Chapter 6 - The Dinner of Wolves
By seven o’clock that evening, the whispers on Wall Street had become a deafening roar.
*Bloomberg* broke the initial headline: **APEX TECH FOUNDER OUSTED AMID FRAUD ALLEGATIONS; ESTRANGED WIFE APPOINTED CEO IN SHOCKING COUP.**
Within an hour, *TechCrunch*, *The Wall Street Journal*, and the *New York Post* had picked up the scent. Page Six had already published a grainy smartphone photo of Vance Sterling carrying a cardboard box out of Apex’s Midtown headquarters, his tie undone, looking like a shattered ghost.
Yet, inside the gilded, private dining room of Le Cirque Royale on the Upper East Side, Vance Sterling was attempting to stage his last stand.
He had gathered what remained of his pathetic, crumbling court.
Beatrice sat to his right, wearing an oversized emerald brooch and drinking her fourth dry martini with shaking hands. Harper was seated across from her, frantically refreshing her TikTok feed, whining because her modeling agency had just put her contract on “administrative review” after the morning’s news broke.
And Vivien Croft sat to Vance’s left.
Vivien looked stunning, but the diamonds at her neck could not conceal the tight, brittle tension in her jaw. Her brother Julian was currently on a private jet heading toward an undisclosed location in Panama, terrified that Moretti’s men were going to pull him out of his bed.
“We are not beaten!” Vance insisted, slamming his wine glass onto the white linen tablecloth. Several diners at neighboring tables glanced over with thinly veiled disgust. “Do you hear me? We are not beaten! Sloan is a technician! She doesn't have the stomach for a protracted public war! She’s doing this because she’s hurt! Once the press dies down, she’ll realize she can’t run a four-hundred-million-dollar company alone!”
“Vance, darling, my credit card was declined at Bergdorf’s two hours ago,” Beatrice whimpered, dabbing her nose with a monogrammed napkin. “I had to leave two fur coats on the counter! The sales clerk gave me a look of pure pity! I have never been so degraded in my entire life! You have to make her turn the cards back on!”
“She locked my Instagram brand partnership payments!” Harper snapped, tossing her phone onto the table. “The brand manager texted me saying they don’t work with creators involved in 'organized financial misconduct'! Organized financial misconduct, Vance! They think we’re criminals!”
“Shut up, Harper!” Vance snapped, his voice hoarse from screaming all day. His neck still bore the faint purple bruises where Dante Moretti’s iron fingers had crushed his windpipe seven hours earlier.
He turned toward Vivien, his eyes pleading, desperate for validation. “Vivien... your family. Your father’s hedge fund partners in Greenwich. They have capital. If we put together a hostile shareholder consortium, we can challenge the board’s vote in Delaware chancery court! We can tie Sloan up in litigation for eighteen months until Apex runs out of runway!”
Vivien slowly set down her champagne flute.
She looked at Vance Sterling with an expression so cold, so thoroughly stripped of affection, that it made his blood run backward.
“Are you completely delusional, Vance?” Vivien said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. “My father wouldn't give you a nickel to cross the street. You are toxic waste. You forged documents against a Moretti-controlled debt facility. Do you have any idea what that means in the real world?”
Vance flinched. “Vivien... we were going to get married! We were going to buy the villa in St. Barth’s!”
“We were going to buy the villa with *her* money, you fool!” Vivien hissed, leaning across the table. “I was with you because you were the golden boy of Silicon Alley with fifty million dollars in liquid equity! Now, you’re an unemployed, indicted fraudster facing twenty years in federal prison! You don’t have a company! You don’t have an apartment! And you don’t have me!”
Vivien reached up, unclasped the heavy diamond tennis bracelet Vance had purchased for her three weeks ago, and dropped it into her purse. She stood up from the table, smoothing her ivory skirt.
“Where are you going?” Vance cried, half-rising from his chair.
“I’m going to my penthouse to pack before the federal marshals freeze my furniture,” Vivien sneered. “Don’t call me again, Vance. If you come near Mason, I’ll take out an order of protection.”
“Vivien! Wait!”
Before Vance could take two steps toward her, the grand arched entryway of the private dining room swung open.
The restaurant, filled with the elite old-money dynasties of Manhattan, suddenly fell into an eerie, suffocating hush.
Four men in tailored charcoal suits entered first, fanning out with military precision, flanking the doorway.
And then, Sloan Kensington walked into the room.
If she had looked formidable in the boardroom that morning, tonight she looked like an absolute empress.
She wore a custom-tailored emerald velvet evening gown that hugged her slender frame before cascading into a subtle, sweeping train. The deep green fabric made her porcelain skin and striking green eyes blaze with hypnotic intensity. Around her neck sat a breathtaking antique choker of Burmese emeralds and diamonds—a Kensington family heirloom that had been locked in a Swiss vault for twenty years.
Her hair was styled in soft, glamorous waves, and her lips were painted in blood-red silk.
Walking beside her, matching her stride with effortless, predatory grace, was Dante Moretti.
Dante wore a bespoke black tuxedo with a silk grosgrain lapel that accentuated his massive, imposing frame. He looked like an ancient Roman emperor who had stepped into modern Manhattan to claim his tribute.
