She thought she was cleaning without witnesses. The millionaire was watching—and what he saw changed everything.

Enrique Almeida had learned to distrust as naturally as others learned to smile. It wasn’t a pose; it was a scar. At thirty-eight, with buildings in his name, accounts that never seemed to empty, and a silent mansion on Calle de las Palmeras, he had reached one unshakable conclusion: when money appears without an owner, it rarely stays where it should.

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That morning, he had left exactly eighteen thousand euros on the dresser. Bills scattered like fallen leaves—too precise to be accidental, too tempting to be harmless. It was a ritual he’d repeated for fifteen years. His private test. His way of confirming what he already believed: that trust was a beautiful lie.

Secretaries with polished smiles. Gardeners who spoke tenderly of family. Housekeepers who swore on their children’s lives. One by one, they had failed.

“Everyone has a price,” Enrique often said—not as a proverb, but as a fact of nature.

That morning, it was Julia Santos’s turn.

He didn’t know her. Just a name on a form, a number beside it, the word available checked with a neat X. The call had been cold, efficient.

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