King of Greed (Kings of Sin #3) by Ana Huang

The ache deepened. God, I adored this man.

“Maybe, but I wanted to.” Dominic’s face softened. “Faria qualquer coisa por você.”

The weight of the memory nearly crushed me before I sucked in a painful breath and shoved it aside.

That was then. This was now. Focus on the now. “Cole told me you refused to sign the papers.”

My answer doused the room in ice.

The warmth vanished from his expression, and Dominic’s jaw flexed as he straightened to his full six feet, three inches. “On a first-name basis with your lawyer already, I see.”

He might as well have slapped me in the face.

Anger flared hot and sudden at his implication. “Don’t even think about playing the jealous husband card. Not when you didn’t care who I spoke to or hung out with before I dented your ego— ”

“You think this is what this is about? My ego?” His eyes flashed. “Dammit, Ále, it’s been a week. One week, and you already have that asshole lawyer serving me divorce papers. We haven’t even tried to fix things yet. There’s marriage counseling— ”

“We tried that once, remember?” I fired back. It’d been a few years ago, when I’d been so frustrated by his long hours, I’d talked him into going to couples’ therapy. “You didn’t show up because of a—surprise, surprise—work emergency.”

He probably didn’t even remember. I hadn’t asked him to go again because the only thing more humbling than exposing our relationship woes to a stranger was having your husband skip the appointment altogether. The memory of the counselor’s pitying gaze stung to this day.

Dominic’s mouth snapped shut. His throat worked with a hard swallow, and silence thundered in the wake of my response.

“You have two weeks to sign the papers, Dominic,” I said. “Or this will turn into a war, and we both know that’ll hurt your bottom line more than it does mine.” He had a multibillion-dollar company to run; I didn’t.

I didn’t want to get into a legal fight with him, but if that was what it took, that was what I’d do. I needed to take control of my life again, and I couldn’t do that without closing this chapter with Dominic.

No matter how much it hurts.





CHAPTER 9



Dominic




I STOPPED SLEEPING IN THE PENTHOUSE. I TRIED, BUT even with a full staff and the best entertainment money could buy keeping me company, it felt unbearably empty without Alessandra. Everything reminded me of her—the dresses in the closet, the white lilies lining the hall, the lingering floral scent of her shampoo in our bed.

Instead, I took up residence in my office, where I already had a sleeping area set up for the all-nighters I occasionally had to pull.

My phone buzzed with an incoming call. As always, my heart tripped over hope it was Alessandra before disappointment set in.

Unknown number. It was the fourth such call today. I didn’t know how they found my private cell number, which was unlisted and only available to a small group of vetted contacts, but it was getting damn annoying. I’d picked up the first time and heard nothing but silence.

If it weren’t for Alessandra, I’d get a new number tomorrow and be done with it.

It’d been two weeks since she showed up at the office and demanded I sign the papers. Her fucker of a lawyer kept hounding me, and no matter what I did, she refused to see me. Gifts. Calls. I’d even booked a damn session at Manhattan’s top marriage counselor, which she hadn’t shown up to.

I rubbed a hand over my face and tried to focus on the screen. I was still dealing with the SEC investigation into DBG Bank, which was picking up steam and throwing our office into chaos. Something about it bugged me, though I couldn’t quite pinpoint why.

Finally, after thirty minutes of fruitless effort, I gave up and called it a night. Since it was only ten and I couldn’t stand the thought of sleeping in the silent office this early, I grabbed my jacket off the back of my chair and headed to the one place that had any hope of making me forget about Alessandra, if only for a little while.



The New York branch of the Valhalla Club sat on a heavily guarded estate on the Upper East Side. That much private land was unheard of in Manhattan these days, but the club was founded over a century ago, when there’d been more leeway for a group of extremely wealthy, extremely connected families to claim dominion over a vast swath of real estate.

Valhalla hadn’t changed in that it remained an exclusive society for the world’s richest and most powerful, but its reach had expanded past its New York flagship and into every major city across the globe, including London, Shanghai, Tokyo, Cape Town, and São Paulo.

I wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming a member had it not been for Dante Russo, a descendant of one of Valhalla’s founding fathers.

“You look like hell,” Dante said as I approached the bar where he sat with Kai Young, CEO of the Young media empire.

“Great to see you too, Russo.” I took the seat on Dante’s other side and ordered a bourbon.

Dante had been one of my first investors. He ran the Russo Group, the world’s largest luxury goods conglomerate, and a combination of luck, timing, and sheer perseverance had wrestled him away from his investment guy to my fledgling company. Where Dante went, the rest of high society eventually followed, including Kai, who’d also become a good friend over the years.