Chapter 12 - Desperation in the Rain
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By noon on Monday, the news had swept through every boardroom from LaSalle Street to the Gold Coast: Claire Moretti had walked out of her husband’s penthouse, assumed direct control of the Moretti Grand Hotel and thirty-five percent of the syndicate’s voting stock with Lorenzo Moretti’s full backing, and cut Adrian out of the hospitality division entirely.
And inside my new fortieth-floor corner office overlooking the Chicago River, I didn't waste a single hour mourning my marriage.
My first official act as Chairwoman of Moretti Hospitality and Security was to summon Dante Vance, the head of the firm’s elite corporate intelligence unit—a man who had previously reported to Adrian, and who now reported directly to my desk.
"Mrs. Moretti," Dante said, placing a thick black leather dossier onto my glass desk while rain lashed against the skyscraper windows outside. "We ran the six-month forensic audit you requested on Sophia Reynolds’s financials, her travel history prior to leaving Milan in April, and every private dealer in Chicago who handles unmounted Colombian emeralds."
"And?" I asked, leaning back in my leather chair.
"You were right about the center stone," Dante said grimly, opening the folder to a high-resolution surveillance photograph taken inside a private diamond bourse on Wabash Avenue in May. "Two weeks after Mr. Moretti handed her your grandmother’s bracelet for that supposed clasp repair, Sophia Reynolds sold the original three-carat Muzo emerald through a broker for three hundred and eighty thousand dollars in untraceable wire credits."
I stared at the photograph of Sophia smiling across a velvet counter as she pocketed the wire receipt.
"Three hundred and eighty thousand is pocket change compared to what she was squeezing out of Adrian’s generosity," I noted, frowning slightly. "Adrian bought her a two-million-dollar brownstone trust lease and paid for her gallery opening in River North. Why would she risk stealing the center stone out of a family heirloom she might eventually have to return?"
"Because she couldn't ask Mr. Moretti for cash without him seeing where the wire was going," Dante replied, flipping to the second tab of the dossier. "Sophia Reynolds didn't leave Milan six months ago because she missed Chicago, ma'am. She fled Italy on a midnight train to Zurich after accumulating four point two million euros in underground baccarat debt at a syndicate casino in Monte Carlo run by Julian Cross."
My breath caught slightly. Julian Cross was Adrian’s most ruthless rival on the Great Lakes and Atlantic shipping lanes—a man who had been trying for three years to hijack the Moretti port contracts in Indiana and Chicago.
"The three hundred and eighty thousand from your grandmother’s emerald was an interest payment to keep Cross’s collectors from breaking her legs in May," Dante continued quietly. "And last month, Cross offered to wipe out the rest of her four-million-dollar debt under one condition: she had to use her access to Mr. Moretti’s briefcase and phone to copy the encrypted security schedules for our armored casino cash transports before Friday’s Founders’ Ball."
Just as I closed the folder, my private office intercom buzzed.
May you like
"Mrs. Moretti," my assistant said nervously over the speaker, "Mr. Adrian Moretti is downstairs on the sidewalk outside the Michigan Avenue entrance. He’s been standing there in the pouring rain without an umbrella for two hours since security told him you revoked his penthouse elevator pass."
I walked over to the fortieth-floor window and looked down through the grey sheets of October rain. Forty stories below, ignoring the stares of hotel guests and valets, stood Adrian in a drenched black overcoat, staring up at my office window.
