Chapter 12 - Blood and Boardrooms
We landed in Manhattan under the cover of darkness, completely bypassing the commercial airports. The Rossi private jet touched down at a secure airstrip, where a convoy of armored SUVs was waiting. The romantic bliss of the Maldives had evaporated, replaced by a suffocating, hyper-vigilant paranoia.
If Dominic’s father’s cufflink had survived the crash, it meant the crash wasn't an accident. And whoever "A" was, they were claiming a blood right to the Rossi empire.
The next morning, I refused to hide in the estate. I had fought too hard to claim my place by Dominic's side to sit on the sidelines now. I walked into the Rossi corporate headquarters wearing a razor-sharp, charcoal-gray Tom Ford suit, my heels clicking aggressively against the Italian marble floors. I was the Lady of the estate, but in this building, I was the newly appointed Co-Chair of the Rossi Foundation, and I had unrestricted access to the archives.
While Dominic tore through the board of directors, hunting for any executive who might have financial ties to the Cayman ghost corporation, I locked myself in the subterranean server room with our chief cybersecurity officer.
"I need you to pull every encrypted file, every hidden trust document, and every redacted payout authorized by Richard Vance over the last five years," I ordered, standing over the glowing monitors. "Vance didn't have the capital to fund Victoria's sabotage on his own. Someone was backing him."
For six hours, we sifted through oceans of data. It was like scrubbing a floor with a toothbrush, searching for a single drop of blood. Just as my vision began to blur, the security officer gasped.
"Mrs. Rossi... look at this," he said, pulling up a digitized ledger from an offshore account that had been aggressively purged. "We found a recurring wire transfer masked as a maritime logistics payment. Ten million dollars a month, every month, for a decade. It was routed through Vance’s personal holding company, but the ultimate destination was a private psychiatric facility in the Swiss Alps."
"Who was the patient?" I demanded, leaning in close to the screen.
The officer typed frantically, overriding a series of firewalls. A patient file loaded onto the screen. It was heavily redacted, but the photograph remained intact. It was a man in his late thirties, with piercing dark eyes and a sharp jawline that looked terrifyingly familiar. He looked like a twisted, darker reflection of my husband.
The name on the file sent a shockwave of ice through my veins. Alessandro Rossi.
Dominic’s older brother. The firstborn son who was supposedly institutionalized as a teenager for severe, violent sociopathy, and who the family claimed had died of heart failure fifteen years ago. He wasn't dead. He had been quietly funded and hidden away by the Vances to be used as the ultimate weapon against Dominic.
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My phone vibrated violently on the desk. It was Elias.
"Ma'am, you need to get to the penthouse boardroom right now," Elias said, his voice laced with uncharacteristic panic. "Someone just breached the building. They bypassed all security protocols."
