Chapter 6 - Serena's Treachery
The realization hit Lena at four in the morning, accompanied by three empty mugs of black tea and four open spreadsheets.
If Serena Voss was laundering European bond syndicates for Moretti through the hospitality division, she hadn't just committed corporate sabotage; she had committed treason against the Corvino syndicate. And in Silvio Corvino’s world, treason was punished with lime pits in the Pine Barrens.
Serena wasn't stupid. She wouldn't have stayed in Boston if she was exposed.
Unless she wasn't exposed yet.
Lena leaned closer to her screen. She accessed the auxiliary cloud backups for Corvino Hospitality’s European holding company—an account Luca had given her access to years ago to handle VAT tax reconciliations in Zurich and Milan.
There it was.
A series of wire transfers, scheduled for execution at midnight on Friday.
Fifty-two million dollars. The exact amount of the mezzanine construction loan for the Grand Beacon hotel—the flagship crown jewel of the waterfront redevelopment. The money wasn't being transferred to the construction escrow account. It was being rerouted through a third-party logistics firm registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, with a subsidiary account held by a shell corporation named *Voss Global Maritime.*
Serena hadn't gotten on that plane to Zurich.
She was still in Boston. She was using Luca’s bruised ego, the family chaos, and the pending divorce proceedings as a smokescreen to drain the company’s primary liquidity reserve before Luca’s legal team could regain control of the corporate accounts.
And the destination of that money? It was being co-signed by an authorized representative from Moretti Holdings.
Lena sat back, her breath catching in her throat.
Serena hadn't just seduced Luca to play the glamorous mafia mistress; she had played both sides of the New England underworld against each other. She had used Lena’s pride to blow up the family from the inside, knowing that Luca would be too distracted by the public humiliation and the court battle to audit the European transfer wires before the weekend.
Lena reached for her phone.
Her first instinct was to call Tess. But Tess was a family law attorney; this was federal wire fraud, racketeering, and corporate espionage.
Her second instinct was to call Luca.
Her thumb hovered over his number. The memory of him standing in the rain, soaked to the skin, telling her that he hadn't slept with Serena, flickered in her mind.
*No,* she thought. *If I call Luca, he sends five men with guns to Serena’s hotel. The money disappears into an offshore freeze, the federal authorities step in, the project gets tied up in litigation for ten years, and the Grand Beacon rots on the docks.*
Lena was an architect. She built things.
And she was going to finish this on her own blueprint.
She picked up the phone and dialed a number she hadn't called in seven years: Commissioner Marcus Evans of the Massachusetts Department of Capital Asset Management.
May you like
"Marcus," Lena said when the groggy voice answered on the fourth ring. "I know what time it is. But I have the banking authorization codes for the Grand Beacon project. And I know how you can recover thirty million dollars for the state pension fund by Friday night."
***
