Chapter 4 - The Poisoned Golden Cage
Back in Las Vegas, Dante Moretti felt like a man condemned to suffocate slowly inside a vault of gold.
The penthouse was suffocating. Every time he stepped into the foyer, his eyes involuntarily sought the place by the umbrella stand where Claire used to leave her small, sensible boots.
He had told himself three years ago that it didn't matter.
When he had walked out of Lily’s hospital room that rainy morning and arrived back at the penthouse to find Claire’s ring, the divorce summons, and the baby blanket on his desk, rage had blinded him. He had smashed the crystal decanters against the wall. He had sent forty men to scour the airports, the bus terminals, the highways leading to California.
*She will crawl back,* he had snarled to his underboss, Enzo. *She has no family without me. She has no money without me. Helen is on my side. Lily is having my baby. Claire is just throwing a tantrum.*
He was wrong.
Claire hadn't thrown a tantrum. She had executed a surgical, bloodless amputation.
Marcus Vance had delivered legal blows that stunned the Moretti syndicate. Within forty-eight hours, international freeze orders locked down Dante’s shell corporations. To keep his casinos from being seized by federal regulators who were smelling blood in the water, Dante had been forced to liquidate half of his commercial real estate to settle Claire’s fifty-percent payout.
Claire had walked away with over four hundred million dollars. And she hadn't left a single footprint.
Then came the reality of living with Lily.
Dante had never loved Lily.
Lily had been an intoxicated, reckless mistake on a weekend when he was reeling from a brutal turf war in Chicago. Lily had thrown herself at him in his VIP lounge, whispering how much better she could understand his darkness than her prim, conservative sister Claire. Dante had taken the bait in a moment of arrogant weakness.
When Lily showed up pregnant, Dante’s Sicilian heritage had trapped him. In the Moretti code, a child of your blood could not be abandoned. He had provided for her, intending to keep her hidden, a secret mistress in Summerlin, while maintaining his pristine, untouchable life with Claire.
He had thought he could compartmentalize his sins.
Instead, he lost the only woman who had ever looked at him as a man rather than a violent mobster.
"Dante! Isabella is screaming again, and the nanny didn't show up!" Lily’s shrill voice cut through the heavy silence of the penthouse living room.
Lily walked into the kitchen wearing a magenta silk robe, her face plastered with expensive skincare serums, her lips curled into an eternal pout. She was twenty-five now, but the sweet, fragile girl who had pretended to be a victim in the hospital was gone. In her place was an entitled, paranoid monster.
"Where is the staff, Lily?" Dante asked, not looking up from his scotch. His voice was dangerously low.
"I fired them!" Lily snapped, slamming her acrylic nails onto the granite counter. "They were looking at me funny! They talk about Claire! The housekeeping staff still whispers about how Claire organized the pantry, how Claire arranged the art! I’m sick of it, Dante! We’ve lived together for three years, and you still haven't proposed! Isabella is three years old! Do you want her to be a bastard forever?"
Dante slowly set his glass down. He looked at Lily.
He felt nothing. No desire. No affection. Only a rancid, rotting disgust—mostly with himself.
"You will never wear Claire's ring," Dante said, his voice flat and dead. "I told you that the day you moved in. You have the black card. You have the jewels. You have the townhouse in Summerlin if you don't like it here. But you will never be Mrs. Moretti."
Lily’s eyes flared with venom. "Claire is gone, Dante! She abandoned you! She ran away like a coward! My mother said she probably died in some gutter in Europe because she couldn't survive without your money!"
"Claire took four hundred million dollars of my legitimate wealth and vanished without asking for a dime of alimony, Lily," Dante whispered, rising from his chair like an awakening demon. "She survived me. She survived you. And if you ever speak her name in this house again, I will have Enzo pack your bags and drop you back at your mother’s three-bedroom tract home."
Lily went pale. She backed away toward Isabella’s room, clutching her robe around herself as Isabella’s wails echoed through the cavernous penthouse.
Dante turned toward the window, gripping the marble sill until his knuckles cracked.
"Where are you, Claire?" he breathed into the glass. "Where the hell did you go?"
Down on the Strip, the giant digital billboard above the Bellagio flickered to a new announcement.
Dante’s eyes narrowed as he read the glowing letters:
**THE STERLING GLOBAL CONSORTIUM ANNOUNCES ACQUISITION OF THE MIRAGE ROYALE GAMING GROUP. GRAND REDESIGN GALA THIS FRIDAY.**
Dante froze.
The Mirage Royale debt notes? Someone had bought out the secondary lenders behind his back?
He reached for his phone, his pulse hammering in his throat.
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"Enzo! Get the car," Dante barked into the receiver. "Who the hell is Sterling Global?"
***
