Chapter 5 - THE WIDOWER'S APPETITE
With no confirmed body and no contesting heir, the courts granted Alex provisional control of Veronika's assets ninety days after the wedding — faster than Ingrid's stalling tactics could hold back, thanks to a judge whose campaign, it would later surface, Alex's associates had quietly funded.
He moved quickly once the accounts opened to him. A yacht. A penthouse in a city Veronika had never taken him to. A woman half his age who called herself his "consultant" and spent most of her consulting hours at his apartment.
He began selling. First the smaller holdings — a chain of boutique hotels Veronika had built from nothing in her thirties. Then a logistics company that employed four thousand people who had no idea their livelihoods were being auctioned to settle a dead woman's estate.
Ingrid watched every transaction from a distance, filing exactly enough objections to look thorough and exactly few enough not to spook him. Every signature Alex made, every wire transfer, every liquidation order — she copied, dated, and sealed into a second folder growing thicker by the week.
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Alex, for his part, had never felt more powerful. He gave interviews about grief and legacy. He funded a small foundation in Veronika's name that existed mostly to fund dinners in his own honor.
He had no idea that four floors below his own accountant's office, in a nondescript clinic two hundred miles from anyone who knew his face, his wife was learning to walk again — and reading every financial filing he made with the quiet, focused hatred of a woman rebuilding herself one betrayal at a time.
