Chapter 8 - The Prenup
The proposed prenuptial agreement was straightforward.
Bianca would retain everything she brought into the marriage.
Vittorio would retain control of his premarital assets.
She would receive generous financial protection if the marriage ended.
But she would receive no ownership of Lucy’s trust.
No control over Vittorio’s family holding companies.
No automatic claim to the Romano mansion.
For most people, the agreement would have represented extraordinary security.
For Bianca, it represented failure.
Financial investigators began examining Marcus.
They discovered he was carrying more than two million dollars in personal debt through loans, failed investments and guarantees connected to a collapsed real-estate venture.
Bianca had debt too.
Much less, but enough to matter.
Their communications showed increasing desperation during the months before the planned wedding.
Neither had expected the Romano assets to be so carefully protected.
That was when their strategy changed.
If Bianca could not gain control through marriage alone, she needed leverage over Vittorio.
The staged record of neglect gave her that leverage.
The disabled cameras hid what she did to Lucy.
The manipulated footage removed employees who might contradict her.
Marcus supplied technical access.
Bianca supplied proximity.
Neither expected Emma to remain quiet long enough to collect evidence.
The most disturbing discovery came from Marcus’s financial records.
He had paid a private investigator to follow Vittorio.
Not to find affairs.
Not to investigate business rivals.
To document exhaustion.
Photographs showed Vittorio leaving hospitals after sitting with sick employees, arriving home after overnight flights, and sleeping in the back seat of a car between meetings.
Each ordinary moment had been cataloged as possible evidence that he was physically or mentally deteriorating.
They were building a portrait of a man collapsing under pressure.
A man who might eventually need someone else to manage his affairs.
Bianca.
But their plan had a weakness.
It depended on Vittorio never asking why so many pieces of evidence appeared at exactly the right time.
Now he was asking.
And one piece did not fit.
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Someone had been sending Marcus confidential information about Vittorio’s medical appointments.
That information had never been stored on the mansion’s security system.
