Chapter 6 - The Unraveling Web
Inside Suite 1402, the atmosphere had shifted from volatile warfare to a fragile, aching truce.
Maya had fallen back asleep on the king-sized bed, her small arm flung over Leo, who refused to close his eyes. The boy sat against the headboard, watching Dominic like a sentry guarding a fortress. Dominic sat in an armchair ten feet away, refusing to crowd them, his tuxedo jacket discarded, sleeves rolled up over his tattooed forearms.
Natalie emerged from the small kitchenette carrying a steaming mug of black coffee. She hesitated for a moment, then set it down on the small table beside Dominic’s chair.
"Drink it," she said flatly. "You look like you're about to collapse."
Dominic looked at the mug, then up at her. "You remembered. Black, no sugar."
"I spent five years knowing every detail of your life, Dominic," Natalie replied, wrapping her arms around herself as she stood near the window, gazing out at the rainy Chicago skyline. "Memory doesn't vanish overnight, no matter how much you want it to."
Dominic picked up the mug. The warmth seeped into his cold palms. "Why London, Nat?"
"Because it was as far away from your shadow as I could get," she said quietly. "My grandmother’s sister lived in Kensington. She took me in when I had nothing. I was three months pregnant before I even realized why I was constantly sick. I thought it was just the grief killing me."
Dominic’s chest contracted violently. "And you raised them alone?"
"I worked eighteen hours a day drafting blueprints for a firm," Natalie said, her voice tight. "I pumped milk in supply closets. I took night classes to get my master's certification. Leo had chronic bronchitis when he was two. I spent three weeks sleeping on a plastic chair in an NHS hospital room, terrified he wouldn't make it, while you were on the cover of Forbes, photographed with Vanessa at charity galas."
"Natalie..." Dominic’s voice broke. He stood up, but stopped himself from approaching her when Leo shifted on the bed. "I didn't touch her. Not once."
Natalie let out a bitter, disbelieving scoff. "Please, Dominic. Don't insult my intelligence."
"I’m telling you the God's honest truth!" Dominic took an urgent step forward, his voice a harsh, raw whisper. "That night—the night you found her in my bed—I had three sips of scotch before I blacked out. I woke up hours later with a migraine that split my skull, completely dressed, on the floor of my bathroom. Vanessa was in my bed. I was furious with myself. I thought I had lost control. But I swear on my mother’s soul, Natalie, I never laid a hand on her. Not that night. Not in the five years since."
Natalie turned to face him, her eyes searching his features with agonizing skepticism. "You proposed to her six months ago."
"My council demanded it!" Dominic snarled quietly. "They said an unmarried Don without an heir was a target! I delayed the ceremony four times. I couldn't do it. Every time I looked at her, I felt sick. Because she wasn't you."
Before Natalie could respond, Dominic’s phone vibrated violently against his hip.
He pulled it out, seeing Marco’s name flashing on the screen. He answered immediately. "What is it?"
"Dom, you need to see this," Marco’s voice was breathless, crackling with fury. "I had our tech team run a deep forensic audit on Vanessa’s private cloud storage and her secondary bank routing numbers. We broke through her encrypted drives."
"What did you find?" Dominic’s voice turned deadly.
"Five years ago, she paid Dr. Alistair Miller three hundred thousand dollars to alter Natalie’s fertility files. Then she paid a digital graphics designer to stitch Natalie’s face into security footage from the Continental Hotel. Dom... Natalie never cheated on you. She was never barren. Vanessa fabricated every single shred of evidence."
Dominic’s phone slipped an inch in his hand. The room seemed to tilt beneath his feet.
"And that’s not all," Marco continued, his tone turning urgent and panicked. "Twenty minutes ago, Vanessa authorized a ten-million-dollar wire from your Grand Cayman holding account to a dummy corporation owned by Matteo Rossi. And three black vans just entered the hotel's underground service tunnel."
Dominic’s blood turned to pure acid.
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"Sound the alarms," Dominic ordered, his voice dropping into the terrifying, icy calm of a predator ready to kill. "Lock down the hotel. Execute Protocol Black. If a single Rossi soldier takes a breath on the fourteenth floor, put a bullet in his skull."
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