One question from Luca exposed the only person in the room who wanted him dead.

The east wing guest suite was a sanctuary of stripped wood, bare white plaster, and pristine light.

By sunset, Dr. Elena Vance—the pediatric dermatologist Nicolás had summoned from Boston—had completed her initial diagnostic panel. She sat at a small oak table in the corner of the room, her laptop open, displaying a complex matrix of chemical breakdowns, skin-scraping cultures, and toxicity indices.

Sofía sat in a wooden rocking chair near the crib, softly humming a lullaby while Mateo slept peacefully in his bare bassinet, wrapped only in the plain cotton sheet she had brought from the hospital.

The door opened silently, and Nicolás stepped inside. He had removed his suit jacket; his white shirt sleeves were rolled up to his forearms, revealing powerful, corded muscles and the faint, pale line of an old scar across his left wrist.

“Doctor,” Nicolás said, his voice quiet so as not to disturb the baby. “What are the results?”

Dr. Vance looked up, her expression grim. She adjusted her glasses and tapped her touchpad.

“Mr. Velasco, your son was not merely experiencing an allergic reaction,” Dr. Vance stated plainly. “The substance on those fabrics was a sophisticated, slow-release organophosphate compound mixed with a synthetic fixative. It doesn't trigger immediate anaphylaxis—which is why standard emergency panels missed it. Instead, it systematically breaks down the skin’s lipid barrier, seeps into the subcutaneous tissue, and induces severe systemic inflammation, respiratory distress, and neurological agitation over time.”

Nicolás’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. The knuckles turned white. “Poison.”

“Slow poisoning,” Dr. Vance corrected. “Administered in microscopic doses every time the child was dressed, swaddled, or laid down to sleep. Had he been exposed for another week, the organophosphates would have crossed the blood-brain barrier.”

Sofía looked up from the rocking chair. “That explains why his symptoms improved every time he was taken to the hospital for evaluation, and worsened within hours of returning home. The hospital linens were clean. The nursery was a gas chamber.”

The air in the room grew so dense it felt difficult to breathe.

Nicolás walked slowly toward the bassinet, looking down at his sleeping son with an expression of such dark, terrifying fury that Dr. Vance instinctively drew back.

“Who had access to the nursery?” Nicolás asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

“Only three people possessed the master security key codes required to bypass the biometric lock on the nursery floor,” Dr. Vance replied, turning her screen toward him. “Doña Leonor Velasco. Luca Moretti. And Valeria Serrano.”

Valeria.

The name hung in the air like a falling blade.

Sofía watched Nicolás’s face closely. For a heartbeat, the man’s iron control seemed to fracture. Valeria, the mother of his child, the woman who had spent seven weeks weeping by a crib, watching her baby writhe in agony.

“Valeria would never hurt her own son,” Sofía said, her voice cutting through the heavy silence without hesitation.

Nicolás turned his head slowly toward her. “How can you be certain, Nurse Reyes? You met her four hours ago.”

“I watched her hands when she knelt on the floor of the nursery,” Sofía said, standing up from the rocking chair and walking toward them. “Desperation has a specific rhythm, Mr. Velasco. A mother who is secretly poisoning her child does not exhaust herself to the point of structural collapse. She does not look at the child with that kind of raw, bleeding terror. Valeria is innocent.”

“Innocence is a luxury I cannot afford based on intuition,” Nicolás said coldly, though the rigid tension in his jaw had eased just a fraction.

“Then don’t use intuition,” Sofía replied, meeting his gray gaze without flinching. “Use logic. Who benefits from a dying heir? If Mateo dies, the unified ownership of Velasco International fractures. The board seats shift. Shares are redistributed among secondary claimants.”

Dr. Vance nodded in agreement. “And according to corporate governance rules, in the event of an heir's demise or incapacitation before majority age, executive voting rights default to the senior operational director.”

“Luca Moretti,” Nicolás murmured, the name tasting like ash in his mouth.

Before Nicolás could respond, a soft knock echoed at the door.

Bruno entered, stepping briskly into the room with a heavy black ledger and a digital drive in his hand.

“Boss,” Bruno reported, nodding respectfully to Sofía and Dr. Vance before addressing Nicolás. “We pulled the encrypted security logs for the third-floor west corridor. The biometric locks were accessed using Luca Moretti’s administrative override code at 2:00 AM three nights ago. He spent twenty minutes inside the nursery.”

Nicolás’s eyes turned to shards of winter ice. “Bring him to my study.”

“Wait,” Sofía said, stepping forward.

Nicolás stopped at the door. “Why?”

“If you confront him directly with physical force, he will deny it, destroy his digital trails, or hide behind corporate lawyers,” Sofía said, her eyes burning with an intense, analytical light. “You need to back him into a corner where his arrogance betrays him. You need a question he isn't prepared to answer.”

Nicolás looked at her for a long, silent moment, weighing her words against the raging storm of vengeance inside him.

Slowly, a dangerous, razor-thin smile touched the corners of his mouth.

“You have spent too much time in public hospitals, Nurse Reyes,” Nicolás murmured softly. “You think like a detective.”

“I think like someone who refuses to let monsters destroy innocent lives,” she replied.

Nicolás turned to Bruno. “Gather the family in the main library. All of them. Leonor, Valeria, and Luca. Tell them we are going to review the security audit.”

As Nicolás strode out of the room, Bruno lingered for a second, looking at Sofía with newfound respect.