All Chapters of Chasing the Pride of Alessi : Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Weston━━❖━━The recovery files sat untouched at the end of the table, where Damien had left them an hour earlier. Outside, the avenue caught the full afternoon sun. The boardroom had emptied early after the morning's session, and the floor around it had gone still.I'd raised the overlap between Damien's assignment and Marin's department with Alfred that morning, before any of this. Alfred had called it efficient, said the board wanted synchronization between the two. I hadn't argued the point then.I'd watched the footage from the plaza three times since it happened. Marin at the microphone, answering questions that should have been mine to answer. Damien beside her, close enough that the cameras kept catching them in the same frame. My own arrival, late, and the one question I'd walked away from without a word.This wasn't going to stay without one much longer.I reached for the intercom."Send Ashford up to the executive boardroom," I said into the receiver. "Tell him to bring the

|•Marin• |The car turned through the estate gates a little after nine. My body knew the second the tires would leave the private approach for the drive itself, a small dip in the pavement that used to make me reach for the door handle the first months I lived here. I'd stopped bracing for it years ago.I checked my phone once more as the house came into view.No reply from Damien.I turned the screen face-down against my thigh and made myself stop looking at it.The house lit up as the car approached, motion sensors waking the drive lights one by one, a system that had been running for years, since the earliest days of my marriage. None of it impressed me anymore. I'd stopped seeing the estate as anything but the place I lived now, marble floors, biometric locks, all of it just the ordinary furniture of my life.Foster had the door open as I reached it."Mrs. Vane."I stepped past him into the entry hall, my heels loud against the stone."Mr. Vane left word he'd be in the east study

|•Marin• |I'd given Cain's office what was left of the money I'd brought into the marriage myself, savings from my own accounts, a few still under my name alone. There'd been a job waiting for me once, an offer from a trade advisory firm in Geneva, a posting my degree was built for, six figures and my name on the letterhead within a year. There'd been my father's company too, Antonio's company, the only daughter he had, the only Alessi left to hand anything to. Weston made it clear a Vane didn't work for someone else's firm, mine included. I'd traded all of it for galas and charity boards instead, the visibility expected of a CEO's wife, and called it a fair exchange at the time.It wasn't much I was asking Cain's office to account for. It was mine, and I intended to keep it."We'll be in touch once we have an update," Cain said, walking me to the door. "Today was just getting the basics down. Once we're ready to request records from his side, that's a different conversation, and I'l

|•Marin• | I stopped at his door on my way to the kitchen and pushed it open anyway. The bed was still made from yesterday, pillows neatly squared from housekeeping's last visit, untouched since. He hadn't come home. I stood there and made myself check it twice, to be sure, then closed the door and went to make coffee I already knew I wouldn't finish. The first message came through while I was still standing at the counter in yesterday's robe. Have you seen this? I didn't recognize the number right away. A junior strategist, a face I'd nodded at in hallways more than spoken to. People who kept their distance didn't usually reach out. I set the mug down and opened the link. The photo loaded slowly, one strip at a time. A bakery, someplace with a striped awning and one lit window, the stop a four-year-old talks his way into when a car ride runs late. Eli's small hand wrapped around two of Weston's fingers. He looked happy in it, in the unbothered way small children look happy, wh

Grandpa Alfred was quiet on the walk down to the car. He had plenty to say, but he kept it to himself.“You remember the summer you were nine,” he said once we'd reached the entrance, “when you refused to leave the estate pool until you'd swum the whole length without stopping, even after everyone else had gone in for dinner.”“You stood at the edge and timed me.”“I did.” He almost smiled. “You've always finished things you started, even when nobody was making you.”I checked my watch, hoping he hadn't noticed. “I have the investor summit. I should get up there and go over my notes ahead of the board filing in.”“Your notes.” He said it like he didn't quite believe I needed any.“Grandpa Alfred.”“Fine, fine.” He waved a hand, but he was still standing there, in no rush to actually leave.His driver pulled up to the curb behind him.“Your car's here,” I said.He turned toward it, as though he'd forgotten it was coming. “So it is.”He put one hand on the door, then stopped.“I could s