Chapter 4 - The Price of Stolen Gold
The VIP suite at Northwestern Memorial Hospital remained warm, quiet, and smelling faintly of expensive lavender mist.
Serena Hayes was sitting up in bed, propped against several plush pillows, absentmindedly scrolling through social media on her gold-cased phone.
Her minor headache had long since vanished, replaced by a growing, petulant boredom.
She tapped her polished French-manicured nails against the screen, annoyed that Dominic had vanished for hours without sending one of his drivers to bring her fresh silk pajamas from her Gold Coast penthouse.
Suddenly, the heavy mahogany door of the suite burst open without a knock.
The door slammed violently against the interior wall, the lock splintering with a sharp crack that echoed like a gunshot.
Serena jumped, letting out a sharp shriek, dropping her phone onto the white sheets.
Dominic Valente walked into the room.
He was drenched from the Chicago downpour, his wet hair plastered to his forehead, his dark eyes hollow and completely devoid of light.
His expensive dress shirt was torn at the sleeves, smeared with black engine grease, and soaked in the dark, drying blood of his wife.
He looked like a demon dragged straight from the deepest furnace of hell.
“Dom!” Serena gasped, clutching the sheets to her chest in genuine shock.
“You scared the life out of me!”
“What on earth happened to you? Where have you been?”
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
Dominic did not answer her.
He walked into the room with slow, deliberate steps, his wet shoes squeaking softly against the polished floor.
He stopped at the foot of her bed, towering over her like an executioner at the scaffold.
Behind him, the doorway was immediately blocked by the massive, silent silhouettes of Mateo and two armed enforcers, who pulled the broken door shut behind them.
The room became instantly airtight, heavy with the suffocating terror of an interrogation chamber.
Serena’s pouty, entitled expression began to crumble, a sharp spike of primal panic tightening in her throat.
“Dom... baby, you’re acting really weird,” she stammered, attempting to offer him a sweet, coquettish smile that had always disarmed him in the past.
“Please, you’re terrifying me.”
“Did something happen to that woman who was wheeled in earlier?”
Dominic reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the water-damaged manila folder.
With a flick of his wrist, he tossed the soaked contents across the bed.
The damp papers scattered across Serena’s lap.
Bank statements.
Forensic accounting ledgers.
And high-resolution surveillance photos of her meeting with a scarred, sharp-featured man in the back booth of a South Side steakhouse.
Serena looked down at the papers, and the remaining color completely drained from her face.
Her skin turned an ashen, translucent gray.
Her lips parted, but no sound escaped her throat.
“His name is Marco Moretti,” Dominic said, his voice dropping into a flat, terrifying monotone that chilled the room by ten degrees.
“Lorenzo Moretti’s younger brother and chief enforcer.”
“He paid off your four-million-dollar gambling debt to an illegal casino in Atlantic City six months ago.”
“And in exchange, you became his sweetest little recording device.”
“Dom, wait—no, please, let me explain!” Serena cried, her voice climbing into a shrill, hysterical pitch.
She reached out with both hands, desperate to grab Dominic’s arm, but he took half a step backward, looking at her outstretched fingers as if they were covered in venomous filth.
“You made sure I was at your penthouse every Tuesday night,” Dominic continued, his words falling like heavy iron anvils.
“You made sure I left my secure phone on your bedside table while you gave me massages.”
“You slipped a tracking receiver into the lining of my leather briefcase three months ago.”
“And tonight, you threw a dramatic, theatrical tantrum at a club so I would rush you to this hospital.”
“You kept me sitting in this room, holding your pathetic, greedy hand, while Moretti’s men hunted my wife across the city.”
“I didn't know they were going to hurt her!” Serena shrieked, tears of sheer terror streaming down her face, ruining her expensive mascara.
She scrambled backward on the bed until her back was pressed hard against the headboard.
“I swear to God, Dom, I didn't know!”
“Marco told me they just wanted business information!”
“He told me they were just going to seize some cargo at the port!”
“He threatened my family, Dom! He said he would slit my sister’s throat if I didn't keep you distracted tonight!”
“You sold out my life, my syndicate, and my home for four million dollars and a handful of designer dresses,” Dominic said softly.
He leaned down over the foot of the bed, his dark eyes boring into her soul with such lethal intensity that Serena choked on her own breath.
“And because of your greed, Tommy is lying on a steel slab in the city morgue with his chest crushed into his spine.”
“And Clara is lying in the intensive care unit three doors down, with her skull cracked open and my baby dying inside her womb.”
Serena’s eyes widened in sheer, paralyzing horror.
“Your... your baby?” she whispered, trembling so violently that the metal bed frame rattled against the wall.
“Yes,” Dominic whispered back, his voice thick with a venomous grief.
“The child you almost helped murder while you complained about a headache.”
Serena broke into uncontrolled, frantic sobs, throwing her hands over her face.
“I’m sorry! Dom, please, I love you! I swear I love you!”
“Don’t kill me, please, don’t kill me!”
Dominic straightened his posture and looked down at her with nothing but absolute, icy disgust.
For an entire year, he had risked his empire, his honor, and his marriage for this cowardly, treacherous creature.
The realization of his own utter foolishness was a humiliation more agonizing than any physical torture.
“Killing you would be too clean, Serena,” Dominic said quietly.
“And I am not going to stain my wife’s honor by giving you a bullet in her hospital.”
Dominic turned his back on her and looked toward Mateo standing by the door.
“Mateo.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“Strip her.”
“Take the five-carat diamond necklace I gave her last month.”
“Take the Rolex from her wrist.”
“Take her phone, her purse, her passport, and the keys to the Gold Coast penthouse.”
“Empty every domestic bank account tied to her name by dawn.”
Serena let out a wailing cry of despair, clutching the gold necklace around her throat.
“Dom, please, no! That’s everything I have! I won’t have anything left!”
Dominic did not even pause.
“Put her in a pair of paper hospital scrubs,” Dominic instructed Mateo, his voice devoid of any human pity.
“Drive her to the state border in the back of a van and throw her onto the shoulder of the highway.”
“If she ever sets foot in the city of Chicago again, or if she ever speaks the name Valente to another human being, bury her alive beneath the concrete of the new port terminal.”
Dominic walked toward the broken doorway without glancing back a single time.
Behind him, Serena’s desperate, hysterical screams echoed against the sterile walls as Mateo’s men moved forward to strip away every shred of stolen luxury she had ever worn.
Dominic stepped back into the cold corridor, breathing in the sharp, antiseptic air.
May you like
The shallow illusion was completely dead.
Now, all that remained was the agonizing truth waiting for him in room 412.
