Suing My Ex, the Don Chapter 02
He wasn’t alone. Isabella stood beside him under the streetlamp, holding the hand of a little girl dressed in a princess gown.
My heart violently stuttered. My fingers clamped onto the strap of my briefcase so hard my knuckles turned white. If my own little baby had survived… they would be exactly this age.
Isabella started offering some frantic, tearful greeting, but her voice was just white noise in my ears. It took every ounce of my mental armor to rip my eyes away from the child.
“I told you, I am not taking any cases from the De Luca family. Stop wasting your breath,” I said, my voice clipped.
Isabella lunged forward, grabbing my wrist, her tears instantly spilling down her face. “Grace, please! I know I was awful back then. I shouldn’t have taken Alexander from you. You can slap me, you can scream at me, I don’t care!”
“But if the De Luca family collapses, Sophia is only three. She’s your niece! Can you really bear to watch her suffer with us?”
Three years old. Alexander and I had parted ways exactly thirty-six months ago.
I stared at Isabella’s perfectly sculpted, sorrowful face. She had certainly mastered the art of the upper-crust lady over the years. When our family first pulled her out of that orphanage, she was a feral little thing, trembling in the corner like a wounded animal. I was the one who mentored her, funded her wardrobe, and paid her Ivy League tuition out of my own inheritance. Even when Alexander broke my heart and claimed he had fallen for her, I had been naive enough to think she was just an innocent bystander.
Until I walked in and found them together; until our family firm’s proprietary algorithms were leaked, and the forensic audit traced the digital signature directly back to Isabella’s personal laptop.
I remember her dropping to her knees, sobbing into her designer sleeves. “Grace, please, I only did it because I love Alexander so much! You’re brilliant, you’re the storm—you don’t need anyone to survive! But I have nothing without him. Please, just let me have him!”
And because I possessed too much pride to fight over a man who lacked a spine, I walked away and let her have him.
Her gratitude? The very morning of their high-profile wedding, she quietly called the clinic and terminated my mother’s medical account. Without the funding cleared, the surgical team halted the critical life-support procedures. By the time the emergency notification bypassed her firewall and reached my phone, my mother had already passed away.
The sheer shock and grief triggered an emergency medical crisis of my own. I lost the baby that same night. That was the day Grace Reed died, and the phantom left New York. I realized Isabella wasn’t a fragile dove; she was a viper that wouldn’t hesitate to bite the hand that fed her.
The younger version of me would have screamed, demanded answers, and torn her down publicly. Now? I felt absolutely nothing but a vast, icy void.
I didn’t waste a breath on her. I turned to ascend my front steps, but Alexander lunged forward, grabbing the leather strap of my briefcase and ripping it backward.
“Grace Reed! We are swallowing our pride, standing on your doorstep begging! The least you can do is show some basic humanity!”
The latch broke. The briefcase popped open, and months of heavily annotated case files, forensic accounting charts, and government-stamped documents scattered across the snowy pavement. Right at Alexander’s feet lay the primary indictment sheet, emblazoned with bold letters, “De Luca Family Commercial Fraud Case.”
Alexander froze.
The anger evaporated from his face, replaced by a sudden, smug, insufferable smirk, “I knew it. You’re still the same, Grace. Still hiding behind a wall of ice when you care the most.”
He actually believed those hundreds of hours of midnight research were a secret attempt to build his defense.
I didn’t bother correcting his delusion. I knelt down in the cold, methodically gathering the wet papers one by one. Without offering them another syllable or a single glance, I walked inside my house and locked the door behind me.
Inside, I left the lights off. The house was dead silent, save for the faint, flickering glow of two small votive candles on the mantelpiece structure in the corner. To the left stood a silver frame holding a photo of my mother, Maria; to the right was a delicate, framed sketch of a small angel—the only memorial I had for the child I never got to hold.
Alexander and Isabella had spent the last three years building an empire on the bodies of my family. While I had been trapped in a living purgatory, fueled entirely by the quiet embers of retribution.
I knelt before the small altar, crossing myself. “Mom. Baby. I saw them tonight. Alexander thinks I’m his savior.”
A cold, bitter laugh cut through the room. “This time, I am going to personally escort them down to hell.”
