Chapter 4 - The Ultimatum
The study door clicked shut, sealing us inside the quiet room. The fire crackled softly in the stone hearth, casting dancing orange shadows across the walls.
Roman paced across the Persian rug like a caged wolf, running a hand through his dark hair before spinning around to face me.
“Have you lost your absolute mind?” Roman exploded in a harsh whisper, keeping his voice down so the children wouldn't hear upstairs. “You are playing a very dangerous game, Emily! Do you have any idea who operates in these shipping lanes? These aren't local street thugs—these are cartel-backed syndicates out of Montreal and Chicago! If they figure out a woman sitting in a lakeside manor controls their bottlenecks, they won't hesitate to put a bullet through your head!”
I stood calmly by the bookshelf, sliding a volume back into its slot before turning to face him.
“Let them try,” I replied steadily. “They’ll find out very quickly that Grayhaven isn't an easy target. Caleb has a private security detail patrolling these grounds twenty-four hours a day, and our legal team has federal protection tied directly to the state tax revenue we generate.”
Roman stopped dead in his tracks, staring at me in sheer disbelief. “You hired private security?”
“I run a multi-million-dollar logistics network and house forty displaced children, Roman. Did you think I was going to rely on a prayer and a locked front door?” I walked slowly toward him, stopping just a foot away, forcing him to look down into my eyes. “You abandoned me here to die. You wrote me off as a casualty of a business deal. But I built an empire out of the wreckage you left behind. So don't you dare stand in my house and lecture me about danger.”
Roman’s chest rose and fell heavily. The angry red flush on his neck slowly faded into a grim, hard line. He reached out, his fingers gently brushing against my shoulder, lingering near the collar of my blouse.
“I didn't abandon you to die,” Roman said, his voice dropping into something raw and heavy. “I left you here because my father’s enemies were gunning for me in Detroit. If they knew I had married, they would have used you to break me. Keeping you isolated here was the only way to keep you off their radar.”
I let out a cold, sharp laugh, stepping back out of his reach.
“Oh, how noble of you,” I mocked, shaking my head. “You kept me in a freezing, crumbling ruin without a phone line for the first six months, letting me think I was entirely discarded, all while playing protector from a safe distance? Spare me the melodrama, Roman. If you cared about my safety, you would have sent word. You would have checked in. You only came back now because your shipping lanes were choked and you finally traced the bottleneck back to your runaway wife.”
Roman didn't deny it. He couldn't. The brutal truth hung heavily in the air between us.
“The board in Buffalo is convening tomorrow morning,” Roman said grimly, changing tactics as he realized intimidation wouldn't work. “They’ve noticed the hostile takeover of the lakefront docks. They’re planning to launch a corporate audit and dispatch enforcers to find out who owns Veritas Holdings. If they discover it’s you, they’ll try to strip the assets by force.”
“Let them try,” I said with a dangerous smile. “My legal team has already preemptively filed a federal injunction protecting every square inch of those docks under federal child-welfare and agricultural preservation acts. Your board can’t touch them without triggering a federal racketeering investigation into your own company’s shadow accounts.”
Roman stared at me in stunned silence. He had walked into Grayhaven expecting to find a timid, shivering girl hiding under blankets. Instead, he found a chess master who had checkmated his entire corporate board before he even walked through the front door.
“You want a war?” Roman whispered, a dark, reckless fascination creeping into his eyes.
“I want peace,” I answered coldly. “Which means you are going to sign a formal separation agreement tomorrow morning, relinquish all claims to my personal assets, and let me live my life in peace.”
May you like
Roman’s jaw tightened into a wall of granite. He stepped forward, caging me between his body and the edge of the heavy oak desk.
“I gave you my name, Emily,” he murmured, his voice husky, his gaze dropping briefly to my lips before locking back onto my eyes. “And I don't give things away. Especially not an empire.”
