Chapter 3 - The Weight of an Unsigned Page
The house was too quiet.
Without Alina’s quiet footsteps, without the faint scent of jasmine and roasted chicory that always lingered in the kitchen by seven in the morning, the four-thousand-square-foot townhouse felt less like a home and more like a mausoleum.
I didn't chase her.
That was my first instinct—to track her phone, send a car, or have my security detail locate her father’s old brownstone on the north side where she had likely gone to hide. But chasing her would mean continuing the dynamic we had lived in for three years: me as the master of the estate, her as the fugitive tenant.
Instead, I sat down at the very kitchen island where she had packed her bags.
I picked up her note. I’m sorry I couldn't be the wife you needed.
It was a lie, born of three years of self-doubt. But it was a lie built on foundations I had laid myself. I had been so terrified of appearing weak, so accustomed to treating my life as a series of boardrooms and risk assessments, that I had never once given her room to believe she was safe with me.
My phone rang. It was my chief of security, Marcus.
“Boss,” Marcus’s gruff voice came through the speaker. “Arthur Sterling just cleared out his office safe. He didn't wait for the board meeting. He booked a private charter out of Midway to the British Virgin Islands about twenty minutes ago.”
“Let him go,” I said calmly.
“Let him go?” Marcus barked, incredulous. “Dante, the man embezzled millions and compromised our corporate firewall. If he gets to offshore accounts, we’ll never claw that capital back.”
“Let him run, Marcus. But freeze his secondary accounts domestically. Let him land in the islands thinking he’s escaped clean. It’ll make it much easier when we audit his personal residences in Chicago. Every single asset he owns is tied to domestic LLCs. He can’t move the real estate.”
“Understood. What about Mrs. Moretti? We tracked her SUV. She’s at her sister’s loft in Wicker Park.”
“Leave her be for today,” I said. “Keep a low-profile tail on the building. I don't want her bothered, but I need to know she’s safe.”
“Boss... there’s something else in Sterling’s private files that we decrypted an hour ago. It’s not just about Vance Industries.” Marcus hesitated, an unusual occurrence for a man who had survived three tours in the private military sector.
“Spit it out, Marcus.”
“It’s about your father’s death five years ago. The yacht fire off the coast of Maine.”
My blood ran cold. The phone felt heavy in my hand. “Go on.”
“It wasn't an electrical fault, Dante. The Coast Guard report was doctored. Sterling’s shell company purchased the insurance policy on that vessel three weeks before it went down, and the payout was funneled directly into the same Cayman account that eventually bought up Vance Industries’ debt.”
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
My father’s death had broken something fundamental inside me. It was the reason I had buried myself in work, the reason I had built Moretti Global into an impenetrable fortress, and the reason I had married Alina—because my father’s dying wish had been for me to ‘find an anchor before the storm takes you too.’
Arthur Sterling hadn't just destroyed Alina’s family. He had murdered my father.
And Alina had spent three years married to the man whose company was built on the ashes of her own family’s ruin and my father’s murder, both of us dancing around each other in a silence born of mutual protection.
By noon, I was standing outside the converted brick warehouse in Wicker Park where Alina’s sister, Chloe, lived.
I didn't use the intercom. I walked straight up the iron exterior staircase, my coat collar turned up against a biting Chicago wind, and knocked on the heavy wooden door.
It took three minutes before the lock clicked.
Alina opened the door. She was wearing an oversized grey sweater, her hair pulled back into a loose clip, dark circles shadowing her eyes. When she saw me standing in the doorway, the color vanished from her face entirely.
“Dante,” she whispered, her hand gripping the edge of the door. “How did you find me?”
May you like
“You left your car parked in plain sight, Alina,” I said softly, stepping past her into the warm, cluttered loft before she could block the threshold. “And we need to talk about why you think you have to run from a man who would burn this city to the ground before he let you go.”
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