireplace, away from the circle that had formed around me. In my right hand I held a cut crystal glass, filled with thirty-year-old Scotch whisky.

But he wasn’t looking at me.

His head was tilted to one side. His gaze was fixed, obsessively, on the grain of the wooden floor, his shoulders hunched. He looked like a scolded child.

But his shame was not because of the atrocity that his mother and sister were committing against me. He did not tell him that he was shamelessly abusing his wife in front of his business partners.

He was ashamed of me.

He was horrified that his wife, the “poor ranch girl”, the one who had slept with her posh friends, had been publicly accused of stealing her mother’s priceless diamond necklace.

“Alejandro…” he pleaded.

My voice came out broken, pathetic. Just a muffled whisper that struggled to break through the same room.

“Please, help me. My love… look at me. I didn’t steal anything. I swear on my life. I was set up.”

Alejandro’s silence was the sharpest dagger of the entire night. It pierced me right through the scepter of my chest and split me in two.

 He didn’t move a muscle. He simply took a long swig of his whiskey, swallowing with difficulty.

—Shut up, you damned useless thing! —Camila shouted, bursting into my field of vision.

Camila, my sister-in-law. Three years older than me, but with the sting of an old rattlesnake. With her perfectly manicured, claw-like nails, she pushed me by the shoulders.

The impact was brutal. I lost my balance on my heels and fell heavily to my knees on the expensive Persian rug that covered the center of the living room.

The blow grazed the skin on my knees, but the physical pain was completely irrelevant compared to the way my spirit was shattered.

—We saw you—Camila snapped, looking at me with such contempt that I could almost feel it—. I saw you with my own eyes putting the Cartier case in your cheap bag.

You are a total embarrassment to Montepegro. We always knew you were a sellout. An opportunist.

I raised my head. My breathing was irregular, almost hyperventilating. I searched for my husband’s gaze one last time. This would be his last chance.

The last chance to save our marriage, to save my love for him.

“Alejandro, for God’s sake…” I shouted, feeling the cold from the marble floor seep through the carpet to my knees. “Say something. Tell them this is madness.”

 You know who I am. You know where I come from. Tell them to leave me alone.

Alejandro finally raised his eyes.

 “That’s how these hungry, ambitious women from the villages hide jewels in their outerwear to steal from our own homes!”

The impact of his words was like receiving a blow to the stomach with a baseball bat. I couldn’t breathe.

I was trembling from head to toe, and it wasn’t just from the cold in the room. It was pure, paralyzing shock. It was as if a bucket of ice-cold water had been dumped on me.