Chapter 4 - The Puppet Master
The cold floor beneath my bare feet felt like ice, but inside, I was burning alive.
*Fabricated.*
Every tear I had shed in the shower so Dante wouldn't hear me. Every night I had stared at the ceiling, feeling defective, broken, and unwomanly. Every time his mother, Victoria Moretti, had looked at me across a Thanksgiving dinner table with thinly veiled disgust, reminding everyone that the Moretti dynasty needed an heir to survive the board’s scrutiny.
Dante had known. Or worse—he had orchestrated it.
"Why?" I choked out, staring at Miriam. "Why would anyone do that?"
"I don't know the politics of your husband's family, Elena," Miriam said quietly, taking my hands in hers. "But under Illinois state law, if you don't have biological children within five years of marriage, what does your prenuptial agreement say?"
The room went dead silent.
The prenup.
Five years ago, on the eve of our wedding, Dante’s attorneys had presented me with a fifty-page document. I had been so madly, naively in love that I had barely read it. But one clause had stuck out: *If the marriage is dissolved without living biological issue prior to the fifth anniversary, the spouse waives all claims to the Moretti trust, company shares, and the penthouse estate, receiving only a flat settlement of five hundred thousand dollars.*
Our fifth anniversary had been today.
Today, October 14th.
If I divorced Dante before midnight tonight without a child, I was out on the street with scraps, while Sofia Vale—the daughter of Moretti Enterprises’ largest private shareholder—stepped into my place.
"He wanted me gone," I whispered, the puzzle pieces clicking together with terrifying precision. "He didn't just forget our anniversary. He was running out the clock."
"Elena, you have two viable heartbeats in there," Miriam reminded me firmly. "You are eight weeks along. The moment you file for divorce and prove pregnancy with his biological heirs, that prenup is shredded. You are entitled to half of everything he built during the marriage—and full custody if you play your cards right."
"No," I said, my voice hardening.
I wiped the tears from my cheeks, stood up from the exam table, and pulled my dress back on.
"I don't want his dirty money," I said, looking Miriam dead in the eye. "If Dante knows I'm pregnant, he will hire every top-tier lawyer in the state of Chicago to take these children from me. He will claim I'm mentally unstable. He will use his connections, his judges, his power. I will lose them before they even take their first breath."
"So what are you going to do?"
May you like
"I’m going to make him sign an unconditional divorce settlement," I said, a cold, dangerous clarity washing over me. "Tonight. Before he finds out I'm carrying the Moretti heirs."
***
