Chapter 4 - The Ghost Wife Dissolves the Assets
With my grandmother’s estate legally reclaimed and Althia’s household effectively placed under legal notice, I checked into the penthouse suite of the Paradise Grand Casino—ironically, one of the premier properties owned by Moretti Holdings, built entirely on land parcels my corporate restructuring team had acquired three years ago.
Sitting behind the executive mahogany desk in the penthouse suite, I opened my laptop and connected to a secure, encrypted satellite network. It was time to execute phase two of my master plan.
For the past forty-eight hours, Dante had been playing a dangerous double game. According to my private surveillance feeds, he was splitting his time between Saint Jude Memorial Hospital playing house with Lily and checking into his downtown bachelor pad to maintain his corporate alibi. He still had no idea that I had cracked his safe, copied his financial ledgers, or locked my mother out of her home. He still believed his ghost wife was sitting quietly at home, weeping into her pillow, completely oblivious to his betrayal.
Ignorance is a luxury, Dante. And you’ve run out of credit.
I opened the primary banking portal for Moretti Holdings and accessed the corporate treasury accounts. Because my name remained co-signatory on the primary operational holding accounts—a protective measure insisted upon by Dante’s late father to safeguard against hostile takeovers—I still held full legal authority to freeze, transfer, and restructure corporate assets in the event of suspected financial malfeasance.
And financial malfeasance was putting it mildly.
Using the encrypted wire receipts I pulled from Dante’s safe, I filed an emergency freeze order with the Nevada State Banking Commission and the federal financial crimes task force, citing documented corporate embezzlement, unauthorized offshore asset stripping, and marital fraud.
Within four hours, the hammer fell.
At precisely 2:00 PM, while Dante was reportedly sitting in a high-level executive board meeting at the downtown Moretti Casino, the federal freeze orders hit every single commercial account connected to his name.
My phone—a burner encrypted line I kept strictly for business—lit up with a frantic call from Marcus, Dante’s chief legal counsel and long-time fixer.
I answered on the fourth ring, keeping my voice chillingly calm. “Good afternoon, Marcus.”
“Mrs. Moretti—Claire? Thank God,” Marcus stammered, his usual cool, arrogant demeanor completely shattered. “Listen, there’s been a catastrophic administrative error at the federal level. All operational accounts for Moretti Holdings have been frozen by the state banking commission. Our cash reserves are locked, the high-roller wire desks are halted, and the casino cages can’t process payouts! We need your authorization immediately to override the freeze—the board is in absolute panic!”
I let out a low, melodic laugh that sent a shiver down his spine.
“An administrative error, Marcus? How fascinating. Tell me, does a federal financial freeze usually include detailed forensic audit trails pointing directly to offshore shell companies registered under Lily Bennett’s name?”
The line went dead silent. You could hear the pin drop across three states.
“C-Claire...” Marcus whispered, his voice trembling as the horrifying realization finally dawned on him. “You... you know?”
“I don't just know, Marcus. I wrote the code that exposed them,” I replied coldly. “Tell my dear husband that his little vacation from reality is officially over. If he wants his casino accounts unfrozen, he knows where to find me. But don't bother sending flowers. They won't help him this time.”
I ended the call, tossed the phone onto the desk, and poured myself a glass of aged vintage scotch.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the neon lights of the Las Vegas Strip began to blink awake against the desert dusk. The city was glowing, vibrant, and alive, completely unaware that the queen bee of the underground empire had just torched the throne room.
And I hadn't even brought out my real secret weapon yet.
Three years ago, when Dante and I first married, my father had tried to force me into signing away my personal inheritance from my grandfather’s tech conglomerate in Silicon Valley. I had refused. Instead, I had quietly funneled those billions into an independent venture capital fund registered in Zurich, Switzerland, operating entirely outside the jurisdiction of the Moretti Syndicate.
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While Dante thought he was the ultimate power player in Las Vegas, I was quietly positioning myself as the primary financial backer of his fiercest international rival—a ruthless, aristocratic Swiss-Italian billionaire named Julian Vance, who had spent the last five years trying to buy out every single gaming license on the Las Vegas Strip.
And Julian Vance had just landed his private jet at McCarran International Airport.
