Chapter 5 - The Wrath of the Titan
Victoria spun around, her face breaking into a triumphant, relieved smile.
“Luca! Thank God you’re here!” Victoria declared, stepping toward her son with her arms outstretched. “I’ve already handled it! Arthur from corporate legal drafted the custody surrender! We take the boy, we leave the girl with Nia, and we salvage the Shaw merger before the morning markets open—!”
Luca didn't speak.
He moved with the concussive, terrifying speed of an artillery shell.
He didn't greet his mother. He reached out with one massive, iron hand, snatched the thick legal custody brief straight out of Attorney Arthur Sterling’s grip, and ripped the sixty-page document clean in half with a single, violent jerk of his forearms.
TEAR.
He ripped it again. And again.
He threw the shredded legal confetti straight into the lawyer’s face, scattering white paper across the hardwood foyer.
“Luca—!” Arthur Sterling stammered, backing toward the elevator wall in blind terror. “That is a certified court petition—!”
“You have three seconds to get out of this building, Arthur,” Luca whispered.
His voice was not a shout. It was a subterranean, gravelly rumble that made the crystal light fixtures rattle against the ceiling.
“If you ever draft another document with my children’s names on it, I will personally revoke your firm’s retainer, liquidate your commercial lines of credit, and ensure you spend the rest of your career defending shoplifters in traffic court. GET OUT!”
Arthur Sterling didn't wait to hear another syllable. He hit the elevator call button frantically, squeezed through the doors, and vanished down the shaft in sheer, breathless panic.
Victoria stood frozen in the center of the foyer, her sable coat trembling, her mouth opening and closing soundlessly like a fish out of water.
“L-Luca…?” Victoria choked out, her aristocratic veneer finally beginning to crack. “How dare you speak to our corporate counsel like that?! I am your mother! I built this family! I protected your father’s name when he was weak! I did this to save your marriage to Evelyn!”
Luca turned his head slowly.
His slate-gray eyes were two points of lethal, unyielding obsidian.
“You didn't do this to save my marriage, Mother,” Luca spoke, each word dropping like an iron anvil onto her neck.
“You did this because you are a miserable, narcissistic vulture who has spent thirty years measuring human souls by their balance sheets.”
He took two slow, measured, towering steps toward her.
Victoria involuntarily stepped backward, her designer heels clicking frantically against the floorboards until her spine hit the mahogany paneling of the vestibule.
“For seven years, you whispered in my ear that Nia was defective,” Luca said, his voice shaking with a terrifying, subterranean rage. “You brought doctors to our dinner parties who specialized in degenerative ovarian failures! You had your friends leave medical pamphlets on our coffee table! You spent seven years poisoning my mind until I looked at the woman I loved and saw an obstacle to your precious corporate legacy!”
“She was an obstacle!” Victoria screamed, her voice cracking into a high-pitched, desperate screech. “Look at her! A baker’s daughter! She has no pedigree! She has no banking connections! You are a Moretti! You were born to rule this city, not to bake bread in an apron!”
“I was born to be a man, Mother,” Luca whispered softly, stepping twelve inches from her face.
“And you turned me into a monster who abandoned his own pregnant wife.”
Luca pulled an encrypted titanium tablet from his breast pocket, holding it directly before his mother’s eyes.
“At three o'clock this afternoon,” Luca stated with clinical, surgical precision, “I unsealed the private forensic audit into the Victoria Moretti Philanthropic Foundation.”
Victoria’s breath caught in her throat. The color completely evacuated from her face, leaving her skin as pale, mottled, and lifeless as dry drywall.
“The audit…?” she whispered in raw, unvarnished dread.
“Forty-two million dollars in unauthorized municipal tax conduits,” Luca revealed coldly. “Routed through shell corporations in Grand Cayman over the last eight years to cover your private gambling debts in Monaco and Monte Carlo. I signed the federal disclosure papers forty minutes ago, Mother. By morning, the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois will freeze your personal accounts.”
Victoria let out a strangled, animalistic wail, clutching her throat, sinking against the wall:
“Luca! No! You can’t do this to your own mother! The scandal will destroy our family! I’ll go to prison!”
“You will go wherever the federal courts send you, Victoria,” Luca said, his eyes completely dead to her tears.
He reached over, pressing the elevator call button.
“Get out of my sight. If you ever come within five hundred yards of Nia, Leo, or Maya again, I will have the United States Marshals drag you out of your Lake Forest estate in chains.”
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The elevator doors slid open.
Victoria Moretti—the untouchable, arrogant queen of Chicago high society—stumbled into the cab, clutching her sable coat, weeping in total, unhinged ruin as the brass doors slid shut, sealing her in the dark.
