Chapter 1 – THE NIGHT I STOPPED BEGGING
“My Husband Slapped Me Out of His House for His Mistress, Then the Most Feared Man in Chicago Put His Ring on My Finger
The last thing my husband gave me after eight years of marriage was a slap hard enough to split my lip.
The second-to-last thing he gave me was a black garbage bag.
“Take what’s yours and get out.”
Chase Whitaker stood in the foyer of the house I had helped him buy, one hand still half-raised from hitting me. Behind him, Brielle Sutton leaned against the staircase wearing my cream silk robe.
My robe.
My house.
My husband.
At least, they had all been mine when I woke up that morning.
Rain hammered the windows of our Highland Park home, cold November rain that turned the glass black and made everything outside look drowned.
I tasted blood.
For one strange second, all I could think about was the stain it would leave on the white collar of my sweater.
“Chase,” I whispered.
His expression hardened.
“Don’t.”
Brielle crossed her arms.
“I told you she’d play the victim.”
I looked at her.
She had bare feet.
Her red toenail polish was chipped on the smallest toe.
It was such a stupid detail to notice while my life was collapsing, but I noticed it anyway.
Maybe the mind chooses small things when the big things are too painful.
Chase pointed toward the door.
“I saw the pictures, Vivian.”
“Pictures of what?”
“You and him.”
My stomach tightened.
Brielle smiled.
Then Chase pulled his phone from his pocket and shoved it toward me.
There I was.
Leaving the DeSantis Logistics building downtown six weeks earlier.
It was almost midnight.
A tall man in a charcoal coat walked beside me, his hand at my elbow as we stepped around construction barriers.
Matteo DeSantis.
Another photograph showed him opening a car door for me.
A third showed us standing close under the awning while rain fell beyond us.
From the angle, it looked intimate.
It hadn’t been.
I had gone there because Chase’s racing company was three weeks from losing its primary sponsor.
Matteo owned the freight company I was trying to convince to save it.
Chase knew I had been meeting potential sponsors.
What he apparently did not know was which one.
“That was business,” I said.
Brielle laughed softly.
“At midnight?”
“The meeting ran late.”
“With Matteo DeSantis?”
Chase’s voice dropped when he said the name.
Everyone in Chicago knew that name.
Officially, Matteo DeSantis was the thirty-eight-year-old head of a logistics, construction, hospitality, and commercial real estate empire.
Unofficially, people lowered their voices when they spoke about his family.
There were stories about old gambling rooms, dockside unions, vanished debts, men who had learned expensive lessons after crossing a DeSantis.
Nobody printed those stories without lawyers.
Nobody proved much either.
All I knew was that Matteo had listened to my sponsorship presentation for ninety minutes, asked smarter questions than most executives, and finally said he would consider backing Chase.
Then, when the meeting ended, he had walked me to my car because the parking garage elevator was broken.
That was the scandal.
That was the affair.
“You could have asked me,” I said.
“I did.”
“No. You accused me.”
“Because I’m not stupid.”
Brielle touched his shoulder.
I saw the way he relaxed under her hand.
Something inside me finally understood what the rest of me had been refusing to see.
This wasn’t about photographs.
The photographs were permission.
He had already wanted her.
I looked toward the kitchen.
Two wineglasses sat beside the sink.
There was a bottle of bourbon open on the counter.
My wedding photograph had been removed from the mantel.
“Are you sleeping with her?”
Chase scoffed.
“You don’t get to ask me questions after what you did.”
“Are you sleeping with her?”
Brielle answered for him.
“Yes.”
The word entered the room almost gently.
Chase stared at her.
She shrugged.
“She deserves to know.”
My knees felt weak.
“How long?”
“Vivian—”
“How long?”
He looked away.
Brielle didn’t.
“Four months.”
Four months.
I thought about four months ago.
Chase had been traveling constantly, preparing for his comeback season after the wreck that had nearly ended his career two years earlier.
I had packed his meals.
Scheduled his therapy.
Reviewed telemetry.
Called sponsors.
Rebuilt his media deck.
Recorded every physical limitation, every improvement, every technical adjustment in three handwritten journals so he would never push beyond what his doctors and trainers allowed.
Four months ago, he had kissed my forehead before leaving for a weekend race and told me I was the only reason he was still driving.
Apparently, Brielle had been waiting at the hotel.
My eyes burned.
Chase mistook my silence for weakness.
He always did.
“You haven’t been happy,” he said. “Neither have I.”
“You could have divorced me.”
