Chapter 10 - The Vow in the Dark
The city of Chicago slept beneath a blanket of cold, pre-dawn fog, the streetlights along Lake Shore Drive casting long, amber halos through the mist.
In the penthouse living room, the bodyguards had cleared the floor, retiring to their tactical posts in the service wings. Only Adrian remained.
He stood directly before the glass, holding the returned wedding band in the palm of his left hand. The cool platinum circle pressed against his skin, its tiny engraved promise—Amor Vincit Omnia—burning like a branding iron.
He looked down at his own right hand, at the matching band he had never removed since the priest blessed it six years ago.
He knew what lay ahead. The syndicate war was not over; the Valenti faction was fractured, desperate, and would strike again the moment they smelled weakness in the Moretti hierarchy. His captains were already questioning why their boss had canceled the citywide sweeps, why forty armed men were standing down while the Don’s wife was missing in the night.
They thought he was weak. They thought grief had dismantled the ruthless king of the South Side.
They were wrong.
The grief had not dismantled him; it had stripped away the poison of his own vanity. For six years, he had believed that his wealth, his violence, and his terrifying reputation were the things that kept Claire safe. He had believed that as long as he ruled the darkness, she could walk in the light.
Now he saw the truth: his darkness had been the very thing extinguishing her light.
Adrian slipped the platinum band into the breast pocket of his dark waistcoat, right over his heart, beside her folded letter.
He reached onto the marble table and picked up his heavy black fountain pen. With a slow, deliberate hand, he pulled the three legal sheets of the divorce settlement toward him. He looked at her signature: Claire Bennett. He looked at the empty space beside it reserved for the respondent: Adrian Moretti.
With a sudden, violent motion of his wrist, Adrian gripped the three pages in his fists and tore them in half.
The sound of ripping paper was a sharp, clean crack in the quiet room. He tore them again, and again, until the sixty-million-dollar waiver was reduced to a dozen white fragments. He let them fall onto the marble table, scattering across the veined Carrara stone like dead leaves.
“I won’t sign it, Claire,” Adrian whispered into the dark glass of the window, his voice low, steady, and vibrating with an eternal, unbreakable vow. “I will never sign it.”
He would find her. Not with guns, not with warrants, and not with the heavy boots of his enforcers. He would find her as the man who had loved her in that small art gallery before he became a monster. He would stand before her stripped of his bodyguards, stripped of his weapons, and stripped of his pride. He would stand in the cold rain and wait for her, for as many days, months, or years as it took for her to see that she had never been his second choice.
May you like
She was his only choice.
Outside, the first faint violet rays of dawn began to bleed across the horizon of Lake Michigan, piercing the cold fog that cloaked the city. Adrian Moretti took a single, deep breath of the morning air, turned his back on the empty penthouse, and walked toward the light.
