Chapter 13 - The Ghost of the 5th Anniversary
"Why now?" Dante demanded, stepping between Eleanor and our children, his voice vibrating with suppressed violence. "I gave you the company. I gave your pet board members all my voting shares. You have everything you ever wanted!"
"We *had* everything," Eleanor sneered, her composure cracking for a fraction of a second, revealing a desperate, frantic rot beneath her diamond facade. "Until yesterday morning. Until Julianna Vance’s will was read."
The name hit the room like a thunderclap.
*Julianna.*
The woman Dante had kissed on our fifth anniversary. The woman who had worn silk and gardenia perfume. The woman whose betrayal had driven me into the snow, into premature labor, and shattered my marriage into a thousand bloody pieces.
"Julianna is dead?" I whispered, my voice hollow.
"Killed in a hit-and-run in Zurich three days ago," Vance said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion despite sharing her last name. "My daughter was foolish. She thought she could outrun her debts."
"Julianna wasn't an accident," Dante said, his eyes narrowing as the pieces clicked together behind his dark irises. "And she didn't just kiss me that night because she wanted an affair. You set her up."
"Of course I set her up!" Eleanor laughed, a dry, rattling sound. "You were going soft, Dante! You were spending your weekends at farmer's markets with a nobody instead of attending private defense summits in Geneva. You were going to let the Sinclair cartel swallow our logistics division because you wouldn't sign off on hostile liquidations! I needed you broken. I needed Lena to leave you so you would remember who you are: a Moretti."
I felt the blood drain from my face. The kiss in the glass-walled penthouse wasn't a drunken mistake or a momentary lapse of passion. It was a corporate assassination plot orchestrated by his own mother.
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"Julianna was supposed to take a payoff and disappear to London," Eleanor continued coldly. "Instead, the little rat stole something from my private safe before she fled. An encrypted ledger. And she placed it in a blind trust that only unlocks upon the biometric signature of Dante’s legitimate offspring."
Eleanor stepped forward, pointing her gold cane directly at Mateo’s small, sleeping form. "That boy’s DNA is the decryption key to forty billion dollars of overseas assets. The Sinclair cartel knows it. The Russian buyers know it. And if I don't produce that baby at the Geneva Swiss depository by Friday noon, they will liquidate Moretti Enterprises down to the foundation, and they will slaughter every single person bearing our name."
