He Gave Another Woman My Wedding Pearls, So I Canceled the Wedding Before He Could Buy My Forgiveness

The triumph at the library lasted less than two hours.

At 11:15 PM, as Clare and Marcus sat in the Bennett Maritime executive office reviewing the finalized federal injunction, the emergency alarms atop Pier 17 shrieked to life.

A deafening siren tore through the snowy night, followed by the deep, shuddering boom of an explosion that rattled the glass walls of the fourth-floor suite.

Clare ran to the window.

At Berth 4-Alpha, thick black smoke and orange flames were billowing from the stern of the *Atlantic Monarch*.

“The ship!” Arthur shouted, bursting out of his private office. “Someone set fire to the auxiliary generator room!”

“Marcus, call the Harbor Police and Boston Fire!” Clare screamed, grabbing her coat and racing toward the elevator.

“Clare, don't go down there!” her father pleaded, rushing behind her. “It’s a trap!”

Clare didn't listen. That ship carried eighty million dollars of medical cargo and the entire future of Bennett Maritime. If the fire reached the container holds, the company would burn with it.

She burst through the ground-floor exit into the freezing blizzard. The cold air was choked with the acrid stench of burning fuel and scorched electrical wiring. Fire department sirens wailed in the distance, but the roads were buried under eight inches of unplowed snow.

Clare ran down the slick concrete apron toward the gangway of Berth 4-Alpha.

Suddenly, three figures emerged from behind a row of shipping containers. They weren't Duca security guards. They wore heavy dark parkas and balaclavas, their hands holding iron crowbars and semiautomatic pistols.

One of them stepped forward, raising his weapon directly at Clare’s chest.

“Miss Bennett,” a raspy, foreign voice said through the mask. “Dominic Russo owed thirty million dollars to our syndicate in Montreal. You just froze the Aegis accounts that were supposed to pay us tonight.”

Clare froze, her breath catching in her throat. “The Aegis accounts were fraudulent. I have federal marshals on their way here right now.”

The gunman laughed, a cruel, metallic sound. “Federal marshals won't arrive before you bleed out on this concrete. If we don't get our money, nobody gets this pier.”

He raised the pistol, his finger tightening on the trigger.

A blinding set of high beams roared out of the snowstorm.

A black armored Range Rover crashed through the temporary wooden barricade, sliding sideways across the ice and slamming directly into the container stack between Clare and the gunmen.

The driver’s door flew open.

Matteo Duca leaped out into the storm.

“Get behind the car!” Matteo roared, pulling a Glock from beneath his coat.

Gunshots shattered the night. Muzzle flashes lit up the falling snow like strobe lights. Bullets ricocheted off the steel containers with ear-splitting clangs.

Matteo fired three rapid shots, forcing two of the gunmen to scramble behind a forklift. The third gunman fired back—a round catching Matteo along his left shoulder, tearing through his cashmere coat and spraying dark crimson onto the white snow.

Matteo grunted in pain, dropping to one knee behind the wheel well of the Range Rover, but he kept his weapon raised, firing two more suppression rounds that shattered the windshield of the gunmen’s getaway van.

“Clare, move!” Matteo yelled, his face twisted in agony, his left arm hanging limp and bleeding heavily.

Clare didn't run away. She lunged forward, grabbed Matteo by the collar of his coat, and hauled him behind the solid steel engine block of the Range Rover just as another volley of bullets ripped through the rear windows.

“You’re hit!” Clare yelled over the shrieking sirens and crackling flames.

“It’s a graze,” Matteo gasped, his teeth clenched against the blinding pain, blood soaking through his fingers where he pressed against his shoulder. “Montreal cartel... Dominic borrowed from them to fund his fleet expansion. Natalia promised them Bennett’s terminal leases as collateral.”

“Why are you here, Matteo?” Clare demanded, ripping her velvet stole off and wrapping it tightly around his bleeding shoulder.

Matteo looked up at her through the falling snow, his dark eyes stripped of all arrogance, raw and bleeding with truth.

“Because I built this monster,” Matteo whispered, his breath ragged. “I gave Natalia the platform. I let my pride blind me. If you die tonight, Clare... nothing I own has any meaning.”

Before Clare could answer, the roaring sirens of four Boston Police cruisers and two heavy fire engines crested the pier bridge, their flashing red-and-blue lights bathing the entire harbor in crimson.

The cartel gunmen cursed, scrambled into their battered van, and sped across the lower access ramp, disappearing into the blizzard.

Firefighters swarmed Berth 4-Alpha, hauling foam hoses toward the burning stern of the *Atlantic Monarch*.

Paramedics rushed toward the Range Rover, their emergency bags rattling.

Matteo leaned his head back against the dented steel door of his car, his face deathly pale from blood loss. He looked at Clare, his fingers weakly brushing against her wrist where the wedding pearls should have been.

“Did you save the ship?” he asked faintly.

Clare looked up at the firefighters smothering the blaze. “Yes. We saved it.”

Matteo managed a weak, bitter smile. “Good. Now save yourself from me.”

As the paramedics loaded him onto a stretcher, his phone slipped from his coat pocket onto the bloody snow.

The screen was illuminated. An unread email from an anonymous Swiss law firm sat on the display:

**SUBJECT: RUSSO-BENNETT ARCHIVE — CLASSIFIED 1964 AGREEMENT UNSEALED.**