Chapter 14 - The Confrontation
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While Dante commanded the ballroom, Victoria sprinted down the east corridor, entirely abandoning her delicate persona. She bypassed the master suite completely, heading straight for the heavy mahogany doors of Dante’s private study.
She pushed the doors open and locked the deadbolt behind her.
The study was dark, illuminated only by the moonlight filtering through the French windows. Victoria didn't waste a single second. She marched behind the massive desk and grabbed the heavy, gilded frame of Dante's father's portrait. She pulled it to the right, exposing the brushed-steel door of the biometric safe.
She pulled a small, clear piece of silicone from her cleavage—a perfect, high-resolution mold of Dante’s right thumbprint, lifted from his whiskey glass three nights ago.
She pressed the silicone mold firmly against the glowing green glass of the scanner.
The machine beeped once. A green light flashed. Because the system was in the post-marriage override window, it bypassed the rolling code entirely. The heavy steel bolts groaned, and the safe swung open.
Victoria smiled a dark, victorious sneer. She reached inside and pulled out the small, black encrypted hard drive containing four billion dollars.
"Got it," she whispered to herself, clutching the drive tightly.
Suddenly, the heavy mahogany doors of the study burst open with a deafening crash, the deadbolt literally shot out of the wood.
Victoria shrieked, spinning around in her massive white dress, dropping the hard drive onto the Persian rug.
Dante Moretti walked into the room. He wasn't in the ballroom giving a toast. He had left Silvio to handle the crowd. Dante held a heavy, suppressed .45 caliber handgun, pointed directly at his bride's chest.
"You forgot one detail about the biometric safe, Katerina," Dante said, using her real Russian name, his voice echoing coldly in the cavernous study.
Victoria backed away, trembling violently, her eyes darting to the dropped hard drive. "Dante... what are you doing?"
"When an unauthorized drive is removed from that safe," Dante continued, stepping fully into the room and kicking the broken doors shut behind him, "the room goes into absolute lockdown."
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He pressed a button on a remote in his pocket. Heavy steel shutters slammed down violently over the massive windows of the study, plunging the room into darkness, illuminated only by the faint green light of the open safe.
"Welcome to the marriage," Dante whispered.
