Chapter 3 - Sins of the Runway
The penthouse suite of the Peninsula Hotel was quiet save for the soft patter of rain against the reinforced panoramic windows overlooking Michigan Avenue.
In the master bedroom, little Leo was fast asleep, curled beneath a duvet with a stuffed velvet bear tucked under his arm. Anna stood by the crackling marble fireplace, holding an untouched snifter of amber bourbon. Her knuckles were white around the glass.
Her hands only started shaking once the bedroom door was securely closed.
"You held your ground beautifully, Anna," Julian said from the open doorway of the sitting room, loosening his bowtie. "The look on his face will be the cover of every financial tabloid by sunrise."
Anna closed her eyes, letting out a breath she felt she had held for thirty-six months. "It wasn't about the tabloids, Julian. It was about surviving the sight of him."
"Did you feel anything?"
"Rage," she whispered. "And shame. Shame that I ever loved a man who valued my life less than Sophia Carter’s panic."
The memories rushed back, unbidden and suffocating.
*Three years ago.*
The screaming alarms inside the cabin of the Gulfstream G650. The thick, acrid stench of burning hydraulic fluid filling her lungs. The sheer terror of being eight months pregnant, her hands cupping her swollen stomach while the cabin tilted on a torn landing gear.
She remembered Vincent turning to her. For half a second, she had seen the man she adored, the man who had promised to love her until death parted them.
And then Sophia had screamed. *“Vincent, please! I have asthma, I can’t breathe! Save me!”*
Vincent had hesitated. Just a fraction of a second. But a fraction was all it took to sever a soul.
*“I’m taking Sophia out first,”* he had said.
*“Vincent, I’m carrying your child!”* she had screamed back, tears scorching her soot-streaked cheeks.
*“I’ll come back for you! I promise!”*
He had taken Sophia’s hand and leaped toward the forward chute.
He never came back.
He didn't have time. Within thirty seconds of the main door opening, oxygen rushed into the smoldering cabin, feeding the engine flames. The bulkhead blew outward in a deafening roar of orange hellfire.
Vincent hadn't known that the brave flight attendant, Maria, had kicked open the damaged rear tail cone exit just seconds before the blast. Maria had dragged Anna, battered and bleeding, into the snowy ravine behind the runway while the fuel tanks erupted in a cataclysmic shockwave.
Anna had spent three weeks in an off-the-grid clinic in Montana, hovering between life and death, fighting through premature labor. Julian Sterling, her estranged maternal half-uncle and head of Bennett Holdings, had tracked down Maria’s emergency calls and arrived before Vincent’s search teams even combed the scorched debris.
When Anna had finally opened her eyes, holding a tiny, fragile boy born six weeks too early, the hospital television was broadcasting Vincent Moretti’s press conference.
He was standing on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in black, weeping. And beside him, her arm looped intimately through his, dabbing her tearless eyes with a lace handkerchief, was Sophia Carter.
*He buried an empty casket,* Julian had told her gently then. *He believes you are ashes, Anna. If you go back now, you return as the wounded wife to a man who abandoned you. Or... you take the Bennett fortune, rebuild your life, and become untouchable.*
Anna had looked down at her newborn son. She had made her vow then: *Vincent Moretti will never touch my child. He gave up his right to be a father the second he let go of my hand.*
"He won't let this go," Julian warned her now, pulling her out of the past. "Moretti is a predator. He’s already set his intelligence network on us. By midnight, he’ll know Bennett Holdings is opening its North American headquarters right across from the Moretti Tower."
Anna took a slow sip of the bourbon, letting the burn steady her nerves.
May you like
"Let him investigate," she said, her hazel eyes blazing with dangerous resolve. "Let him come. He thinks he’s a king in this city. It’s time he learned what happens when you leave a queen to burn."
***
