He didn’t beg for forgiveness. He just confessed.
He named every sin.
He named every truth he buried.
He enclosed the legal documents. His entire Salvacion empire–clean and dirty shares alike- was transferred to Elle’s name. With coded instructions for my Montenegro banks. Protected. Locked. Empowered.
“Let her rule without the weight I failed to carry. Let her grow without the shadow I cast. And tell her… papa never stopped loving her. Even when I wasn’t worthy of her love.”
I folded the letter and placed it in the vault under my father’s desk. Then I went outside and stared at the moon for a long time. I didn’t cry. But my bones ached in places only grief could
reach.
Two days later, I stood over a nameless grave.
There was no headstone. No flowers. Just dirt, rocks, and silence. This was all Margot earned. Her final resting place buried outside Salvacion jurisdiction, guarded by Montenegro death law.
I didn’t bring a speech.
Just a single white lily.
I dropped it over the mound and said quietly, “You wanted to destroy me. You only built me
harder.”
She didn’t get the legacy she craved. She didn’t even get remembered. And I made sure of that.
The Montenegro family issued a formal global directive through our silent allies and underground regulators: The Jenner bloodline has been erased. No protection. No recognition.
No name.
They no longer exist in the underworld.
Elle’s legacy would never again be tainted by the woman who tried to erase her.
And I would never again speak the name Margot Jenner.
Some deaths deserved silence.
And silence… I gave her.
They told me Niccolo woke up after seven months.
I didn’t flinch when the message came through. I just poured tea and continued organizing the new educational initiative under Elle’s name. A Montenegro legacy built from a Salvacion’s ashes. He asked for me, they said. I didn’t respond. That part of me had already been buried.
So I sent Michael
My brother didn’t sugarcoat it. He never did.
“You lost her the day you let your mistress hold a pen over your children’s blood.”
1:04 pm
Niccolo didn’t argue. I heard he just closed his eyes and nodded once. Only his right hand stayed, Luca.
After that, he stayed quiet. No press. No noise. No desperate schemes for redemption. Just pain and silence. They said he went into physical therapy every morning before the sun rose. He spent the rest of the day reviewing every corner of Elle’s empire cleaning deals, paying off blood debts, wiring investments back into her holdings. Not as a Salvacion. Not even as a father.
Just as a man who had nothing left but the ruins he built.
Time passed.
The world changed. Salvacion’s name fell off the tongues of power, and Montenegro became synonymous with restoration. We didn’t conquer, we refined. Elle’s name was whispered wit bride by European councils and old bloodlines who once cast me aside. No one dared raise a voice now unless it was in respect.
But none of that healed the girl who still didn’t speak.
Elle was nine when she stopped calling for me in the night. She would just hold my hand in her sleep and cry without sound. She didn’t scream anymore. That scared me more.
So I took her away again. Not to a fortress. Not to a locked–down villa. But to a beach. Just the
two of us. And Nathaniel.
He never pushed.
He’d become part of our rhythm now. Quiet breakfasts. Walks by the sea. Chess on the balcony Elle trusted him. She never said it out loud, but I saw it in the way her body leaned toward him when she sat, and how she gave him half her strawberries at lunch.
We were watching the waves one afternoon. The air was warm, the sand soft under our feet, and for the first time, Elle wasn’t clinging to me.
She was building a tiny castle by herself.
Then she turned to me. Her voice was small, cracked, like a whisper that hadn’t been used in
years.
‘Mama… I dreamed Eli said he’s okay.”
I dropped to my knees before I even realized it, and my arms went around her so tight she squeaked. My tears spilled into her hair and the ocean roared behind us like it carried all our grief away.
I kissed every inch of her cheeks and whispered, “I’m so proud of you. He would be, too.”
Nathaniel didn’t interrupt. He just sat a few feet away, head down, pretending not to cry. Later that evening, while Elle slept beside a pile of seashells she’d collected, Nathaniel sat beside me
on the porch.
He pulled out a small box.
I didn’t need to open it to know what it was.
“I’m not asking for a future right now,” he said, his voice low and steady. “I just want you to know
1:05 pm P ppp.
I’ll be here when you’re ready to live in it.”
I didn’t give him an answer.
I just kissed him slow, let my fingers trace the edge of his jaw, and whispered, “Let me learn t breathe again before I love.”
He smiled like that was enough.
And maybe for the first time in years, I believed it might be.
–
Two weeks later, I visited Eli’s grave alone.
It was dawn. The sky was soft pink and gold, and the grass around his stone was clean. Elle‘ drawing was in my hand–colored pencil lines, slightly shaky, of our family.
Eli stood in the clouds beside an angel. Below, she drew herself, me, and even Nathaniel. I sav Niccolo too. In the distance, watching.
At the bottom she wrote in small letters: “Our family in heaven and earth.”
I knelt and placed the drawing in a glass frame at the head of his stone.
I kissed the corner.
I closed my eyes.
“Mama kept her promise. No one ever hurt us again.”
And I walked away without needing to look back.
Because the past no longer owned me. I was Geneva Montenegro. And I had already buried every ghost.
- N. D
Chapter 22
