Chapter 7
At 12:17 a.m., Bianca called Bella directly.
“You took the apartment,” she said.
Bella stood beside the harbor windows with one hand pressed beneath her ribs. “It was never yours.”
“Neither is the company.”
“I agree.”
The answer disrupted Bianca’s anger. “What?”
“The company belongs to its legal owners. The trust belongs to its beneficiaries. Eastport belongs to the entity that operates it. I am a temporary steward. That is the difference none of you understood.”
“You spent twelve years being patient and good, and where did it get you? He came to me because I made him feel alive.”
Bella remembered every version of herself Bianca meant to diminish. The young wife who believed promises. The grieving woman after two miscarriages. The exhausted patient measuring medication at dawn. The mother learning to protect a child before holding him.
“Perhaps you did make him feel alive,” she said. “He made you feel powerful. Neither feeling turned theft into ownership.”
“You think calm makes you superior?”
“No. I think calm keeps me from walking into your trap.”
“He was bored with you.”
The sentence found an old wound and pressed it. Bella allowed the pain to exist without letting Bianca steer with it. “A bored husband is not a natural disaster. Adriano made choices. So did you. I am done making either of you the weather in my life.”
Bianca recovered. “If you want the key before Rever uses it, meet me at Harbor House. Alone.”
“Send surrender terms through your attorney.”
“I do not have an attorney.”
“Then get one. I will not walk into an apartment where you and Rever control the doors.”
Bianca lowered her voice. “Adriano would have come for you.”
Bella looked through the glass at the dark harbor. “Adriano stopped coming for me a long time ago.”
She ended the call and forwarded the recording to investigators.
Ten minutes later, a hard pressure crossed her abdomen. Bella gripped the edge of the table. Dante entered from the adjacent office and stopped several feet away.
“Do you want me to call the doctor?”
Bella waited for the pain to pass. “Not yet.”
Eight minutes later, another contraction came. This time, she called. Her obstetrician sent her directly to Massachusetts General. She was barely thirty-four weeks pregnant. The contractions were too regular to dismiss, and the baby’s heart rate dipped each time her abdomen tightened.
Bella changed into a hospital gown while Alina called the trustees. David called Eastport. Someone called Matteo. And somewhere in the city, Adriano learned from a forwarded message that his ex-wife was in premature labor seventy-two hours after he had signed the divorce.
He arrived at the hospital before the security detail could refuse him entry. He stood in the corridor wearing the same clothes from the vault, his hands empty, his face carrying an expression none of the guards had seen on him before.
“I am not here to fight,” he told Dante. “I am here because I signed the thing that made her do this alone.”
Dante did not move. “She did not do this alone. She had her family. She had her son. She had herself. She did not have you.”
Adriano took the blow. He did not argue.
May you like
A nurse appeared. “The patient is asking for—” She stopped when she saw Adriano. “For no one. She is asking for no one. She is focused on the baby.”
Adriano nodded. He sat in the plastic chair against the wall. He did not try to enter the room.
