Married to the Monster They Said Was Dead Chapter 08

Married to the Monster They Said Was Dead Chapter 08

We opened the portfolio at three in the morning, behind a bolted door, by the glow of my phone.

It was worse than Lorenzo had imagined. And far better than we’d dared hope.

Ottavia hadn’t simply kept records. She’d kept insurance — and that insurance amounted to a confession. Wire transfers. Forged signatures. Recorded phone calls she’d transcribed in her own elegant hand. Payments to a corrupt physician named Ricci, the one who’d signed Lorenzo’s false incapacity order. A ledger accounting for every dollar she and Alessio Conti had siphoned out of the Vitale empire.

But the final page stopped my breath.

A handwritten note, dated eight months earlier, in Ottavia’s script:

“Once C. is declared incompetent and the marriage to the Greco girl is dissolved, A. moves on the deadline. The girl knows too much by then. She becomes a liability. Handle accordingly.”

Handle accordingly.

I read it three times over. The plan had always ended with my death. The instant Lorenzo was declared dead-in-all-but-name and the inheritance passed to Ottavia, I was just a loose thread to be snipped.

“You knew,” I said quietly.

“I suspected.” Lorenzo’s voice was flat and lethal. “Now we

have proof.” He laid the page down with terrible calm. “This ends them. Every last one.”

But before we could map out our next move, my phone buzzed.

Alessio Conti’s name on the screen.

He still had my number. Of course he did.

I answered, my voice ice. “What.”

“Addie, baby. We need to talk.”

The nickname made my skin crawl. “We have nothing to discuss.”

“Giulia lost the baby.”

The words hit like a slap. Whatever Giulia had done to me, a lost pregnancy wasn’t something I could answer with cruelty. But Alessio’s next words extinguished any sympathy.

“The alliance is coming apart without the wedding. Your father says you need to come home and honor the original engagement. Giulia’s too fragile to take the pressure now.”

I laughed—sharp and hollow. “Let me get this straight. She stole my fiancé, got pregnant, lost the baby, and now I’m expected to come back and clean up the wreckage?”

“It’s not like your marriage is real, Addie. You married a brain-dead corpse for the payout. Don’t act like you’re above arrangements.” His voice dropped, the warmth souring into

a threat. “Besides. That marriage is about to be finished anyway. Your father’s filing to annul it. The paperwork goes in tomorrow. On grounds of the groom’s incapacity.”

The line went dead.

I lowered the phone slowly. Across the room, Lorenzo was watching me, and he’d heard enough.

“They’re moving the timeline up,” he said.

“An annulment.” My mind raced. “If it’s filed before your birthday, the court orders a competency review. Ottavia controls the doctors. She makes certain you fail it. And then —”

“And then control defaults to her. Permanently.” Lorenzo swung his legs off the bed, his jaw set. “Then we stop hiding.”

“What?”

“Tomorrow morning, I walk out of this room. Down those stairs. Into the dining hall. In front of Ottavia, the staff, the guards. We file a counter-petition before your father’s paperwork clears. We go public, and we go loud.”

“You can barely walk ten minutes without—”

“Then I’ll walk for ten minutes.” His voice was steel. “I survived four years of chemical torture, Adriana. I’m not losing my empire to a custody filing. And I’m not letting them anywhere near you.”

The protectiveness in that last sentence made something in

my chest tighten.

“If you collapse in front of witnesses, they’ll have all the proof they need that you’re unfit,” I warned.

“Then I won’t collapse.” He stood, swaying once, then steadying. He crossed the room toward me—slowly, but under his own power—and stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. “I need you to trust me.”

Every clinical instinct screamed that it was too soon. His blood pressure spiked under exertion. One stumble and we’d lose everything.

But the look in his eyes wasn’t a patient asking permission. It was a man who refused to spend one more day in a cage.

“Okay,” I breathed. “We do it tomorrow.”

We spent the night preparing. I administered a precise dose of stimulants—enough to bolster his stamina without triggering cardiac stress. We rehearsed the route. Forty-one steps from bed to dining hall.

At 2 AM, I found him standing at the window, practicing his balance in the dark.

“You should rest,” I said.

“Can’t.” He glanced at me. “After tomorrow, Adriana—when I’m standing in my own house as myself again—I’m going to keep my promise. I’m going to ask you that question.”

“And if the honest answer scares me?”

He turned, and in the moonlight his face was all sharp edges and certainty. “Then we’ll be scared together.”

He went back to bed without another word, leaving me standing in the silver light, my carefully built walls developing cracks I couldn’t afford.

Tomorrow, the dead man would rise.

And the city would never be the same.