Chapter 2 - The Collapse of the Crown
Dante didn’t fight the guards. The sheer shock of my betrayal—a betrayal born entirely of his own making—had rendered him completely impotent. He was escorted out of St. Catherine’s Hospital, his white roses abandoned on the floor, while I finally let myself cry. Not for the marriage I had lost, but for the overwhelming, fierce love I felt for the tiny boy sleeping on my chest.
While I spent the next three days recovering in the VIP maternity wing, completely shielded by my security team, Dante returned to a crumbling empire.
He marched into his Manhattan headquarters expecting to rally his capos and lieutenants, planning to use his vast wealth to intimidate my lawyers and force me back into line. Instead, he walked into an apocalypse.
Because I had filed the divorce under a federal seal with a mountain of forensic accounting evidence, the authorities had moved with devastating speed. The FBI executed synchronized raids on three of his primary fronts. The Cayman accounts were frozen. The shipping containers in Red Hook were seized.
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Dante’s most loyal men, realizing their boss had carelessly allowed his scorned wife to walk away with the keys to the kingdom, began to turn on him. In the syndicate, respect is currency. And Dante had just been completely financially and politically emasculated by a woman he thought was merely a pretty accessory.
He tried to call me fifty times. He left voicemails begging, threatening, and bargaining. I listened to none of them. I handed the phone to Sofia and focused entirely on feeding Leo.
