Chapter 5 - The Midpoint Shift
The loft grew ice cold.
Alina pulled back from my touch, her hand sliding away from my chin as if my skin had suddenly turned to fire. The raw vulnerability in her eyes was instantly replaced by a sharp, defensive wariness.
“Homicide?” Alina whispered, the word tasting foreign and grotesque in the quiet room. “What is he talking about, Dante? What does my family’s bankruptcy have to do with your father’s boat sinking?”
“Nothing,” I said, my voice hard as iron, though my mind was racing to connect the pieces Arthur Sterling had just weaponized against us. “Sterling is trying to build a public narrative to deflect from his own embezzlement. If he paints Moretti Global as a corrupt conglomerate, any domestic fraud charges we bring against him look like a retaliatory corporate witch hunt.”
“He named my family, Dante,” Alina said, her voice rising, the Evanston elegance completely gone, replaced by the fierce, protective instinct of a woman whose family name had already been dragged through the mud once. “He’s saying our patents were the motive. He’s saying my father was in on it.”
“Your father wasn't in on anything,” I said, stepping toward her, though she backed away, putting the dining table between us. “Julian Vance was a victim of Sterling’s greed, just like my father was. Arthur used shell companies to bleed both our families dry from the inside.”
“And how am I supposed to know that isn't just another story you tell yourself to keep the board happy?” Alina’s voice broke, the anguish in her tone cutting deeper than any corporate betrayal ever could. “Three years of living in your house, three years of wondering if I was just a business transaction, and now I find out the man running your company claims our lives were collateral damage in a murder plot?”
She grabbed the stack of unsigned divorce papers from the table, clutched them against her chest like a shield, and glared at me with a fierce, tear-stained resolve.
“Sign them,” she said.
“Alina—no.”
“Sign them, Dante! If this story gets out—if the press connects your family’s tragedy to my family’s bankruptcy while we are still legally married—the media will tear us both to pieces. Every regulator in Washington will be crawling through our personal accounts. The only way to protect Moretti Global, and the only way to keep my family out of a federal subpoena, is a retroactive annulment disguised as a clean divorce finalized before today's news cycle hits.”
She wasn't just speaking out of hurt anymore. She was speaking out of cold, hard survival instinct—the exact same instinct her father had lacked.
Before I could answer, my phone buzzed violently in my pocket. I pulled it out. It wasn't Marcus. It was an incoming call from the Chairman of the SEC enforcement division in Chicago, requesting an immediate deposition regarding Moretti Global’s asset acquisition history.
The trap Arthur Sterling had set wasn't designed to save him.
It was designed to force a public war between the Moretti and Vance families—a war that would destroy us both before the week was out.
I looked across the table at my wife—the woman I had spent three years misunderstanding, the woman who was currently trying to divorce me not because she didn't love me, but because she loved me enough to take the entire blow upon herself.
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“No, Alina,” I said quietly, locking my phone and dropping it onto the table beside the unsigned papers. “We aren't signing anything. If Sterling wants a war, we’ll fight it together. But we start by finding out who helped him liquidate my father’s estate from inside the federal maritime commission.”
Alina stared at me for a long, agonizing moment, the pen still resting beside the yellow tabs. Then, slowly, her gaze shifted from the papers to the door behind me, where heavy footsteps echoed up the wooden staircase—followed by the sharp, authoritative knock of federal marshals.
