Chapter 3 - The Cold Audit
The Riverside penthouse smelled of old paper, beeswax, and sea salt.
Unlike the sleek, glass-and-steel duplex she shared with Dominic in SoHo—a place designed for magazine shoots and intimidated business partners—this apartment was a fortress. The walls were reinforced concrete lined with mahogany bookshelves, and behind the oil paintings of Tuscan landscapes sat silver-plated data servers that had never been connected to the internet.
Frank Scalise was waiting by the fireplace when she entered.
He was sixty, short, built like a brick wall, and wore a simple gray suit that hid a custom Sig Sauer beneath his arm. When he saw Ava, his eyes softened, dropping instantly to her pregnant belly before rising to meet her gaze.
“Ava,” Frank said, his voice like gravel grinding under a boot. “I saw the footage from the St. Aurelia.”
“It’s already online?” she asked, setting her clutch on the marble coffee table.
“It’s everywhere,” Frank replied flatly. “The press is calling it the mafia scandal of the decade. The Giordano capos are calling it a display of absolute amateurism. Dominic just embarrassed three hundred of the most dangerous people in North America because he couldn't keep his hands off a junior analyst.”
Ava walked to the safe hidden behind the floor length mirror in the hallway. She punched in an eight-digit code, followed by a thumbprint scan. The heavy steel door popped open with a quiet hiss of hydraulics.
She pulled out a thick black hard drive and a stack of leather-bound ledgers.
“Celeste Vane isn't just a junior analyst, Frank,” Ava said, laying the files on the desk. “I ran her background three weeks ago when I noticed discrepancy logs in the Newark shipping manifests.”
Frank straightened. “What did you find?”
“She’s not Dominic’s mistress because she’s in love with him,” Ava said, opening the top ledger. Her finger traced line after line of encrypted accounts. “She was placed in Moretti Enterprises by the Federal Organized Crime Task Force. Or worse... by the Giordano family to set up a takeover.”
Frank took a quick step forward. “Does Dominic know?”
“Dominic thinks she’s a brilliant young woman who admires his mind,” Ava sneered, her voice dropping into a razor blade edge. “His pride made him blind. He was so desperate to feel like a god again—so tired of living in my father’s financial shadow—that he welcomed her into the inner vault. He gave her master access to the shell accounts in Grand Cayman.”
Frank swore quietly in Italian. “If she has master access, she can freeze our liquid assets with a single affidavit.”
“She could,” Ava agreed, looking up at Frank with cold, brilliant clarity. “If those accounts were still valid.”
Frank blinked. “What did you do?”
Ava permitted herself a tiny, terrifying smile.
“Two months ago, when I first felt the shift in Dominic’s behavior, I began moving the sub-ledgers. Every dollar flowing through Newark, every kickback from the port union, every clean dividend from our real estate portfolio—I rerouted them through my father’s original trust.”
She tapped the black hard drive.
“Dominic thinks he owns Moretti Enterprises,” she whispered. “By tomorrow morning, when the markets open, he will discover that he owns forty-two shell companies loaded with three hundred million dollars in bad debt, toxic real estate liabilities, and pending tax audits. While I hold the liquid keys to every cent his empire needs to operate.”
Frank stared at her, a look of profound, terrified respect spreading across his weathered face.
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“You stripped him naked,” Frank breathed.
“He stripped himself,” Ava corrected, placing her hands gently over her unborn child. “I just took back what belonged to my baby.”
