Chapter 3 - The Safe in the Master Suite
I stared down at the forged loop of my own name on the four-million-dollar Baron Capital loan guarantee while Chase’s incoming call flashed across my phone screen for the eighth time in ten minutes.
Now I understood why Chase had thrown unsigned divorce papers at my feet tonight instead of having a lawyer serve me properly at my office.
In Illinois, once a formal divorce petition is filed with the court, every marital asset and corporate liability is automatically frozen and subjected to mandatory forensic discovery—which would have instantly exposed his forged signature and the secret Delaware company he had opened with Brielle.
By hitting me and throwing me out into the rain without an active court docket, Chase and Brielle were counting on me spending the next two days hiding in a hotel room until Friday at five o’clock, when Baron Capital’s lawyers would liquidate my personal accounts and destroy my life before I could even hire representation.
"He is calling you in a panic right now because Brielle just realized that without my signature on that twelve-million-dollar sponsorship contract tonight, the Cayman Islands lender will trigger an immediate collateral audit tomorrow morning," Matteo said as the Maybach pulled into the subterranean private elevator bay beneath the seventy-story DeSantis Tower downtown.
"If I go to the police tonight and report that he forged my signature on the Baron loan, how long will it take the district attorney to stop Friday’s default," I asked as we stepped into his private express elevator.
"Three weeks at minimum, because the notary who stamped your forged signature on that guarantee is Brielle Sutton’s uncle, a corrupt county clerk in Lake County who will swear under oath that you signed it in person until a grand jury convenes next month," Matteo answered as the brass doors slid open into his sprawling glass-and-stone penthouse overlooking the Chicago River.
"Then I cannot fight him like a discarded wife waiting for a family court judge to take pity on me," I said clearly as I set my leather satchel down on his marble island.
Matteo turned toward me with a flicker of fierce respect lighting up his guarded dark eyes.
"Tell me why you carried those three leather notebooks out of your foyer tonight instead of your clothes, Vivian," Matteo asked softly.
I unbuckled my satchel and spread the three thick, hand-stitched black journals across the marble counter between us.
"When Chase crashed at two hundred miles per hour during the Indianapolis qualifying trials two years ago, he suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him with severe vertigo and a three-month gap in his memory," I told Matteo.
"Because the racing commission would have permanently revoked his license if those deficits had been reported, I spent eighteen months engineering every custom suspension ratio, pedal-pressure curve, and cockpit telemetry algorithm that compensates for his delayed right-side reflex—and the encrypted master source code for his entire fleet is inside these books," I explained.
A slow, dangerous smile touched Matteo’s lips as he looked down at my mathematical schematics.
"Chase Whitaker cannot even calibrate the cars he drives without your notebooks, yet if you go back to Highland Park tomorrow morning to retrieve your corporate tax tokens from your bedroom safe, he will have the local police arrest you for trespassing," Matteo murmured.
Before I could answer, Matteo stepped close to me, slid a heavy platinum signet ring set with a square-cut black diamond off his own right hand, removed my worn gold wedding band from my left ring finger, and slid the unmistakable DeSantis family ring onto my finger in its place.
"Every banker, commissioner, and team owner in Illinois will be at the Chicago Motorsports Charity Gala tomorrow night, and if we announce at eight o’clock tomorrow morning that you left Chase weeks ago, that you are my fiancée, and that I have just named you Managing Director of my new twenty-million-dollar motorsports division, not a single cop or crooked clerk in this state will dare block your path," Matteo promised.
At nine o’clock the next morning, wearing an ivory wool coat and Matteo’s black diamond blazing on my left hand, I walked right back up the steps of our Highland Park house flanked by Matteo, his legal team, and two local police officers.
When Brielle—still wearing my cream silk robe with a fake bandage wrapped around her wrist—tried to tell the officers that I had attacked her with a knife the night before, Matteo’s lawyer handed the police sergeant a tablet playing the high-definition cloud backup from our own foyer security camera, which Chase had forgotten was linked to my private consulting email.
The sergeant watched Chase slap me twice across the face and shout at me while Brielle smirked untouched on the stairs, and on the spot the officers served Chase with an emergency order of protection while threatening Brielle with felony arrest for filing a false report.
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While the police held a furious Chase at the bottom of the stairs, I forced Brielle to strip off my silk robe in the hallway, spun the combination on the master bedroom floor safe, and pulled out my tax tokens along with a steel memory drive that Chase’s recently fired chief mechanic, Danny Vance, had hidden behind my jewelry box.
Wrapped around the steel memory drive was a certified metallurgical lab report from the 2024 Indianapolis crash and a terrified handwritten note from Danny Vance that stopped my heart cold: "Vivian, the severed titanium brake line in the Indy crash two years ago wasn’t on Chase’s car—it was on Car Twelve driven by Matteo DeSantis’s twenty-two-year-old brother Eli, and the microscopic tool marks on the severed brake line came from Chase’s own personal wrench."
