VALENTINA POV'S

The Investor’s Name

The boardroom smelled of fresh coffee and old ambition. I was already seven minutes late for the most important meeting of my life when the CFO slid a single sheet of paper across the glass table like he was handing over a live grenade.

Item 7 – Major Shareholder Activation.

I frowned. “We don’t have major shareholders. It’s founder-controlled. One hundred percent me.”

He didn’t meet my eyes. “Actually… we do. Forty-nine percent. Silent since the first round.”

The room temperature dropped. I felt it in my bones.

“Who?”

He turned the page over.

Matteo Luca De Luca.

The name hit like a slap I’d been expecting for five years but still wasn’t ready for.

My fingers curled around the edge of the paper until it creased. The letters blurred, then sharpened again, mocking me.

Forty-nine percent.

Almost half of everything I’d bled for. Every late night, every rejected investor, every time I told myself I didn’t need anyone.

And he’d been here the whole time.

Watching.

Funding.

Owning.

I laughed once short, sharp, the sound bouncing off the glass walls. The entire board froze.

“Everybody out,” I said, voice low enough that they had to lean in to hear it.

They left faster than if the building had caught fire.

When the door clicked shut, I picked up my phone. His number was still there, of course. I’d never deleted it. I’d just stopped pretending I’d ever use it.

It rang twice.

“Valentina.”

His voice was deeper than I remembered. Still velvet. Still dangerous.

“You have exactly ninety seconds to explain why you own almost half of my company,” I said, “and why I’m only finding out the morning we’re supposed to file for IPO.”

Silence stretched long enough that I thought he’d hung up.

Then he answered, calm as ever, the way he used to speak when he was trying not to explode.

“Because four years ago you were three weeks from bankruptcy. You refused every bridge loan on the planet. I couldn’t watch you lose everything you’d built from nothing. So I became the everything you refused to accept.”

My grip on the phone turned my knuckles white.

“You don’t get to play saviour after you ghosted me while I was pregnant, Matteo.”

“I know.”

The simplicity of it made me want to throw the phone through the window.

“Then why now? Why surface today?”

Another pause longer this time.

“Because the Italian parliament just voted to change the succession law. If Alessandro dies without a named heir, the crown goes to the next legitimate male bloodline. My mother found out about Luca two weeks ago. She’s already filed a paternity claim in Rome. And if the IPO goes public tomorrow… the press will find the funding trail. They’ll find him. They’ll find us.”

The room tilted.

I looked through the glass wall at the open-plan office. Luca was sitting on the rug in the creative corner, wearing noise-cancelling headphones, carefully arranging scent strips into a rainbow pattern. My entire universe in one small body.

I closed my eyes.

Opened them again.

“Tell your lawyers to stall the claim,” I said. “Tell your mother I will burn this company to the ground before I let her near my son.”

His voice came softer, almost pleading.

“I’m not asking you to give him up, Valentina. I’m asking you to let me stand between them and both of you.”

I laughed again colder this time.

“You had five years to stand somewhere. You chose silence.”

I ended the call.

The silence in the boardroom was deafening.

I stared at the name on the paper until the ink seemed to pulse.

Then I stood, smoothed my blazer, and walked back into the main office.

Every head turned.

I placed both palms on the nearest desk.

“We’re not going public tomorrow,” I said.

The room erupted.

I raised one hand. Silence fell instantly.

“And we’re not accepting any further investment from Matteo De Luca.”

I met every pair of eyes in the room.

“Effective immediately, I’m activating the founder’s buy-back clause. I’m buying back every single share he owns. With interest. With penalties. With whatever it takes.”

I looked straight at the CFO.

“Tell the lawyers to prepare the hostile tender offer.”

I paused.

“We’re going to war.”

Then I walked out, picked up my son, and carried him past thirty stunned board members like I was carrying the crown itself.

Because I was.

MATTEO POV'S

The line goes dead.

Her voice still echoes in my skull like a gunshot in an empty cathedral.

I sit there on the edge of the hotel bed, phone still pressed to my ear even though there’s nothing left to hear. The room is too quiet. Too clean. Too everything I’ve hated for five years.

I drop the phone. It bounces once on the duvet.

Then I stand up and walk to the window.

New York glitters below like a promise I broke.

Five years.

Five years of mornings that started with the same ritual: open the secret phone, check her Instagram, close it before the ache settled in my chest.

I told myself it was penance.

I told myself it was protection.

I was lying to both of us.

It started the night I left Positano.

I’d kissed her goodbye at three in the morning, her hair still smelling of salt and sex, and promised I’d be back by lunch.

I meant it.

I swear I meant it.

The driver took me straight to the private airstrip.

My mother was already on the tarmac when I landed in Rome.

She didn’t hug me.

She handed me a folder.

Inside were photos.

Valentina walking alone in New York.

Valentina laughing at a café with friends.

Valentina crying on a bench in Central Park three months pregnant, hand curved over a belly she thought no one knew about.

My mother watched my face the way surgeons watch incisions.

“She’s pregnant,” she said.

“And she’s American. Common. Disposable.”

I tried to argue.

I tried to shout.

I tried to tell her I loved her.

She laughed once, soft and cold.

“Love is a luxury the crown cannot afford, Matteo.

You will end it.

Or I will end her.”

She slid another photo across the table.

This one showed a red laser dot dancing across Valentina’s back while she walked home from the subway.

“Next time it won’t be a warning.”

