Chapter 354: I Was Right All Along
He had looked at her then a little more than one second and made the kind of arrogant assumption men like him always made about women they thought belonged to them. He had thought she would be docile.
A bride bred for duty. A woman whose favourite words would be no more than yes and amen.
How wrong he had been. Maybe if he had actually taken the time to know the woman he was marrying, to look past the arrangement and the surnames and the convenience of the alliance, he would have discovered sooner what kind of ice lived under Bianca’s skin.
"Julian is dead," Luca announced.
"As he should be," she said.
"You really think so?"
For all her poise, she didn’t realise she was standing in the wrong room at the wrong time in front of the wrong man if she thought he had called her in merely to share family updates.
His fingers tapped once against the desk, close enough to the gun to make the point without using it. He kept his eyes on her.
If she truly believed Julian deserved death, then what interested Luca was whether she feared she might deserve it too.
"Yes," Bianca said. "It is what happens to people blinded by power." She even gave a small shrug with it, as if Julian’s death were not the end of a man raised inside the same brutal machinery that had shaped them all, but merely the predictable result of ambition turned rotten.
"He had some interesting things to say about you," Luca said at last. "I was right all along."
Bianca’s chin lifted instantly. "You shouldn’t believe anything he says."
"Maybe I won’t." He reached toward the laptop and turned the screen around so it faced her. "But I needed physical proof," he said. "So I waited a couple of days more to get it."
All at once, the color drained from her face. On the display was grainy but unmistakable picture by picture footage: the street outside the hotel, timestamped, angled from across the road. A woman entering. Pausing just enough for the camera to catch her profile.
Her.
"You covered your tracks," he said. "Covered them well. You even made the hotel receptionist disappear. But you didn’t account for the bank’s camera opposite the hotel," Luca finished. "Did you?" Luca clicked the screen once, replaying the sequence. "That’s you," he said. "Visiting the hotel Cassidy was staying in while he was there."
Bianca took one involuntary step back.
"Veronica didn’t go there," Luca continued. "It was you. You were the one feeding the Bastiones information."
Luca’s hand moved then. He picked up the gun resting on the desk. Bianca recoiled immediately, stepping backward so fast the heel of her shoe caught slightly against the carpet.
"Luca," she said, and for the first time since entering the office, her voice lost its polish. "Don’t—don’t do this."
"I gave you time," he said quietly. "More than you deserved. Don gave you an out."
Bianca shook her head once. "You don’t understand."
"Then explain it."
"It wasn’t—"
"Explain it, Bianca."
Her gaze flicked from the gun to his face, searching for hesitation, for mercy, for some trace of the man she might still manipulate if she found the right nerve to press.
"You can’t, can you?" He opened one of the desk drawers. From inside, he pulled out a neatly prepared file and set it on the table between them. Then he slid a pen after it.
Bianca stared at the cover. Divorce Agreement. She looked up. Luca, maddeningly composed lifted the gun and aimed it at her.
"For every second you hesitate to sign," he said, "I shoot you anywhere. Not badly enough to affect your writing hand, though."
"You’d do this for her?"
Luca answered by cocking the gun. That was answer enough. Bianca’s jaw tightened. She picked up the pen.
The pages blurred slightly at first because fury kept rushing too hot behind her eyes. She flipped through to the marked sections and signed quickly.
"You made me do this," she said.
Luca said nothing.
"You married me and then discarded me."
Luca looked at her as a tragedy he no longer had the patience to mourn. "And I was sorry," he said. "I even felt guilt at some point," he continued. "But you know what they say," he said, lifting his eyes back to hers. "The heart wants what it wants. Your mother will be sending a car for you tomorrow," he said. "In the meantime..." His mouth curved into the faintest smile. "You are invited to our engagement party tonight."
She stood very still, the humiliation settling over her in layers. To be divorced at gunpoint was one thing. To then be invited to celebrate the woman who had replaced her?
That was artistry.
"What am I to do, Luca?" Bianca asked. "I’m finished."
Luca looked at the woman who had once stood beside him at an altar, dressed in white and expectation. The woman he had never truly tried to know. The woman who had, somewhere along the line, let love curdle into bitterness and bitterness into betrayal.
He felt nothing now. "I have no pity left for you," he said. "You should be dead," he added. "But your father will carry out your punishment. You are the Vitale responsibility now."
Bianca swallowed once. "She will fail you," she said. "And then one day, you will realise what you lost."
"You may leave," He did not give the sentence any more emotion than one might use to dismiss a servant.
Bianca stared at him, waiting perhaps for some hesitation she could use as proof that she still mattered enough to wound him. She found none.
The pen slipped from her fingers and hit the desk with a light clatter.
"God," she said with a ragged disbelief in her voice. "I loved you." Bianca laughed, softly, bitterly, shaking her head, the woman who had once believed in that love disgusted her now.
(Brought to you by Mar King 3/3)