The entire room stared. Billionaires, senators, and socialites parted like the Red Sea, lowering their voices, whispering behind their linen napkins.
*“Is that Sloan Kensington?”*
*“My God... she’s with Moretti.”*
*“Did you hear about Apex? She took the whole board down in forty minutes.”*
Vance stood frozen beside his table, his jaw hanging slack, his chest heaving. Beatrice looked as if she were about to faint, her fingers clutching her pearls so hard the string looked ready to snap.
Sloan did not look around the room. Her eyes were locked onto Vance Sterling with the lethal, unwavering focus of a sniper sighting a target.
She stopped three feet from the Sterling family’s table. Dante stopped half a pace behind her, his hands folded loosely in front of him, radiating a quiet, terrifying threat that made the surrounding waiters back away into the shadows.
“Good evening, Vance,” Sloan said. Her voice was like crystal bells ringing over frozen water—sweet, clear, and utterly merciless.
“Sloan...” Vance breathed, his eyes traveling over the emeralds at her throat, the bespoke velvet gown, and the terrifying man standing at her shoulder. “What... what are you doing here?”
“I came to settle our accounts,” Sloan replied smoothly.
She reached into the small, beaded vintage evening clutch she held in her left hand and pulled out three distinct legal notices folded in pristine white envelopes.
She dropped the first envelope onto Beatrice’s bread plate.
“Beatrice,” Sloan said, her eyes glancing down at her mother-in-law. “That is a formal notice of eviction from the Southampton carriage house. As you well know, the deed belongs to the Kensington Family Trust. You have seventy-two hours to remove your personal effects before the locks are changed and the estate is listed for private liquidation.”
Beatrice let out a high-pitched, strangled shriek. “My Southampton home? You can’t evict me! I am a Sterling! My grandfather built that club!”
“Your grandfather died broke, Beatrice,” Sloan said without a flicker of emotion. “And for the last six years, my dead grandfather has been paying your wine bills. That ends tonight.”
Sloan dropped the second envelope directly into Harper’s lap.
“Harper. That is a formal notification that the Kensington Trust has settled the outstanding balance on your Soho loft lease and surrendered the keys to building management. Your furniture has been placed in an industrial storage unit in Queens. The first month’s fee has been paid. After that, I suggest you ask your influencer friends to help you pay the bill.”
Harper burst into hysterical, uncontrollable tears, burying her face in her hands.
Finally, Sloan turned her gaze back to Vance.
She held the third envelope between two slender, manicured fingers.
“And this, Vance, is for you.”
Vance did not reach for it. He looked at the envelope as if it contained anthrax. “What is it?”
“It is a temporary restraining order issued by the New York County Family Court, prohibiting you from coming within five hundred feet of Ara or her school until the formal custody hearing next month.”
Vance’s eyes widened with manic, desperate rage. “You’re keeping me from my daughter? You spiteful, vindictive bitch! You can’t keep me from my own child! I’m her father!”
He took an aggressive, lunging step forward, his hand raising as if to grab her arm.
He never reached her.
Dante Moretti moved with the blinding speed of a striking viper.
Before Vance’s hand could even cross the space between them, Dante’s left hand caught Vance by the lapels of his suit, lifting the smaller man completely off his feet and slamming him down onto the center of the table.
Plates shattered. Wine glasses exploded into shards of crystal. Red wine pooled across the white linen like a fresh pool of blood.
The dining room erupted into sharp gasps and panicked shrieks, but nobody dared move to intervene.
Dante leaned down over Vance, his knee pinning Vance’s chest against the broken porcelain, his right hand drawing a heavy, silver-plated Montblanc pen from his tuxedo pocket.
With terrifying, mechanical precision, Dante drove the hardened steel tip of the pen into the wood of the table, half an inch from Vance’s left eye.
Vance whimpered, his bladder nearly failing, his body trembling violently beneath Dante’s crushing weight.
“You have five seconds to apologize to your wife for raising your voice,” Dante whispered into Vance’s ear.
Vance looked up into those slate-gray eyes and saw the absolute, terrifying certainty of death staring back at him.
“I’m sorry!” Vance sobbed, tears and sweat mixing with the spilled wine on his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Sloan! I’m sorry! Please... please don’t hurt me!”
Dante held him pinned for two more agonizing seconds before slowly releasing his grip and stepping back.
He pulled a pristine silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped a speck of red wine from the cuff of his shirt, and dropped the cloth onto Vance’s face.
Sloan looked down at the pathetic, broken man lying among the shattered crystal and spilled burgundy. She felt no pity. She felt no lingering warmth. She felt only the profound, cleansing relief of a woman who had finally cut the cancer out of her life.
“The board meeting tomorrow morning starts at eight, Vance,” Sloan murmured, her voice carrying through the silent dining room. “Don’t be late. We’re reviewing your criminal indictment referrals.”
She turned her back on the Sterling family, linking her arm smoothly through Dante Moretti’s offered elbow.
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Together, the queen of Apex and the king of the New York underworld walked out of Le Cirque Royale, leaving the golden boy drowning in the wreckage of his own arrogance.
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