Chapter 5 - The Wedding DressWednesday morning brought a new level of psychological warfare. Veronica arrived alone, dismissing the private security guard stationed outside the door with a flick of her wrist. She locked the heavy oak door behind her and walked straight to the wardrobe in the corner of the suite.
She opened it, revealing a massive white garment bag. Unzipping it slowly, she pulled out a wedding gown made of French Chantilly lace, studded with thousands of hand-stitched diamonds. She held it up against her body, pirouetting in front of the full-length mirror as sunlight from the Manhattan window caught the crystals.
“Isn’t it magnificent, Dominic?” she purred, walking over to the side of the bed and trailing a manicured fingernail down the clear plastic tubing of his oxygen mask. “We’re still getting married, you know. Technically, at least. A bedside wedding ceremony is so tragic, so romantic. The tabloids will eat it up. ‘The Billionaire’s Dying Vows.’ It guarantees public sympathy when the probate court awards me sole control of his estate.”
She leaned down, her face inches from his. Her eyes were hard, devoid of any human warmth. “You built this entire empire thinking you were a king. But you forgot one rule of the jungle, darling: never trust a queen who knows how to sharpen her own knife.”
Dominic stared back at her through half-mast eyelids, letting her see the vacant stare of a comatose man while his mind calculated the exact coordinates of her destruction. He remembered the night he proposed to her at the rooftop restaurant overlooking Central Park, how she had wept tears of joy—tears he now knew were rehearsed for maximum financial impact.
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“Just two more days,” Veronica whispered, patting his cheek patronizingly. “Hold on until Friday morning. After that, you can sleep forever.”
She packed the dress back into its bag, reapplied her red lipstick in the vanity mirror, and glided out of the room, leaving behind the suffocating scent of her perfume and the echoing promise of murder.
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