Save who can be saved. Burn what must be burned.
A simple revenge would have been easier.
Take the shares. Freeze the accounts. Destroy Dominic publicly. Walk away.
But Bellucci Civic employed hundreds of people who had never touched the dirt beneath the polish. Accountants, admin staff, drivers, site managers, maintenance crews, grant coordinators, union subcontractors. If I pulled the wrong beam, the whole structure would come down on heads that had never even known what held the ceiling up.
I needed help.
There was only one person I trusted to look at financial corruption without flinching and tell me exactly where the rot ended.
Gabriel Shaw answered on the second ring.
It was 1:12 in the morning.
“Lena?”
“Are you alone?”
A pause. Then his voice changed. “Yes. What happened?”
“My husband announced he’s in love with another woman,” I said. “And I think he’s trying to make me the face of a transportation corridor for organized crime.”
Another pause.
Then, because Gabriel had known me since grad school and understood that I only sounded this calm when I was very close to detonating, he said, “Send me your location.”
By dawn we had spread Rosa’s files across a folding table in Gabriel’s West Loop office, where exposed brick and brutalist lighting tried very hard to make forensic accounting look sexy.
“It’s real,” he said after two hours of cross-checking. “The share transfers, the shell layers, the parcel maps. This is sophisticated as hell.”
“Can it bury him?”
Gabriel leaned back in his chair. “Yes.”
I waited.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “It can also bury a lot of people standing too close.”
That was exactly what I feared.
He turned one of the maps toward me. “If Dominic gets you to sign that easement transfer inside divorce papers, he moves the liability path through entities connected to your design firm. If the corridor gets discovered later, you look like the clean executive who engineered the civic disguise.”
“And the affair?”
Gabriel’s expression went flat. “A pressure tactic. Destabilize you emotionally. Rush the paperwork. Make the divorce the headline so the tunnel isn’t.”
I thought of the restaurant. The rehearsed cruelty. The chosen lighting. The pregnancy.
Not love.
Never love.
Just leverage wearing cologne.
I should have felt relief at understanding the architecture of the betrayal.
Instead I felt something colder.
Because now I knew Dominic had not simply broken my heart.
He had built a frame and meant to hang me inside it.
At ten that morning, he came to the house.
I saw the black SUV through the front windows and had exactly enough time to set my phone to record before he let himself in with the old key. The locks had been changed three hours earlier. He discovered that only after the key failed, swore under his breath, and pounded once on the door until I opened it myself.
He stood there in yesterday’s suit, freshly showered, eyes shadowed from too little sleep and too much ego.
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