I signed the breakup text in the palace bathroom, hands shaking so hard the screen smeared.

We were a mistake. Don’t contact me again.

Then I turned off the phone and threw up until there was nothing left.

After that, I became the perfect son.

I attended galas with Isabella on my arm.

I smiled for the cameras.

I let my mother believe she’d won.

Every night I opened the second phone.

The one I kept in the safe behind the false panel in my study.

The one with only one contact.

I watched her build Luxe Bloom from nothing.

First post: a single candle burning on a windowsill. Caption: Started with $800 and a dream. Let’s see how far we get.

I wired the first anonymous transfer that night.

Then another.

Then another.

Shell companies.

Blind trusts.

Layers so deep even my mother’s people couldn’t trace them.

I told myself it was the least I could do.

I told myself it wasn’t love if it came with strings.

I lied.

Every time I saw a new photo of Luca, something inside me cracked a little more.

First steps.

First birthday.

First day of preschool.

He had my eyes.

And her smile.

I got drunk the night she posted him wearing a paper crown.

I almost booked a flight.

My mother’s security team intercepted the booking.

They showed me a new photo: Valentina pushing Luca on a swing.

A red dot on his tiny back.

I cancelled the flight.

I stayed away.

Until three weeks ago.

The parliament vote changed everything.

New succession law.

Male bloodline only.

No named heir.

The archivist found the old clinic records from Positano.

My name.

Her name.

The council voted 11–2 to bring the child in.

My mother lost control for the first time in fifty years.

And I finally had a reason to fight back.

I flew commercial.

No security.

No title.

Just a man with a five-year-old letter in his pocket and a son he’d never held.

Now I’m standing in a hotel room in New York, staring at the city I left her in, and I can still feel the weight of her voice on the phone.

I pick up the phone again.

Dial the number I’ve memorized.

It rings.

She doesn’t answer.

I don’t leave a message.

Instead I open my laptop and start drafting the statement I’ll release tomorrow.

The one that says I’m claiming my son.

My family.

My future.

And if the world wants to burn me for it,

let them try.

I’m already ashes.

VALENTINA POV'S

The conference room still smelled of Matteo’s cologne when I walked back in.

Sharp. Clean. Lingering like a promise he never kept.

The board was waiting.

Twelve suits and one intern who looked like she wanted to crawl under the table.

They’d had ten minutes to whisper.

Ten minutes to decide whose side they were on.

I didn’t sit.

I stood at the head of the table, palms flat on the glass, weight forward like I was about to lunge.

“Let’s make this quick,” I said.

The CFO poor, nervous Daniel cleared his throat.

“We’ve reviewed the buy-back clause. Technically, you can trigger it, but the cost…”

“Spit it out.”

“Rough estimate? One hundred and eighty-seven million. Plus penalties. Plus legal fees. You’d have to leverage the company. Heavily.”

I felt the room breathe in.

They thought I’d flinch.

I smiled instead.

Slow.

Sharp.

The way you smile when you know you’re about to break something beautiful.

“Good,” I said. “Then we leverage.”

Someone coughed.

Someone else shifted.

I kept going.

“I built this from a single candle in a studio apartment in Brooklyn.

I slept on the floor for six months so I could pay rent and buy wax.

I said no to every investor who wanted a piece of me.

I said no to banks, to VCs, to men who thought they could buy my dream and my soul in the same deal.”

I leaned in.

“And then Matteo De Luca slipped in through the back door with a shell company and a smile I couldn’t see.

He watched me bleed for this place.

He watched me cry over spreadsheets at three a.m.

He watched me rock my son to sleep while the numbers turned red.

And he never once stepped forward.

Until today.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the HVAC hum.

“So yes,” I said, “I will mortgage every brick of this building if I have to.

I will sell the prototype line, the limited-edition scents, the private-label deals.

I will sell my goddamn wardrobe if it means I own this company free and clear.”

Daniel swallowed.

“Valentina… the board has fiduciary duty. We have to consider ”

“You have a duty to the company,” I cut in.

“And the company is me.

I am the brand.

I am the story.

I am the reason people pay three hundred dollars for a candle that smells like rain on concrete and broken hearts.”

I straightened.

“So decide now.

You’re either with me, or you’re out the door.

There is no middle ground.

No committee.

No compromise.”

Silence again.

Then Maria my assistant, my ride-or-die stood up first.

She was twenty-six, tattooed knuckles, purple streaks in her hair, and zero patience for bullshit.

“I’m with you,” she said.

“Fuck the prince.”

One by one they stood.

Some faster than others.

Some with trembling hands.

Daniel was last.

He looked at the paper like it had personally betrayed him.

Then he stood too.

I nodded once.

“Good.”

I turned to the intern.

“Call legal. Tell them to draft the tender offer tonight.

I want it on my desk by sunrise.”

She nodded so fast her ponytail whipped.

I walked out without another word.

Luca was waiting in my office, sitting on the rug with his headphones half off, drawing a crown on a piece of scrap paper.

He looked up when I came in.

“Mama, you mad?”

I knelt beside him.

Pulled him into my lap.

His little body fit perfectly against my chest, warm and solid and mine.

“Not at you, baby,” I whispered into his curls.

“Never at you.”

He hugged me tighter.

I closed my eyes.

Outside, the city kept moving.

Inside my head, the war had already started.

And I was going to win it.

Not because I was brave.

Not because I was strong.

But because the alternative was losing him.

And that was never going to happen.

Not while I still had breath.