“I’m trying to.”
“Before or after sleeping with your publicist?”
Brielle stepped forward.
“Watch your mouth.”
I almost laughed.
“You’re wearing my bathrobe.”
“That won’t be yours much longer.”
Chase tossed a manila envelope onto the floor.
Divorce papers spilled partly out.
“I’m done, Vivian.”
I looked at the signature line.
His was blank.
Mine was blank.
“You haven’t even signed them.”
“I will.”
“Then why the performance tonight?”
His jaw flexed.
“Because you think everything belongs to you.”
I stared at him.
“What?”
“This house. My career. My comeback.”
“I never said your career belonged to me.”
“You act like I couldn’t have done it without you.”
I swallowed.
There it was.
The wound beneath every argument we had been having for a year.
“I kept records because you couldn’t remember three months after your crash.”
His face changed.
“Don’t.”
“I slept in a chair beside your hospital bed for thirty-nine nights.”
“Don’t.”
“I learned rehabilitation protocols. I called every sponsor who abandoned you. I sold my car to cover the private training facility you said you needed.”
“I said don’t.”
“And when nobody believed Chase Whitaker could race again, I did.”
His palm struck my face before I saw him move.
My shoulder hit the wall.
Brielle gasped.
Not in horror.
In satisfaction.
Chase stared at his own hand.
For perhaps half a second, he looked shocked.
Then shame turned into anger.
“Look what you made me do.”
Those six words killed something in me that eight years of disappointment had not.
I pushed myself upright.
“No.”
“What?”
I touched the blood at the corner of my mouth.
“No, Chase. I did not make you do anything.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Get out.”
“I will.”
Something about the calmness of my answer unsettled him.
I walked past him.
Brielle’s smile disappeared.
“Where are you going?”
“To get what belongs to me.”
Chase laughed.
“You’ve got ten minutes.”
I climbed the stairs.
For eight years, I had believed a marriage ended with screaming.
It didn’t.
Sometimes it ended while you folded two pairs of jeans and three sweaters into a garbage bag because the man downstairs had already decided your memories were clutter.
I took my passport.
My laptop.
My mother’s earrings.
A photograph of my parents.
Then I opened the bottom drawer of my desk.
The three rehabilitation journals were gone.
I froze.
Those notebooks contained everything.
Chase’s medication changes.
Doctor recommendations.
Sponsorship contacts.
Training schedules.
Mechanical notes.
And, more importantly, every financial payment I had personally made during the eighteen months after his accident.
I hurried downstairs.
“Where are my journals?”
Chase looked almost bored.
“What journals?”
“You know exactly which ones.”
“They’re related to my career.”
“They’re mine.”
“Not anymore.”
My heart started pounding.
“You took them.”
Brielle smiled.
“Consider them company property.”
That was when I finally understood.
This had been planned.
Not just the divorce.
The photographs.
The accusations.
The demand that I leave immediately.
They wanted me gone before I realized what had disappeared.
I picked up the garbage bag.
Chase opened the front door.
Rain blew across the marble.
“You have nowhere to go,” he said.
For the first time that night, I looked directly into the eyes of the man I had loved since I was twenty-four.
“You should have thought about that before you gave me a reason never to come back.”
Then I walked into the storm.
I made it three blocks before the garbage bag split.
My clothes spilled onto wet pavement.
My phone had twelve percent battery.
I had forty-seven dollars in my checking account because nearly everything Chase and I owned sat in joint accounts controlled by his business manager.
I bent to pick up a sweater.
Headlights appeared through the rain.
A black sedan slowed beside me.
For one terrible second, I thought Chase had followed me.
Instead, the rear window lowered.
Matteo DeSantis looked out.
His expression changed the moment he saw my face.
“Mrs. Whitaker?”
I straightened.
“I’m fine.”
His gaze moved to the blood on my lip.
Then to my clothes scattered in the gutter.
Then toward the road behind me.
His voice became very quiet.
“Who did that to you?”
I should have lied.
Instead, perhaps because I had spent eight years protecting Chase, I finally told the truth.
“My husband.”
Something cold entered Matteo’s eyes.
He opened the car door.
“Get in.”
“I don’t need rescuing.”
“No.”
Rain ran down my face.
Matteo held my gaze.
“But you do need somewhere dry to stand while you decide what happens next.”
Behind us, headlights appeared at the far end of the street.
A familiar white Porsche.
Chase.
Matteo saw it too.
His jaw tightened.
“Mrs. Whitaker.”
I looked at the approaching car.
