Chapter 5 - The Fire in the Bellagio
Back in Las Vegas, the executive floor of the Bellagio was plunged into an atmosphere resembling a war council under artillery bombardment.
At 9:15 AM, Dante Moretti stood behind his eight-foot slab of smoked glass desk, his face drained of all color, staring at the glossy eight-by-ten photograph resting on the blotter.
In the image, taken through the partially opened door of room 412, Dante was kissing Lily’s hand while Eleanor leaned over the newborn infant.
Beside the photograph lay the legal summons from Arthur Vance, stamped by the federal district court.
Standing across from the desk, Dante’s chief of operations, Marco Vieri, stood with his hands folded nervously, his eyes darting toward the floor.
"Who took this?" Dante’s voice was barely a whisper, but it carried the lethal, vibrating tension of a drawn bowstring.
"Boss... the security logs from Sunrise Medical show that Claire’s Audi entered the visitor deck at 8:14 PM yesterday," Marco answered carefully.
"She checked in at the nurse's station to deliver a baby gift."
"She was outside the room for approximately four minutes before walking away."
Dante slowly lifted his hands and pressed them against his temples, a sickening vertigo washing over him.
The memory of last night struck him with the force of a sledgehammer:
Claire standing by her suitcases, looking at him with those calm, clear hazel eyes.
Her sweet, untroubled smile.
Her gentle comment: "You look like a man who has carried an unbearable weight on his shoulders."
She knew.
She had known while looking him straight in the eyes.
She had watched him lie to her face about Argentina and bad weather, and she hadn't shed a tear, screamed, or accused him.
She had treated him like a dead man walking.
"Where is she?" Dante roared, his voice suddenly exploding into the cavernous office as he swept his arm across the desk, sending a five-thousand-dollar crystal decanter shattering against the marble wall.
"Where is my wife?!"
"She didn't board any commercial flight to Florence, Boss," Marco said, flinching at the explosion.
"Arthur Vance chartered a private Swiss Gulfstream under an anonymous shell company."
"The jet departed McCarran at 8:02 AM."
"The flight plan was filed with an initial waypoint in Halifax, Canada, but after that, it disappeared into international transatlantic airspace."
"Find her!" Dante snarled, grabbing Marco by the lapels of his suit and dragging him across the desk.
"Call our contacts in Interpol! Call our banking associates in London, Paris, Zurich, and Milan!"
"I don't care if it costs ten million dollars! I want every airport, every private terminal, every luxury hotel in Europe searched until Claire is standing in front of me!"
Before Marco could respond, the office doors swung open violently, and Eleanor Bennett rushed into the room, her designer clothes rumpled, her makeup smeared with streaks of black mascara.
"Dante!" Eleanor shrieked, clutching her designer handbag like a life preserver.
"She knows! Claire knows everything!"
"She called me from an airplane! She took all the trust money! My bank cards were declined at the grocery store twenty minutes ago!"
"My home mortgage is being called by the bank! What did you do to her?!"
Dante let go of Marco's lapels and turned his freezing, murderous gaze onto his mother-in-law.
"What did I do?" Dante sneered, his lip curling in disgust.
"You were the one who insisted on bringing the baby to Lily's room before the hallway was secured!"
"You were the one who convinced Lily that Claire would forgive her because she was family!"
"Now Claire is gone, and she took the land trusts with her!"
"What do you mean, the land trusts?" Eleanor gasped, her face turning gray.
Marco stepped forward, clearing his throat nervously.
"Mr. Moretti... Arthur Vance just filed an emergency injunction with the Nevada Gaming Commission."
"Because Claire owns the underlying commercial land of the Bellagio and Mirage strip corridors through her father's trust, and because she has formally filed for divorce on grounds of marital infidelity with child birth, the commission has placed a provisional freeze on our casino operating licenses."
"We cannot open the high-limit VIP gaming rooms tonight unless the landholder signs a venue operating renewal."
"And the only person authorized to sign that renewal is Claire Bennett."
The room fell into a terrifying, suffocating silence.
Dante sank slowly into his high-backed leather chair, the reality of his ruin settling upon him like a suffocating shroud.
For three years, he had treated Claire as an ornament, a docile, aristocratic trophy wife whose quiet demeanor allowed him to run his criminal syndicate without domestic interference.
He had seduced her younger sister because Lily was needy, fragile, and looked up to him like a god, inflating his ruthless ego.
He had believed that power came from bullets, fear, and casino vaults.
Now, with a single stroke of a pen and four minutes of cold observation, Claire had stripped him of his legitimacy, his gaming licenses, his cash flow, and his pride.
She had left him with an infant child he could not publicly acknowledge without destroying his political connections, an unstable sister who was terrified of her own shadow, and a hysterical mother-in-law whose greed had poisoned everything.
Dante picked up the photograph from the desk, his hands shaking with an emotion he had never felt in his life: absolute, crushing terror.
"She didn't just leave me," Dante whispered into the empty air of his office, his voice hollow and broken.
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"She executed me."
"And she didn't even drop a single tear on my grave."
