No One’s to Protect

“Allow me to introduce her—this is Camila. She’s Javier’s sister.”

All I could do was force a thin smile and a small nod as Adriana presented me to a handful of her male friends gathered inside the luxurious villa. If I was being honest, the atmosphere of the place unsettled me the moment I stepped inside. An awkwardness clamped itself around my throat and refused to let go. And the way those men looked at me only made it worse.

I had dressed deliberately conservatively—every inch of skin covered, nothing remotely inviting about my outfit. Yet their eyes moved over me as though taking stock of something on display, appraising and unhurried, and the sensation made every surface of my skin prickle with visceral discomfort.

“Very beautiful. Allow me—I’m Pedro.” One of them stepped forward, extending his hand with a smile that struck me as far too confident for a first introduction.

I accepted the handshake only out of basic courtesy. But I yanked my hand back the next instant—bluntly, without apology—when Pedro’s fingers dragged deliberately across the back of my hand as I pulled away. The calculated little gesture set off every alarm I possessed.

“Camila,” I replied, clipped and cool, offering nothing further.

“Oh, and she’s single, by the way,” Adriana announced, her voice pitched with bright, manufactured enthusiasm. “So if any of you are interested, now’s your chance to make a move.” The declaration was immediately met with a chorus of loud, rowdy approval from the unattached men in the room.

I said nothing. My gaze drifted sideways to where Javier sat, not far from the group. He was utterly still, turning his glass slowly in his hand, as though the noise around him were nothing more than wind through an open window. Somewhere deep and stubborn inside me, I held out a small, foolish hope. That he might speak up. That he might step in—play the role of the protective older brother, the kind who notices when his younger sister is being circled by men who mean nothing good.

But then I caught myself, and the self-reproach arrived swiftly. Sister. I laughed at myself, a soundless, bitter thing. I was not his sister by blood. I was an orphan—a lone, rootless girl his mother had brought home to raise twelve years ago. In Javier’s eyes, I was most likely nothing more than a stranger who happened to occupy space beneath his roof.

****

The discomfort had grown too heavy to carry inside, so I peeled away from the group without a word and made my way to the balcony, which looked out directly onto the open sea. The scene in the main room had become genuinely nauseating—particularly once Adriana’s friends who had brought their partners began embracing and kissing one another with the careless ease of people for whom public intimacy was simply the default currency of a night out.

I folded my arms across my chest, hugging my own elbows against the night wind that had begun to bite. My eyes fixed on the dark, wide expanse of the ocean before me. This place, which by any measure should have been beautiful and calming, was doing nothing but pressing deeper on the hollow ache already settled in my chest.

“Hey …”

I turned slightly at the sound—a breath, and a shift of weight beside me. One of the men from the group had materialized at the balcony railing, settling himself right next to me without invitation. I had no interest in conversation, so I gave him a single, stiff nod and returned my gaze to the sea.

“I had no idea Javier had a younger sister as beautiful as you. I always assumed he was an only child—the sole heir of the Villareal name,” he said, angling for conversation with a tone that was doing its best to sound charming.

I offered him only a faint, flat smile. It wasn’t surprising he didn’t know. No one outside the family’s immediate circle did. I had been raised under their roof, given every comfort and opportunity, but I had never been formally presented to the world as part of the Villareal family. I still carried my birth surname—not theirs—and so my existence remained unknown to everyone but those closest to them.

“Are you uncomfortable here?” the man asked, reading my silence correctly, if perhaps for the wrong reasons.

I glanced at him briefly, then shook my head—a small, dishonest motion—before cutting the eye contact and turning back to the shore, hoping he would understand, without being told, that I wanted to be left alone.

The night deepened, and the atmosphere inside the villa’s main hall grew wilder with every passing hour. I sat in a dim corner of the room, watching the scene unfold before me with a quietly aching heart. Some of the guests had moved on to alcohol, laughing too loudly with flushed faces, while the couples among them pressed against one another with a complete absence of self-consciousness.

And there, in the centre of the main sofa, were Javier and Adriana.

I wrenched my gaze away with everything I had, driving my eyes to the floor or the nearest empty wall—anywhere that wasn’t them. But the effort cost me. My chest felt as though something enormous was bearing down on it every time I caught, in my peripheral vision, Adriana deliberately arranging herself across Javier’s lap. She wound both arms around his neck with languid, proprietary ease and murmured something against the curve of his jaw—marking her territory, announcing to the room and to me in particular that Javier belonged to her, and to no one else.

****

“Camila. Here—have a drink.”

A glass of something alcoholic appeared in front of my face without warning. I looked up to find Pedro standing over me, wearing that same lopsided smile. “Thank you, but I don’t drink,” I said, nudging the glass away from me with quiet firmness.

“It’s good, Camila—just try a little. You won’t get drunk from one sip,” Pedro pressed, leaning in to bring the glass deliberately closer to my lips.

“Oh, come on, Camila. You’re twenty-two—don’t tell me you’ve literally never had a drink. Don’t be so rigid, it’s a holiday,” one of Adriana’s female friends called from across the room, and the comment drew a ripple of mocking laughter from the others.

“Ha—and she’s never been in a relationship, either, which means she’s probably never been kissed,” someone else threw in, feeding the fire.

Pedro let out a low chuckle. His eyes settled on me with an expression of contempt so undisguised it was almost bold. “Camila—what do you say? Want me to teach you how it’s done tonight? I could show you how to kiss properly.”

The words hit my ears like a slap. I didn’t answer. Not one word. My tongue sat useless behind my teeth, paralyzed by a shame and fury that had fused into something I couldn’t separate or name. But even as the laughter tightened around me like a ring, my eyes moved on their own—straight to Javier.

He had not moved. He sat exactly where he had been, watching in perfect stillness as his sister was humiliated, reduced to the punchline of a cheap joke right in front of him, as though none of it warranted so much as a raised eyebrow. And Adriana—still perched on his lap—wore a smile of quiet, satisfied pleasure, the kind that belonged on the face of someone who had planned exactly this from the very beginning. Someone who had wanted, from the first moment she extended the invitation, to watch me be stripped of every last shred of my dignity.

A pain so acute it eclipsed everything else drove straight into my chest—deeper and more devastating than anything the men in that room could have inflicted. Because it was Javier. Javier who sat there and let it happen. Javier who had no intention—not even the faintest flicker of one—of reaching out his hand to pull me back from the edge of this.

****