The moment Julián Mena threw the bucket of cold water on her, Isabel Fuentes understood with perfect clarity that she had been right to conduct this investigation. The water hit her like a physical slap, soaking through her cheap blazer, plastering her hair against her face, filling her worn shoes until her feet sloshed with each breath. But worse than the cold, worse than the humiliation of standing there drenched in front of forty witnesses, was the sound of Julián’s laughter—cruel and satisfied, the laugh of a man who believed himself untouchable.
“Maybe that’ll teach you your place in this world,” he said, setting the empty bucket down with deliberate care, as if he’d just completed a reasonable disciplinary action rather than committed an act of stunning cruelty.
Around her, the office had fallen into the kind of silence that follows explosions, everyone frozen mid-motion, keyboards still, phones forgotten, eyes wide with shock at what they’d just witnessed. Isabel stood there trembling—not from fear, but from the effort of controlling her rage—and felt water drip from her chin onto the cheap linoleum floor of her own corporate headquarters.
Because that’s what nobody in this room knew, what Julián Mena couldn’t possibly have imagined when he decided to publicly humiliate a woman he believed to be a struggling temporary receptionist: Isabel Fuentes owned this building. She owned this company.
She owned every desk, every computer, every square foot of the forty-seven floors beneath her feet.
And Julián Mena had just made the most catastrophic mistake of his professional life. But to understand how the owner of a two-hundred-million-dollar business empire ended up soaking wet and shivering in front of her own employees, we need to go back six hours, to when Isabel had woken in her penthouse apartment overlooking Bogotá’s financial district and made the decision that would change everything. The alarm had sounded at 5:30 AM, pulling her from dreams into the pre-dawn darkness of her bedroom.
Through floor-to-ceiling windows, the city spread below her like a carpet of lights, but Isabel barely glanced at the view she normally loved.
Today required focus. Today she would finally see the truth about what was happening in the operational departments of Grupo Altavista, the company her father had built from nothing and left to her when cancer took him five years ago.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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