Chapter 7 - THE CONFRONTATION IN THE CABIN
Luca stepped across the threshold, his pistol raised, a predatory grin spreading across his scarred face. He kicked the front door shut behind him, locking it with a heavy deadbolt.
"Well, well, well," Luca purred, lowering his stance. "The runaway queen. You really thought you could pack up and disappear with the boss's life savings and his ledger? Put your hands on the table, Vivien. Don't make this messy."
Vivien didn't move. She didn't raise her hands. She simply reached out, tapped the black case sitting in front of her, and slid it two inches across the table.
"You think this is about money, Luca?" she asked, her voice dangerously calm. "You think Matteo sent you here to recover a stack of paper?"
"Shut your mouth and stand up," Luca snarled, signaling his men outside through the glass window to hold their positions. "Boss wants you back in New York. He wants you sitting across from him at the penthouse like nothing happened. You belong to him."
"I belonged to no one," Vivien said softly. She stood up slowly, her chair scraping against the wooden floorboards. She looked Luca dead in the eye—not with fear, but with the chilling, detached authority of a general addressing a low-ranking foot soldier. "Matteo forgot something fundamental about the woman he married. He thought he rescued a stray cat from a broken background seven years ago. He never bothered to check my family tree."
Luca hesitated, a flicker of genuine unease crossing his features. "What are you talking about?"
"My father wasn't a mid-level accountant, Luca. He didn't die of a heart attack in Chicago like Matteo's background check indicated," Vivien said, taking a slow step toward him. "My father was Viktor Vasiliev. The man Matteo double-crossed to take control of the eastern waterfront back in 2018."
The color drained entirely from Luca’s face. The pistol in his hand dipped an inch. "That... that's impossible. Vasiliev's entire family was wiped out in a warehouse fire."
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"Most of them were," Vivien replied, her voice dropping an octave, cold as the Vermont wind outside. "Except for the nineteen-year-old daughter who was away at boarding school in Switzerland—learning corporate law, forensic accounting, and syndicate management. I didn't run away from Matteo because he cheated on me with some cheap collateral like Lena Marik. I left because I finally finished auditing every single asset he stole from my father. And tonight, the audit is complete."
Before Luca could squeeze the trigger or shout a warning, the front window shattered inward in an explosion of flying glass.
