Chapter 7 - The Witness in the Sun
By midnight, we were flying south out of Midway on a private Gulfstream G650, cutting through a bank of heavy clouds over the Midwest.
The cabin was dead quiet except for the low, rhythmic hum of the twin jet engines. Alina sat across from me in the leather swivel chair, a laptop open on her knees, glowing with encrypted financial records and flight manifests. The twenty-seven pages of our divorce papers were sitting back in Chicago, locked inside my office safe, forgotten.
“Arthur thinks we’re panicking,” Alina said without looking up from her screen, her fingers flying across the keyboard as she cross-referenced the notary’s old business directory with current Florida property deeds. “He filed the SEC injunction to buy himself four days to liquidate his offshore holdings in the Caymans. If we can secure a sworn deposition from the notary before the federal freeze goes nationwide, we can attach a federal lien to every single asset Sterling owns before his private jet touches down in Zurich.”
“You’re enjoying this,” I observed, leaning back in my seat, watching the way the cabin lights caught the golden highlights in her hair.
Alina paused, her fingers hovering over the keys. She looked up, a slow, genuine smile spreading across her face—the first real, unburdened smile I had seen in three years of marriage.
“I’m terrified, Dante,” she admitted honestly. “For three years, I thought I was the weak link in the Moretti empire. Finding out I’m not the victim—finding out we’re actually fighting the same enemy—is the first time I’ve felt like I could breathe since my wedding day.”
“You were never the weak link,” I said, my voice dropping low, charged with an intensity that made the air between us crackle. “I was just too blind to see that your silence wasn't submission. It was endurance.”
She held my gaze for a long moment, the distance of three years of emotional exile evaporating in the span of a single heartbeat. She reached across the small table between us, resting her palm flat against my hand. Her skin was warm, steady, grounding.
“When this is over,” Alina whispered softly, “we’re going back to that house. And we’re going to have the conversation we should have had on our wedding night.”
“Count on it,” I replied, my fingers closing tightly around hers.
We landed at a private airstrip outside of Naples, Florida, just as the tropical sun was beginning to bleed over the flat, palm-fringed horizon. The air was thick, heavy with the scent of salt water and damp earth.
Marcus had sent a local security car to meet us—a nondescript black sedan that dropped us off at a sprawling, manicured retirement community by seven in the morning.
The house belonged to Arthur Sterling’s former notary, a man named Arthur Vance—no relation to Alina’s family, but a man whose professional integrity had been bought out a decade ago.
When we walked up to the screen door of the single-story ranch house, an elderly man with oxygen tubing resting under his nose was sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, reading the morning paper.
“Mr. Vance?” I asked, stepping onto the wooden planks.
The old man looked up, his faded blue eyes narrowing behind thick bifocals. He took one look at my tailored suit, then at Alina standing beside me, her expression resolute and unyielding.
“If you’re from Moretti Global, you’re wasting your time,” the old man wheezed, his hand trembling as he folded the newspaper. “I already told Arthur Sterling I’m retired. I’m not signing another affidavit for anyone.”
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“We aren't here for Arthur Sterling,” Alina said, stepping forward and opening her leather folio to reveal a certified copy of the original 2021 corporate acquisition notes. “We’re here because you notarized a signature on a document that put my father into a grave and tried to destroy my husband’s family. And unlike Sterling, we brought our own pen.”
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