PART 3: The Debt of the Mother
“Nerissa? What on earth are you doing here?”
I looked up. Standing on the mezzanine stairs was Marcus Vance—the owner of the West Loop bakery where I worked. But he wasn’t dressed in his flour-dusted apron. He was wearing a tuxedo that cost more than my annual salary, holding a glass of champagne.
Beside him stood a man I recognized instantly from the red warning letters piled on our kitchen table: Hector Geller, the predatory private lender who had been trying to repossess my mother’s remaining estate for the past six months.
Marcus hurried down the stairs, his face flushed with anger. “Mr. Moretti, I am deeply sorry. This girl is one of my kitchen hands. She was strictly instructed to leave through the back. I don’t know how she sneaked in here to harass your guests.”
“She didn’t sneak in, Marcus,” Silvio said, his voice flat. He didn’t look at Marcus. He kept his eyes on me, his thumb lightly brushing the cuff of his sleeve. “She was invited.”
“Invited?” Geller sneered, stepping forward. He was a bloated man who smelled of heavy cologne and cheap ambition. “By whom? She’s a broke orphan. Her mother died owing my firm eighty thousand dollars, Mr. Moretti. I’m actually here tonight to execute the seizure of her property—including those useless leather-bound notebooks she keeps in her apartment.”
The mention of my mother’s notebooks made my blood turn to ice.
Those notebooks contained my mother’s life’s work—the master formulas for the bespoke, natural fragrances she had designed before her illness. They were the only things of value we had left. They were Sasha’s future.
“The notebooks,” Silvio repeated, his voice dropping to a dangerous, quiet register. “You mean the ones containing the proprietary extraction formulas for the Moretti signature imports? The ones her mother, Dr. Elena Rostova, patented twenty years ago before your firm fraudulently acquired her medical debt?”
Geller’s smug smile froze. “I… what?”
“You thought you were clever, Geller,” Silvio said, taking a single step forward. The sheer physical dominance of his posture made the lender instinctively take two steps back. “You targeted a dying woman, bought her hospital debt for pennies on the dollar, and altered the lien agreements to include her intellectual property. You believed no one was watching.”
Silvio turned back to the room.
“My family has spent five years searching for Dr. Rostova’s heirs to return the royalties that were illegally diverted by the former board,” Silvio announced, his voice carrying to every corner of the silent ballroom. “As of four o’clock this afternoon, the Moretti Trust has fully liquidated Geller’s firm. Every debt associated with the Rostova estate is null and void.”
With Geller staring at his phone as the real-time notification of his company’s bankruptcy flashed on his screen, Silvio turned back to me, offering an arm clad in flawless dark wool…