Then at the stranger half of Chicago feared.
And for the first time in eight years, I made a decision based entirely on what I wanted.
I got into Matteo DeSantis’s car.
Chapter 2 – THE MAN CHASE WAS AFRAID TO FACE
The door closed with a soft mechanical click.
Outside, the rain kept falling.
Inside Matteo DeSantis’s sedan, everything became strangely quiet.
The leather smelled faintly of cedar. A privacy screen separated us from the driver. My soaked sweater clung to my shoulders, and blood had dried at the corner of my mouth.
Matteo handed me a folded white handkerchief.
I stared at it.
“People still carry these?”
“Apparently dangerous men do.”
For the first time that night, something almost like a laugh escaped me.
It hurt my lip.
Matteo noticed.
The amusement left his face immediately.
“Press it there.”
I obeyed.
The Porsche stopped ten feet behind us.
My stomach knotted.
Matteo glanced through the rear window.
“Your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Stay here.”
He opened his door.
I caught his sleeve.
“Matteo.”
It was the first time I had used his first name.
He looked down at my fingers around his coat.
“Please don’t hurt him.”
A strange expression crossed his face.
“You think I’m going to hurt him?”
“I don’t know what you do.”
“That makes two of us. Half the newspapers in Chicago apparently know more about my life than I do.”
Then he stepped into the rain.
Chase got out of the Porsche.
“Vivian!”
Matteo closed his car door behind him.
Chase stopped.
Even through rain-streaked glass, I saw his confidence change.
Men like Chase were loud around people they considered weaker.
Around Matteo, he became careful.
“DeSantis.”
“Whitaker.”
“What is my wife doing in your car?”
Matteo looked back at me once.
Then at Chase.
“Your wife?”
“Yes.”
“The woman you just threw out of your house?”
Chase’s jaw tightened.
“This is between Vivian and me.”
“You made it public when you sent her walking down a street with blood on her face.”
Chase looked toward the sedan.
For one second, our eyes met.
His expression wasn’t remorseful.
It was furious.
He hated that someone important had seen what he had done.
“She cheated on me.”
Matteo’s face did not change.
“With you.”
“No.”
“I have photographs.”
“I imagine you do.”
Chase blinked.
Matteo stepped closer.
“The interesting question is who paid for them.”
Silence.
Even from inside the sedan, I felt it.
Chase recovered quickly.
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that Mrs. Whitaker came to my office to secure sponsorship for your racing operation. She spoke about your recovery, your team and your future for ninety minutes. She never once mentioned herself unless I asked.”
I stared at Matteo through the rain.
He continued.
“She left my office after midnight because my legal department delayed negotiations. I walked her to her vehicle because the garage elevator had failed. My security cameras recorded every second.”
Chase’s face drained.
“There was nothing between us.”
Matteo paused.
“Unfortunately for you, I have evidence.”
That single sentence changed everything.
Chase looked toward me again.
This time, I saw fear.
Not guilt.
Fear.
“Vivian,” he called. “Come home. We’ll talk.”
Forty minutes earlier, he had thrown divorce papers at my feet.
Now he wanted to talk.
I lowered the window three inches.
“No.”
His face tightened.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Matteo’s head turned.
I watched something dangerous move across his expression.
Chase seemed to realize his mistake.
“Vivian, get out of the car.”
I pressed Matteo’s handkerchief harder against my mouth.
“No.”
“You’re my wife.”
“And Brielle is wearing my robe.”
His face flushed.
“We can handle that privately.”
“You hit me privately.”
He glanced at Matteo.
There it was again.
Humiliation.
Chase cared less that he had struck me than that another man had witnessed the consequences.
I raised the window.
Matteo stood in the rain another moment.
Then he walked back to the sedan.
He got inside without another word.
“Drive,” he told the man in front.
The car pulled away.
I stared backward until Chase disappeared.
Only then did my hands begin shaking.
Matteo watched them.
“You’re in shock.”
“I’m angry.”
“You can be both.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“Yes, you do.”
I looked at him.
“My sister lives in Arizona. My parents are dead. Most of my friends are Chase’s friends.”
“You can stay at one of my hotels.”
“I can’t afford one of your hotels.”
“You aren’t paying.”
“I don’t take charity.”
His mouth moved slightly.
“Good. Neither do I.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“Protecting an investment.”
I frowned.
“What investment?”
“Your proposal.”
I almost laughed.
“Matteo, Chase just accused me of sleeping with you. I doubt your company is still sponsoring him.”
