Chapter 5 - The Gala on Michigan Avenue
In the back of the ambulance racing Danny Vance to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the injured mechanic pressed a blood-stained brass locker key into Matteo’s palm before the paramedics pulled the oxygen mask over his face.
"The backup decryption dongle isn’t in the garage, Mister DeSantis—I hid it inside Locker Seven-Eleven at the Union Station commuter terminal, and if you don’t stop that exhibition lap tonight, Eli’s hand-control brake line will lose all hydraulic pressure the second he hits the ceremonial ramp inside the convention hall," Danny choked out.
Matteo sent Luca directly to Union Station to retrieve the backup key while we raced straight to the McCormick Place lakefront convention center, where twelve hundred VIP guests, television crews, and automotive executives were already gathering for the annual Chicago Motorsports Charity Gala.
Tonight was supposed to be a triumphant milestone for Matteo’s twenty-four-year-old brother Eli: using a custom-built DeSantis prototype exhibition car outfitted with steering-wheel hand controls, Eli was scheduled to drive a celebratory lap around the indoor stadium floor at eight o’clock before presenting the youth engineering scholarship.
When Matteo and I hurried into the subterranean prep paddock beneath the stadium floor at seven-fifteen, Eli DeSantis was already sitting in his wheelchair beside the gleaming silver prototype car, laughing with two young charity mechanics while adjusting his racing gloves.
The moment Eli looked up and saw me walking beside his older brother, his warm smile faded into polite confusion.
"Matteo, isn’t this Chase Whitaker’s wife," Eli asked quietly as he glanced from my face down to the unmistakable black-diamond DeSantis signet ring gleaming on my left hand.
"Not anymore, Eli—Vivian is the woman who just saved your life tonight, and she is also the person who brought us the metallurgical proof that Chase Whitaker was the one who cut your brake line at Indianapolis two years ago," Matteo told his brother firmly.
Eli’s knuckles whitened on the rims of his wheelchair as I knelt immediately beside the silver prototype’s front left wheel well with a high-intensity inspection flashlight.
Because I had spent two years studying every micro-valve assembly used in professional stock-car hydraulic systems, it took me less than ninety seconds to spot what the charity crew had missed behind the carbon-fiber brake duct.
Screwed inline between the hand-control master cylinder and the front caliper was a miniature anodized-black radio-frequency bleed valve—identical to an illegal pressure-dump valve used by crooked pit crews in outlaw racing!
"The valve is completely passive while the car is idling in the paddock so it passes pre-check, Matteo, but the moment someone in the grandstand presses a remote transmitter while Eli approaches the concrete stage ramp at sixty miles per hour, this valve dumps eighty percent of the brake fluid onto the inner tire wall," I explained as I used a titanium wrench to unbolt the sabotaged valve and replace the line with a solid braided-steel hose from the spare parts crate.
Matteo looked down at the black radio valve in my palm, his jaw clenching so hard I thought the bone might crack, before he reached down, pulled me to my feet, and pressed a fierce, lingering kiss to the back of my hand right above his family ring.
"Let Chase and Brielle believe the valve is still attached to that caliper until eight o’clock," Matteo said in a voice that promised absolute ruin.
Five minutes later, the twenty-foot glass doors of the upstairs Grand Ballroom swung open, and every single conversation among the twelve hundred black-tie guests died instantly as I walked down the red-carpeted marble steps on Matteo DeSantis’s arm.
I was wearing a custom floor-length crimson silk gown Matteo’s stylist had delivered to the penthouse that afternoon, my split lip expertly concealed save for a faint mark that I refused to hide, and the forty-carat black diamond of the DeSantis family ring blazing under the crystal chandeliers.
Thirty feet away near the champagne fountain stood Chase Whitaker in a white dinner jacket beside Brielle Sutton, who was wearing a gaudy gold sequined dress and trying desperately to convince the chief executive of Baron Industries to sign a last-minute sponsorship check.
The second Chase saw me clinging to Matteo’s arm with Matteo’s ring on my left ring finger, his face turned a violent, blotchy shade of purple and he nearly crushed his champagne flute in his hand.
"Look at her parading around with him less than twenty-four hours after she walked out of my house, she doesn’t even have the decency to hide that she was his mistress all along," Chase snarled loud enough for the surrounding tables and the local society reporters to hear.
Blinded by bruised ego and liquid courage, Chase marched straight up the steps of the central presentation stage, snatched the live wireless microphone off the podium before the charity host could stop him, and pointed an accusing finger down at me under the spotlights!
"Ladies and gentlemen, before my former colleague Eli DeSantis drives his exhibition lap tonight, I feel obligated as a board member to apologize for the disgraceful spectacle standing by the entrance," Chase’s voice boomed across the entire convention hall through the stadium speakers.
"Last night I was forced to serve my wife Vivian with divorce papers after discovering she had been trading Whitaker Motorsports’ proprietary secrets in midnight hotel meetings with Matteo DeSantis—and when she begged me on her knees this morning to take her back and pay off the four-point-five-million-dollar debt she racked up behind my back, I threw her out for good!"
A shocked murmur rippled through the twelve hundred guests as twenty television cameras swung toward Matteo and me at the base of the stage.
Instead of looking ashamed, Matteo calmly buttoned his bespoke black tuxedo jacket, led me straight up the marble steps onto the main stage, and took the secondary microphone from the stunned host while holding my left hand high in the air.
"First of all, ladies and gentlemen, Vivian did not beg this coward for anything this morning—she returned to her Highland Park home with two police officers after Chase struck her in the face last night to cover up his four-month affair with his publicist," Matteo’s calm, commanding voice echoed through the silent hall as the giant eighty-foot LED screen behind the podium suddenly lit up with the timestamped foyer video of Chase slapping me and screaming "Look what you made me do!"
Gasps of horror and disgust erupted across the ballroom as sponsors and executives backed away from Brielle at the foot of the stage like she had the plague!
"Second," Matteo continued ruthlessly while pulling a stamped legal binder from his coat, "at four o’clock this afternoon, DeSantis Capital purchased the four-point-five-million-dollar Baron Capital bridge loan that Chase fraudulently guaranteed by forging his wife’s signature—and because Whitaker Motorsports violated its moral-turpitude covenant on that video last night, I have just called the entire loan due on the spot and legally seized one hundred percent of Chase Whitaker’s race cars, garage leases, and corporate bank accounts, naming my fiancée Vivian as sole Controlling Director!"
As Chase stood frozen in public ruin on the stage and I stepped back toward the side curtain hallway to signal Eli’s crew that the stage was clear, Brielle Sutton suddenly lunged through the velvet side drapes behind me, her eyes wild with cornered terror as she grabbed my arm.
"Wait, Vivian, do not let Matteo walk out onto that track deck yet, you have no idea who you just put that black ring on your finger for," Brielle hissed frantically in my ear while glancing toward the armed guards at the exit.
May you like
"Get your hands off me, Brielle, your brother tried to murder Danny Vance today and planted a remote brake valve on a paralyzed man’s car," I snapped, pulling my arm free.
"My brother works for Viktor Kovacs’s Eastern European gambling syndicate, Vivian, and Chase didn’t plant that brake valve on Eli’s car tonight—Viktor Kovacs’s men just locked your husband inside Chase’s own flagship race car down in the underground test tunnel because Chase lost eight million dollars fixing races for them, and the remote transmitter in Kovacs’s hand isn’t wired to Eli’s brakes... it is wired to a ten-pound C4 block bolted under the driver’s seat of the exhibition car rolling onto this stage right now with your younger brother Noah’s stolen hospital transport van parked directly above the blast wall!"
