Chapter 95 THE DEAD MAN HUNTS.

Chapter 95 THE DEAD MAN HUNTS.
DANTE.
"Mom, we don’t speak that name either."
"I'm just—"
"Mom."
My phone rang, interrupting us. I reached for it instinctively, half-expecting Cinnamon's name, fully bracing myself for the guilt of explaining tonight without actually explaining.
Bringing the blaring phone to my face, I saw the unknown number on the screen.
The laughter ceased in my throat. Mom’s gaze shifted to my face as she instantly understood that whatever took my laughter could be the same thing hunting her. Her hands stilled in her lap. "Who is that?"
"Tate." I stood up adjusting my expression. "We have a project deadline, and I forgot he was calling tonight." I kept my tone relaxed. "I need to take this outside."
She gradually relaxed. "Okay."
I walked over to her, bent down, and held her tight. I would fight this battle for us.
"Stop worrying," I whispered into her hair. "It's nothing serious."
She patted my arm and let me go.
I rushed out, the night air taking dominance on my face. I walked straight to my car, sliding into the driver's seat.
The voice on the other end of the line as I answered was distorted. Electronically altered beyond recognition. I couldn't identify if it belonged to a male or female. Old or young. Or even a hint at the race. Just flat mechanical sounds.
"Mr. Moretti. I was beginning to think you’d gone to sleep."
"Who are you?" It wasn't a question. It was a demand.
"That's not how this works." A pause calibrated for maximum discomfort. "You've had two days. You and your mother. Very generous of me. Don't push me."
"You're a coward hiding behind software. Call me from your real number and let's have this conversation properly."
"I don't think your bravado is appropriate for someone in your position." The voice was almost amused. Almost. "You have six hours. Transfer the Bitcoin to the wallet and this stays between us. I won't contact you again and I'll erase all the evidence I have."
"You haven't told me anything specific," I said. "Which tells me you know nothing specific. Just trying to get us afraid."
The voice chuckled loudly then stopped. I waited, breathing heavily.
"What really happened to Max Ashford?" the voice asked.
The night went cold.
"You want to try that again?" The voice mocked staying unhurried. "Because I've been very patient. And patience, Mr. Moretti, has a price."
 A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. This was very real. They sounded confident.
"For your little stunt just now, the number has changed. Ten million from you. Twenty million from your mother." The distortion made it almost bored. "Six hours. Don't be late or the whole world will know that your mother murdered Max Ashford, her husband."
"Listen to me very carefully—"
The line went dead.
I sat in my car in my mother's driveway with the phone in my hand and the night saying nothing, because there was nothing to say to the silence.
Max Ashford, a name that has come back to disturb our peace even in death.

CINNAMON.
The clock on my Apple Watch showed 1:17 a.m. I had checked it four times in the last twenty minutes, each time hoping for something different to appear. Each time, it remained the same.
The living room was quiet. Oliver was upstairs in his bed, one arm thrown over his stuffed bear asleep and completely unbothered by the fact that his father had walked out five hours ago with no explanation and hadn't come back. I envied him.
I opened the Find My app for the third time. Dante's location dot was on a quiet residential street just two blocks from his mother’s house. It had been there since eleven—perfectly still, with the car icon parked beside it. I stared at it, fully aware that a location dot only indicated where a phone was, not a person.
He could be sitting in that car. He might not be.
I closed the app. I had almost called Khole to vent but I knew she was dealing with her own stuff. Risa, I couldn't contact right now until she set her mind straight. Dove, oh no. She needed me more than I needed her.
I needed to be in control of this. Whatever this was.
 Our wedding video had been sitting in the shared drive since the day the videographer delivered it. Three hours and forty-seven minutes of footage I had watched exactly twice since then. Once when it arrived and again on our first anniversary when Dante projected it at two in the morning, and we fell asleep on the couch during the reception dancing segment.
"Reaching for the remote, I pressed play because I needed a reminder of what we once were. The screen lit up with water first—the Adriatic—captured by a drone in the soft morning light, enhancing the ocean's beautiful blue hues. A white-hulled yacht with three decks glided smoothly through the water. Garlands of white orchids and trailing greenery adorned the entire length of the upper deck railings, flown in from three different countries by the florist. I recalled standing at the dock, gazing up at it and thinking, 'this cannot be real.'
Guests arrived by tender, two at a time, stepping onto the lower deck where staff in white linen greeted them with champagne. We had a total of two hundred people—board members, politicians, artists, and others whose names often graced financial headlines. The women wore elegant gowns while the men donned suits, with the sea remaining completely indifferent to it all.
Then the camera found me.
I had slightly forgotten what I looked like that day. My dress was ivory, back open to the waist, featuring a single column of covered buttons that cascaded down to the floor—a train that flowed like water as I moved. My hair was elegantly pinned up, and around my neck was Dante's mom's golden necklace that she had gifted me that morning.
I watched myself on screen walking toward Dante on the upper deck. He stood at a makeshift altar framed by an archway of white roses and eucalyptus that opened up to the sea behind him. Clad in a suit as dark as midnight, he clasped his hands in front of him with his jaw set tight. It was clear he was trying hard to keep himself composed.
I remembered experiencing that moment from my own perspective—cresting that last step and seeing him for the first time that day as his expression transformed before my eyes.
But now, seeing it through the camera’s lens in a way my own eyes couldn't capture—the full sequence of his unguarded emotions as I walked toward him—tightened something deep within my chest so much that I had to press my hand flat against it. His eyes had been filled with the brightness of a man who had decided he was not going to cry and was losing the negotiation badly.
His jaw moved slightly. His throat shifted. He pressed his lips together and glanced briefly at the deck before looking back up at me. By the time I reached him, the tears hadn’t fallen, but they were undeniably there, I hadn’t noticed at the moment because I was too focused on holding back my own tears.
"You came," he whispered when I got to him.
It wasn’t a joke. It was genuine.
"You came."
We had been the kind of story that could have ended multiple times before it even began, and there he stood on a yacht in the middle of the Adriatic, surrounded by two hundred people, still unable to believe this was really happening.
I kept watching, seeing us exchange our vows again.
Dante had written his in secret, sharing none of their content with anyone. I had written mine and read them to Risa four times the night before, each time breaking down at the same moment. On screen, we faced each other with our hands linked while the officiant spoke, and then Dante cleared his throat and glanced down at the card he held, reciting the words he had penned alone at his desk three weeks prior.
"I have been many things in this life. Some worth being proud of, others not. But from the moment you entered my world and remained unaffected by what typically sways people, I became the man I always hoped existed within me. I didn't discover him. You restored him."
The guests were silent on screen.
On my couch at 1 a.m., in a dark living room with my husband parked two miles away for reasons unknown to me, I rubbed my temple and breathed through it.
"What is happening to us," I wondered. But immediately that thought came, "stop. Don’t do that. You don’t know enough to think like that."