Chapter 3 - Three Thousand Miles of Ash
"Turn the plane around."
The words cut through the interior of the Cadillac Escalade like a whip. Elena blinked in shock, her glossed lips parting as she stared at Vincent.
"What? Vincent, we just got here! You promised we’d have dinner at Carbone tonight, you promised—"
Vincent didn't even look at her. He leaned forward and tapped the glass partition separating the passenger cabin from the driver. "Turn this car around. Back to the hangar. Tell the pilot we’re wheels up in fifteen minutes."
"Vincent, are you insane?!" Elena shrieked, grabbing his arm. "You can't just drag me all the way to Florida and then leave me on the tarmac like some—"
Vincent turned his head slowly. The look in his eyes was not the amused indulgence she was used to. It was black, bottomless, and dripping with raw, violent fury. Elena’s voice died in her throat. Her hand instinctively recoiled from his sleeve as if she had touched hot iron.
"Get out of the car, Elena," he said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. "Take a commercial flight back to New York. Charge it to the black card. But if you speak another word to me today, I will make sure you never work in this country again. Do you understand me?"
Elena turned pale, clutching her Birkin bag to her chest, nodding rapidly in sheer terror. The driver pulled to the curb outside the private terminal, opened her door, and within thirty seconds, Vincent was speeding back toward his Gulfstream.
Two hours later, the jet was cruising at forty-five thousand feet, heading north toward the storm clouds gathering over Illinois.
Vincent sat in the leather armchair of the main cabin, a crystal tumbler of Macallan 25 untouched in his hand. His laptop was open on the credenza in front of him. Dominic had imaged the contents of the silver USB drive and transmitted the files directly to his secure server.
Vincent stared at the screen, his breathing ragged.
There were hundreds of folders, meticulously organized by date, location, and name.
*Folder 1: Miami – April 14-17.*
Inside were surveillance photographs of him walking out of the Fontainebleau with a brunette real estate broker. High-resolution shots of him leaning over the balcony, laughing, holding a glass of champagne. Next to it was the dinner receipt from Prime 112: $2,400 charged to a shell corporation Claire had somehow traced back to him.
*Folder 2: New York – August 2-5.*
Photographs of him entering the Carlyle Hotel with Elena. The reservation confirmation under the alias he thought only his closest lieutenant knew. A video clip, barely thirty seconds long, showing him kissing Elena’s neck by the private elevator bank.
*Folder 3: Chicago – The Peninsula.*
*Folder 4: Aspen – The Little Nell.*
*Folder 5: London – The Connaught.*
Every lie he had ever whispered to Claire. Every time he had kissed her forehead at five in the morning, promising that the negotiations were brutal, that he hated being away from her, that he was doing it all to secure their family’s future.
Every single time, she had known.
Vincent closed his eyes, a violent wave of nausea washing through his gut. He remembered the night he came home from Aspen, smelling of cedarwood and another woman’s hair. Claire had made him chicken soup because he claimed he had a fever. She had sat by his bed, running her cool fingers through his hair, while he pretended to sleep.
She hadn't been nursing him. She had been observing him. Cataloging his deceit. Building her case.
*“Those women mean nothing to me,”* he had told her once, dismissing her suspicions with a wave of his hand while offering her a diamond necklace. *“Look at everything I give you, Claire. You have everything a woman could ever want.”*
How monstrous he must have sounded to her.
He had treated her like an employee whose bonus was being renegotiated, rather than the woman who had held his hand in the hospital when he took a bullet to the shoulder five years ago. The woman who had never flinched when rival families threatened their home. The only person in his entire vicious, blood-soaked life who had loved Vincent, not the monster named Vincent Moretti.
He opened the final document: the divorce filing.
His eyes scanned the demands. There were none.
No request for spousal support. No claim on the Lake Forest estate. No demand for a percentage of his casino shares, his shipping companies, or his real estate holdings. Under Illinois law, as his wife of seven years, she was legally entitled to half of everything he had built during their marriage—hundreds of millions of dollars.
Instead, the petition stated simply:
*Petitioner seeks no maintenance, no division of marital assets, and requests only the restoration of her former legal name, Claire Elizabeth Vance.*
Vincent’s chest seized. A cold, suffocating weight crushed his lungs.
If she had demanded half his empire, he could have fought her. He could have hired the most vicious lawyers in America, dragged the proceedings through appellate courts for a decade, frozen her out, starved her of funds, and forced her back to the negotiating table. He understood greed. He understood leverage.
Claire hadn't asked for a single cent. She had walked away from three hundred million dollars as if it were radioactive waste.
She hadn't filed this to get even. She had filed this because she wanted to purge every trace of him from her life. To her, staying married to Vincent Moretti wasn't worth all the gold in the world.
Vincent slammed his glass down onto the table, shattering the heavy crystal into a dozen jagged shards. Scotch and blood mixed across the polished wood, dripping onto his pants, but he didn't feel it.
He grabbed his phone and called Dominic.
May you like
"Find her," Vincent roared into the receiver, his voice breaking with a terrifying mix of grief and uncontrollable fury. "Pull every camera from O'Hare to the Wisconsin border. Hack every toll booth, every ATM, every credit card processor. Bring me the names of every private investigator, every lawyer, every friend she has spoken to in the last six months. I don't care if you have to burn this city to the ground, Dominic. Find my wife!"
***
