Chapter 11 - Evicted from the Empire
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"Sign the stock transfer acknowledgment, Adrian," Lorenzo ordered from the head of the table, sliding a gold pen across the glass toward his son. "Or I convene an emergency board meeting at noon and remove you from the shipping terminals as well."
Without taking his eyes off my face, Adrian picked up the pen and signed the acknowledgment transferring sole control of the thirty-five percent Class-A voting block and the Moretti Grand Hotel directly to me. He didn't hesitate for a single second, and he didn't ask his lawyer to contest a word of it.
"Keep the hotel and the shares, Claire," Adrian said quietly, setting the pen down on the glass. "Keep all of it. Take every dime I have in Chicago if it proves to you that I didn't marry you for Grandmother’s stock. I will sign over my personal twenty-five percent right now if you just give me thirty days before you push that divorce petition through the court."
"I don't want thirty days, Adrian," I said, standing up from the table as two of the penthouse housekeepers rolled my two packed leather suitcases out of my dressing room toward the front foyer. "And I only want what Eleanor left me."
Adrian stepped around the table, blocking my path toward the suitcases, his tall frame trembling with a desperation that made even Victoria look away for a moment.
"Where are you going?" he asked, his voice cracking. "This is your home! If you don't want to see my face right now, I’ll pack a bag and move into the athletic club tonight! Don't leave our house, Claire!"
"This penthouse has had Sophia’s thumbprint programmed into the elevator for three months, Adrian," I replied calmly, looking up into his dark, bloodshot eyes. "Every time I walk through that foyer, I’m going to see the woman you told me not to worry about standing on my rug with a bag of stomach medicine. I’m moving into the presidential suite at the Moretti Grand Hotel—since I now own the building—and I’m taking over the hospitality division tomorrow morning."
I stepped around him toward the elevator lobby, where Lorenzo’s two bodyguards picked up my luggage.
Right before the bronze elevator doors closed, I reached out and finally took the antique emerald-and-diamond bracelet from the foyer console where Adrian had set it down.
"By the way, Adrian," I said as the doors began to slide together, "before you spend any more energy defending Sophia’s honor, you might want to ask yourself why a woman who claims to love you so much returned your grandmother’s bracelet this morning with a piece of green glass where the center diamond-cut emerald used to be."
Adrian’s eyes widened in shock.
"What?" he breathed, stepping toward the closing doors.
I held the antique bracelet up under the recessed halogen spotlight of the elevator car. To an untrained eye across a crowded dinner table, the three-carat center stone still looked bright green. Yet to someone who held a graduate degree in fine art restoration—the exact career I had paused when I married Adrian—the lack of natural jardin inclusions inside the center stone and the fresh glue residue beneath the platinum bezel were unmistakable.
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During the six months Sophia had kept my bracelet locked in her Lincoln Park apartment, she had pried out Eleanor Moretti’s priceless three-carat Muzo Colombian emerald—worth nearly four hundred thousand dollars on its own—and replaced it with a lab-grown hydrothermal crystal.
The bronze doors clicked shut on Adrian’s stunned, darkening face.
