Chapter 9
557words
Dante stared at the phone screen, his brow tightening slightly. He held it in for five days, but the discomfort never went away.
Something about Sofia’s behavior this time was too abnormal, so abnormal that it unsettled him. It was an instinct honed from years moving through the underworld.
He rose from Olivia’s private office at Massachusetts General Hospital, slipped on his tailored Tom Ford suit jacket, and decided to go back to the house in Beacon Hill to take a look.
Olivia wrapped her arms around him from behind, pressing against him with practiced sweetness. "Dante, stay a little longer. There’s an important academic conference tomorrow. You have to come support me."
Dante turned back, his expression cool. "Don’t bring up the foundation chair with Sofia just yet."
Olivia pouted, clearly displeased. "You’re already getting divorced. What are you afraid of? And she’s an outsider anyway. What does she know about the weight of a foundation chair position?"
Dante paused, irritation creeping into his voice. "There are still twenty-five days before the court hearing. That’s not a divorce. I told you not to mention it. What kind of attitude is this?"
He pushed Olivia away, finished dressing, and drove his armored Tesla back to the Beacon Hill estate.
After nearly a week away, the villa was unnervingly quiet. A vague sense of unease crept up his spine.
That unease peaked when he opened the walk-in closet.
Sofia’s clothes were gone.
Her red-soled heels. Her La Mer skincare. All of it gone.
Even her desk had been cleared spotless. Nothing was left behind.
He strode into the master bedroom, yanked open drawers, and searched the cabinets.
At last, at the bottom of the nightstand drawer, he found what he had been looking for.
A ring.
The day she signed the divorce agreement, Sofia had taken it off and placed it on the desk, handing it to him.
He hadn’t taken it because deep down, he was convinced she would never truly divorce him. She loved him too much. How could she bear to leave?
Even if she had signed the agreement, she would definitely regret it before the judgment became final.
She would come back crying, begging him to forgive her, begging him not to divorce her.
He had already planned it all—how to humiliate her, how to make her understand the price of betraying the family, of betraying him.
Alas, staring at the ring tossed carelessly into a drawer now, Dante felt something twist in his chest. He picked it up and carefully wiped the dust from its surface.
Back when he was studying at the Boston Institute of Technology, he had worked three jobs—at a cafe, in a lab, and in the library—for three straight months just to afford it.
At the time, he was still an unacknowledged illegitimate son, dirt poor, yet he had gritted his teeth and bought a one-carat diamond ring from Tiffany's.
On the day he proposed to Sofia in the Harvard University quad, she had cried as she accepted. To him and to Sofia, that ring meant everything, so she couldn’t possibly want a divorce.
The ring must have just slipped into the drawer by accident. Yes, that had to be it.
That was how Dante reassured himself.
