Chapter 4 - Unraveling the WebThe silence in the boardroom was absolute. You could hear the faint hum of the HVAC system and the distant sirens wailing four dozen floors below.
Evelyn was the first to recover, her face twisting into an ugly mask of corporate venom. She slammed her palms onto the table and stood up.
"This is a fraudulent shakedown!" Evelyn shrieked, her usual composure entirely shattered. "You trapped him! You planned this from the very beginning—getting pregnant, hiding away, waiting for the exact legal window to execute a hostile takeover of our family’s legacy!"
"Tread very carefully, Evelyn," I said, my voice dropping an octave, cold and venomous. "Every word you are uttering right now is being recorded by the legal stenographer sitting quietly in the corner."
A junior associate near the back of the room subtly closed his laptop, where a live audio feed had been running. Evelyn’s face paled further as she realized she had just walked straight into a legal trap.
Luca hadn't moved an inch. He stood at the far end of the table, staring at me not with anger, but with a horrifying, broken devastation.
"Nia... is that true?" Luca whispered, his voice trembling. "Did you... did you have the children just to do this? Was it all a long game?"
I turned my head slowly to look at him, letting my gaze strip away every ounce of his remaining dignity.
"You really think so little of me, don't you, Luca?" I stepped closer to him, stopping just inches away, close enough to smell the faint scent of expensive cologne and cheap whiskey. "You think I spent seven years raising two brilliant, beautiful children alone just to wage a corporate war against a man who wasn't even worth the dirt on my shoes?"
"Then why didn't you tell me?" he cried out, his voice cracking with raw anguish. "Why hide them from me? If you had told me you were pregnant back then—"
"If I had told you back then," I interrupted, my voice sharp as broken glass, "you would have handed me over to your mother’s doctors to have the problem quietly erased! You would have accused me of trapping you with a pregnancy to secure your bank accounts! You told me to my face, Luca, that I was a parasite draining your potential. Do you honestly think you would have believed me?"
Luca flinched as if I had physically struck him across the face. He staggered back a step, gripping the back of a chair for support.
"I was blind," he whispered. "My mother... she showed me doctored photos, reports, text messages from a burner phone... she convinced me you were seeing someone else behind my back, that the baby wasn't mine even before they were born..."
"Oh?" I raised an eyebrow, glancing toward Evelyn, whose posture suddenly stiffened like a statue carved from ice. "So now we’re finally getting to the truth. The fabricated infidelity. The forged evidence."
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Evelyn raised her chin defiantly. "He was destined to run an empire. You were a distraction from a lower tax bracket. Anyone with half a brain would have done what I did to protect the Moretti name."
"And look where protecting the name got you, Evelyn," I smiled coldly, picking up my briefcase. "You lost your empire. And Luca lost his soul. Meeting adjourned."
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