Chapter 17
Seventeen
Massimo
Seven days. I've spent three of them buried in legal filings, shell company records, and offshore trust documents, and every thread I pull leads to another wall the Ferraros built eighteen months before I knew they existed.
Luca's financial forensics confirm what I suspected.
The twelve million in obligations runs through four shell companies registered in three jurisdictions, each one layered beneath a holding entity that traces back to a trust administered by Lorenzo's father. Every dollar Harrison owes is insulated by legal structures designed to be unbreakable. The only thing we can’t find proof of is the dead man's switches on the business records Harrison spoke about.
That would be enough to prove Harrison was forced to sign the contract. But without proof I have nothing.
Luca also dug up Harrison's gambling debts. A few million owed to dangerous men. Apparently if Harrison fails to pay, Sloane's name was offered as collateral for debts owed. But that isn’t part of the Lorenzo deal.
Either way, I can’t make this shit up. What asshole puts his daughter in harm’s way like this?
Julian's contact, the Ferraro associate named Giordano, confirmed that the acquisition Lorenzo bragged about isn't real estate.
It's Harrison's entire operation. The hotels, the properties, the territorial influence.
The marriage to Sloane is the door. Once Lorenzo is inside, the Ferraros absorb everything.
But that is Lorenzo’s word against a drunk’s as far as Harlon is concerned.
I know all of this and I still can’t put my hands on the one detail that will prove Lorenzo forced Harrison to sign. His bad business decisions are not duress. Everything points to him willingly signing the contract to dissolve his debt.
My office door opens without a knock for the second time this week.
The first time it was Harlon Constantine bringing Bones.
This time it's Harrison Whitmore, and he doesn't bring anyone.
He walks in alone with his fists clenched at his sides, his face flushed from either whiskey or fury, and the look of someone who just watched his last bridge burn.
“You married her." He stops in the center of my office, his suit wrinkled, his tie loose, the skin under his eyes bruised purple from sleepless nights and too much whiskey.
He's lost more weight since the last time I saw him and his collar gaps at the neck.
His voice carries a tremor that has nothing to do with the alcohol I can smell on his breath from six feet away.
"You married my daughter. Behind my back. Without a word.”
I set my pen down on the desk and lean back in my chair. I don't stand. Standing would be defensive and I have nothing to defend.
"Sit down, Harrison."
"I will not sit down." His voice climbs and his hands shake at his sides and I watch the veins in his neck pulse against his collar.
"Harlon Constantine called me this morning to verify a marriage contract bearing your name and Sloane's.
A marriage contract, Massimo. You're my lawyer.
You're my best friend. She was a child in braces the first time you sat at my dinner table. "
The words land where he aims them. My jaw tightens and I feel the accusation press against the bruise I've been carrying since I recognized Sloane's initials on the wish.
He's not wrong about the timeline. I sat at his table while she grew from a teenager into a woman and I never looked at her, not once, until the night she walked through my door and showed me what I'd been missing.
"I didn't pursue your daughter, Harrison. She came to me."
"She's twenty-six years old. You're forty. You've been a fixture in her life since she was fifteen."
"Since I pulled a guard off her in your hallway.
A guard who worked for you. In your house.
Under your roof. I protected her when you were too damn busy entertaining men who saw her as an asset to acquire one day.
" I keep my voice level but the heat behind it bleeds through and I let it.
"Don't call me a predator when your own security couldn't keep her safe. "
Harrison's face goes white. The gray pallor tells me I hit the exact nerve I aimed for.
"That's not fair."
"None of this is fair. You signed your daughter away to Lorenzo Ferraro without telling her, without telling me, without considering for one second what it would do to the woman who spent eleven years rebuilding herself after what happened in your house.
" I lean forward, my elbows on the desk, my hands clasped.
"You put a price tag on her and called it a family alliance.
You handed her to a man who will abuse her.
So don't stand in my office and tell me I crossed a line, Harrison. You erased the line."
Silence. Harrison's hands open and close at his sides, the fists forming and releasing, forming and releasing.
"I was trying to protect her." His voice breaks on the word protect and I watch twenty years of friendship crack along a fault line that has been building since the night I kneeled beside his daughter on a hallway floor.
"The Ferraros have everything. The debts, the records, the dead man's switches.