“We were never sponsoring Chase.”
My hand stopped.
“What?”
“I was considering sponsoring Whitaker Racing because of you.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“No.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
“It isn’t.”
I remembered the meeting.
Matteo had asked detailed questions Chase’s existing sponsors never asked.
Who managed vendor negotiations?
Me.
Who rebuilt the recovery campaign?
Me.
Who designed the community outreach package?
Me.
Who identified the freight partnership opportunity connecting DeSantis Logistics with racing venues?
Also me.
At the time, I thought he was evaluating the team.
Now I wasn’t sure.
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying your husband has a talent for driving fast.”
Matteo leaned back.
“You have a talent for building things around men who take credit.”
That landed harder than I expected.
I looked away.
The city lights blurred through rain.
After several minutes, Matteo said, “You mentioned journals during our meeting.”
My head snapped toward him.
“How do you remember that?”
“I remember useful details.”
“They’re gone.”
“What’s gone?”
“The journals. Three notebooks. Chase took them.”
“What’s inside?”
“Everything from his recovery. Payments. Sponsor contacts. Medical schedules. Financial notes. Mechanical adjustments. Names. Dates.”
Matteo’s expression sharpened.
“Did anyone know you kept them?”
“Chase. His trainer. His accountant.”
“Brielle?”
“I don’t know.”
His phone appeared in his hand.
He typed one message.
“To whom?”
“My attorney.”
“I didn’t ask you to call an attorney.”
“You also didn’t ask your husband to assault you.”
I stared at him.
“I’m not your responsibility.”
“No.”
He slipped his phone away.
“Which means if I help you, it’s because I choose to.”
The car turned beneath a covered entrance.
Not a hotel.
A residential tower overlooking Lake Michigan.
Matteo stepped out first.
“Where are we?”
“My building.”
“I thought you said hotel.”
“I changed my mind.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“There are twenty-seven cameras between this curb and my private elevator.”
He looked at my split lip.
“Tonight, reassuring is overrated. Safe is better.”
I should have refused.
Instead, I followed him.
The penthouse was enormous, but unlike Chase’s house, it wasn’t decorated to impress visitors.
Dark wood.
Books.
A piano nobody seemed to use.
Family photographs.
One showed Matteo much younger beside an older woman with the same dark eyes.
He noticed me looking.
“My mother.”
“She’s beautiful.”
“She was terrifying.”
“Past tense?”
“She died five years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
He handed me a glass of water.
A woman in navy scrubs arrived twenty minutes later and examined my face.
No fracture.
A cut inside my lip.
Bruising.
She photographed the injury after asking my permission.
“Evidence,” Matteo said from across the room.
“I know.”
When she left, my phone buzzed.
Twenty-eight missed calls.
Chase.
Nine messages from Brielle.
Then a new email arrived.
The subject line made my stomach drop.
NOTICE OF TERMINATION.
I opened it.
Whitaker Racing had terminated me as Director of Operations effective immediately.
For misconduct.
Breach of confidentiality.
And inappropriate contact with a prospective sponsor.
Attached was a statement apparently prepared for the press.
My supposed affair with Matteo was being used to fire me.
“They’re destroying my reputation,” I whispered.
Matteo took the phone.
He read for perhaps thirty seconds.
Then he smiled.
It was not a warm smile.
“Why are you smiling?”
“Because Chase Whitaker has just made a very expensive mistake.”
“What mistake?”
“He put in writing that you contacted me as an employee of Whitaker Racing.”
I didn’t understand.
Matteo handed the phone back.
“Our lawyers have been asking his company for proof that you had authority to negotiate.”
“Yes?”
“His people kept claiming you were simply his wife helping informally.”
I stared at him.
“That’s what Chase always said.”
“Not anymore.”
Matteo tapped the termination letter.
“This establishes employment.”
My pulse quickened.
“And?”
“And if you were an employee, Vivian, we can subpoena compensation records.”
I went completely still.
Because I had never been paid.
Not once.
Eight years of work.
Thousands of hours.
Zero salary.
Matteo watched comprehension arrive.
“That’s not all,” he said.
His phone rang.
He answered.
Listened.
Then his gaze returned to me.
“When your husband accused you of an affair tonight, did he tell you who took those photographs?”
“No.”
Matteo’s eyes turned cold.
“My security team just identified the photographer.”
“Who hired him?”
“We don’t know yet.”
He paused.
“But the payment came from a corporate card.”
My heart pounded.
“Whose?”
“Whitaker Racing.”
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