Chapter 15 - The Verdict of Lake Forest
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In the cavernous silence of the warehouse, Julian, Damon, and Lucas stood motionless behind their mother, watching the proud, ruthless man who had ruled their world for three decades kneeling in the dirt with his head bowed and blood dripping from his hands.
For ten seconds, Evelyn looked down at the five-carat diamond ring resting on Arthur’s scarred, bleeding palms.
She remembered the twenty-two-year-old boy with dark hair and fierce gray eyes who had carried her groceries up four flights of stairs in Little Italy thirty-two years ago, who had paced the hospital hallway for eighteen hours when Julian was born, and who—five minutes ago—had ripped the flesh off his own wrists against a rusted iron bolt just to throw his body at a gun pointed at her head.
And she also remembered the three seconds he had hesitated under the chandelier at the Palmer House last night while three hundred people watched her cheek burn.
Slowly, Evelyn reached out.
She didn't take the wedding ring.
Instead, she closed Arthur’s bleeding fingers back over the diamond so it stayed inside his own fist, and then pulled a clean white linen handkerchief from her handbag, handing it down to him just as he had handed her his thirty years ago.
"Stand up, Arthur," Evelyn said quietly.
Slowly, wincing as his bruised ribs shifted, Arthur got to his feet, clutching the ring and the linen cloth in his hand as he looked at her with raw, hollowed-out eyes.
"Thank you for keeping my father’s secret about Victor in 1998," Evelyn said evenly, her voice calm and crystal clear. "And thank you for what you did by that pillar five minutes ago. Because of those two things, you are walking out of this warehouse alive today instead of staying here with Marc Conti."
Arthur swallowed hard, a flicker of desperate hope rising in his bruised face. "Evie—"
"However," Evelyn cut in softly, stopping him dead in his tracks, "you don't heal a bullet wound in twenty-four hours just because the man who pulled the trigger feels sorry when the blood hits the floor. Last night, in front of our sons and our entire world, you let another woman strike me in my own house, and you hesitated when asked if I was replaceable."
She looked at Julian, Damon, and Lucas, then back at Arthur.
"Clause Nine stands," Evelyn stated with absolute finality. "The company, the docks, the casinos, and the Lake Forest estate belong to me and our sons. You are no longer the Don of Chicago, and you are no longer living in my house."
Arthur’s shoulders sagged an inch, though he didn't argue a single word. He simply nodded once, accepting the blade he had forged himself. "Where do you want me to go?"
"We own the forty-acre horse farm and hunting lodge up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin," Evelyn said. "Damon will have our doctor meet you up there tonight to stitch your head and your wrists, and four guards will stay on the perimeter gate to make sure nobody from Montreal comes looking for a rematch. You will stay up in Wisconsin off the grid, sober up, and remember who you were before the money made you arrogant. If—and only if—in six months you still want to earn back the right to sit at the bottom of your sons' Sunday dinner table, you can knock on the front door in Lake Forest and ask permission."
Evelyn turned toward her eldest son. "Julian, take me home. Damon, Lucas—put your father in the second car and make sure Dr. Rossini checks his ribs before he goes north."
As Evelyn walked back toward the front door of the warehouse in her spotless cashmere coat, Arthur stood by the iron pillar watching her go.
As Lucas and Damon stepped up beside their father to wrap a heavy wool blanket over his bloodied shoulders, Lucas paused and looked his father dead in the eye.
"She gave you a door in six months, Dad," Lucas said quietly. "Don't make the three of us lock it."
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Arthur looked down at the five-carat diamond ring clenched inside his bloody palm, then up at the retreating silhouette of the woman who had just saved his life and taken his empire in a single afternoon.
"I won't, son," Arthur whispered.