If I don't deliver Sloane, I lose everything. She loses everything. The boutique, the inheritance, all of it. I refuse to give up what I’ve built when all she has to do is marry the man. How hard can that be?"
"She'd rather lose the inheritance than lose herself. You would know that if you'd asked her."
"I couldn't ask her. I couldn't—" He stops. Presses both hands against his face and drags them down over his jaw. The sound of his beard scraping against his palms fills the quiet office.
"You don't understand what it's like to watch your child grow up knowing you're the reason she can't let anyone touch her. I saw what that guard did to her. I saw the aftermath. I've watched her build walls around her. Walls so high she’s blinded herself to how our life works."
My chest tightens. For one second I feel sorry for him. For the father who failed and knows it and has been drinking himself into a grave ever since.
Then I remember the Society 69 photographs in my desk drawer. The viewing rooms. The cocktail glasses and the parties. And the pity evaporates.
"You saw what happened to her and you still signed the contract." I say it quietly. No heat. Just the fact, laid bare on the desk between us.
Harrison meets my eyes for the first time since he walked in. Whatever he sees in my face makes him take a step back. Not from fear, I’m guessing, but from recognition. He's looking at a man who loves his daughter and there's nothing left to argue against.
"How long?" His voice drops to barely above a whisper. "How long have you had feelings for her?"
"Long enough." I don't elaborate. He hasn’t earned that level of confidence from me.
"She's happy." I offer it like a bridge, knowing it might not hold. "She's safe. She's loved. And I will spend every resource I have dismantling Lorenzo's contract before the deadline."
"Seven days. Harlon will make sure the contract holds. I wish it wasn’t like this but there’s nothing I can do."
"There is. You can tell me you signed that contract under duress and we can end this."
Harrison’s head is already shaking before I get the full sentence out.
“But I didn’t. I need this to save my operation.
Lorenzo thinks he’ll get a foot in the door and take over, but he won't. I'm smarter than that. I just need his money and his compliance and I get that with him taking Sloane’s hand in marriage.”
His words make the acid in my stomach riot against the sides.
Harrison looks around my office. The files on my desk.
The legal briefs stacked on the credenza.
The coffee cups from three days of work that I haven't cleared because stopping to clean up feels like I’m lining myself up to lose.
Just the thought pisses me off. His eyes settle on the framed photo on my bookshelf, the one Sloane noticed, the tarnished silver frame with my mother's face inside.
"Gianna." He says her name quietly. He's the only person besides me who knows my mother's name. Twenty years of friendship gave him that.
"Don't." My voice comes out harder than I intend. "Don't use her name to find common ground with me right now."
He nods slowly. He knows he's lost and he's deciding how to walk away with whatever dignity he has left.
"This is something you can’t fix, Massimo." He straightens his jacket, a gesture so familiar I've seen him do it a thousand times leaving courtrooms and conference rooms. "Get out of the way or I’ll make sure Harlon eliminates the problem."
He walks out. The door closes behind him with a quiet click that sounds louder than a slam.
I sit in the silence. My hands are flat on the desk, fingers spread. Twenty years of shared holidays and a trust built on seeing each other at our worst. Gone in twelve minutes.
He'll come back. Or he won't. Either way, the man who walked out of my office is not the same man who walked in, and neither am I.
My phone buzzes. Luca's name on the screen.
"Talk to me."
"We've got a problem." Luca's voice is stripped of its usual playfulness.
"Kon's surveillance team just flagged two men on foot three blocks south of Redthorne.
He recognized them as Genesis runners. They're not approaching, just positioning. Mapping sight lines and entry points. It’s getting real. They do not play around, man."
My blood chills. Three blocks. Genesis runners don't position unless they've been given a timeline. Harlon is organized and methodical and his people are already preparing for the possibility that I don't fix this in time.
"How long have they been there?"
"Two hours. They rotated once. Fresh team."
Six days. Harlon's runners are mapping Redthorne's perimeter and Sloane is upstairs in my penthouse with no idea that the men positioning themselves outside our building are there for her.
"Double the internal security. Nobody moves through the lobby without being logged. And Luca." I pause. Swallow against the tightness in my throat. "Harrison is never allowed in this building again."
Another secret. Another brick in the wall I'm building between us.
Six days.