He Sent Me Away So I Took His Crown Chapter 02
The river house looked no different from the last time I’d been sent away.
The work gloves I had forgotten still hung under the porch. Half a bag of expired coffee beans still sat in the kitchen.
Over the past year, I had lived here for a total of fifty-seven days.
Longer than I had spent in the main house as Luca’s wife, receiving members of the Moretti family.
The man on the phone was Elias Reed.
Founder of Reed Bloodline Diagnostics.
Three years ago, his portable testing system had revolutionized thoroughbred bloodline certification in seven states. This year, his company had begun building independent registration systems for several hostile families, ensuring no single one could alter the ownership of horses, assets, or betting rights on its own.
What he offered me was not comfort, but a choice.
“Chief Bloodline Systems Officer. You’d report to the independent committee, not to me.”
“What you do with your stake in the racing industry is your decision. My advisers can offer opinions, but they won’t have the final say.”
“Housing can be company-provided or converted into a stipend. You do not need to move into my home unless you want to.”
The clearer he was, the more absurd the past year felt.
Apparently, real respect didn’t require someone to keep repeating, *I’m doing this for your own good.*
After a brief pause, he added, “Outside of work, I want to pursue you. Properly. Not to get my hands on the Moretti registry system, and not to get revenge on your behalf.”
“If you’re willing, we can start with an engagement, and then get to know each other again. The ring, the date, whether it’s public—we decide all of it together.”
“Why me?” I asked.
The line went quiet for a moment.
“I’ll tell you in person, after you leave Chicago.”
I was silent for a long time before finally saying, “Okay.”
This wasn’t me grabbing the nearest rope in desperation.
This was me agreeing to leave, and agreeing to give a chance to someone who had never once taken my choices away from me.
At dusk, the estate steward, Teresa, delivered two suitcases.
I slipped off my wedding ring and placed it in her roughened palm.
“Give this to Luca for me.”
Her face fell.
“Elena, Luca does care about you. He’s just been used to protecting Bianca since they were children. And the Bellandi patriarch controls several underground auction houses and the Moretti family’s capital channels, so he—”
“Don’t frame his choices as something he couldn’t help.”
I drew my hand back.
“He could have refused every single time. Refusing Bianca would only have made business between their families harder. Making me move out was the easiest solution.”
Teresa fell silent.
Before she left, she asked in a low voice, “Should I tell Vittorio?”
“I’ll tell him myself.”
After the door shut, I sat on the living room floor and sorted through my papers.
Vittorio Moretti was Luca’s grandfather and the recognized patriarch of the Moretti family.
He was also the man who had paid for the rest of my high school and college tuition after I lost my parents at sixteen.
My parents had run a small horse farm. The year a wildfire jumped the fences, they went back to free the trapped horses and never came out of the barn.
After the fire, only one life remained: a light-brown filly, not yet weaned.
Her name was Lark.
Vittorio bought the scorched land, brought Lark to the Moretti racing farm, and told me, “You can owe me for tuition. You do not owe the Moretti family your life.”
But I had still carried that debt too heavily.
When I graduated from college, the Moretti-controlled racing operation was in its hardest year. Disease, drought, and chaotic bloodline records had led to repeated returns from the underground auctions. Several leaders who used horse transactions to move money were close to turning on one another.
I turned down an offer from a breeding company in Kansas and came back to the estate to rebuild the bloodline files, vaccination records, and ownership codes from scratch.
That was also the year Luca kissed me in the north garden.
What followed was not a transaction, and no family had forced it.
Vittorio had personally witnessed our marriage in a small church and sealed the record with his adviser. Luca had sworn that once the Bellandi auction contract was renewed, he would make everything public, so the leaders who depended on Bellandi’s channels couldn’t use my background to attack his legitimacy as heir.
I believed him.
A news blast circulated among the allied families popped up on my phone.
*The Moretti family has airlifted twenty thousand blue delphiniums to create a “blue galaxy” for the heir’s engagement banquet.*
In the photo, the north garden—once meant for Luca and me to announce our marriage—was already covered in white tents.
Bianca stood in the middle of the flowers, wearing the silver headdress I had spent three months selecting.
Last year, when I suggested using blue flax for our ceremony, Luca had said wildflowers weren’t suitable for an event with family witnesses.
Now Bianca said she liked blue, and he could buy out half the florists in the state.
A new message came in right after. It was from Elias.
*There’s an empty lot beside the new Denver office. I had blue flax seeds scattered there. Whether they stay is up to you.*
It was the flower I had mentioned once in college while presenting a grassland restoration project.
I stared at the screen until my eyes burned.
I hadn’t even replied when Mara Collins, the veterinarian overseeing the racing farm, suddenly called.
“Elena, did you know they moved Lark into the breeding center?”
I shot to my feet.
“What?”
“The booking form says commercial embryo retrieval. The authorizing party is Bianca Bellandi. She says they’re auctioning Lark’s first embryo at the engagement banquet as a symbol of the two families’ merged bloodline assets.”
“That’s impossible.”
My voice shook.
Lark was already eighteen. Last year’s exam had shown a thinning uterine wall. Mara and I had agreed she would never undergo breeding procedures again.
She wasn’t just some mare who could fetch a high price at an underground auction.
After the fire, she was the last living link to my parents.
“Stop it right now. I’m on my way.”
I snatched my car keys and ran out the door.
Forty minutes later, I shoved open the breeding center’s metal door.
Lark was secured in the procedure stocks, shifting uneasily on her hind legs.
Bianca stood before a camera in a spotless white blouse, introducing “the new bloodline jointly controlled by Moretti and Bellandi” to representatives of several allied families.
She saw me and paused for only a beat before her smile returned.
“Elena, perfect timing. Everyone knows Lark is a legend of the Moretti racing farm. I wanted her to be part of the engagement banquet, too.”
I strode over and slammed the emergency stop button.
The machine’s hum died.
“Let her out.”
The smile vanished from Bianca’s face.
“Luca already agreed. Once I’m wearing the wife’s signet ring at the banquet, breeding arrangements here fall under my authority anyway.”
“Lark belongs to me. So do her medical decisions.”
I reached for the safety latch on the side of the stocks.
Bianca suddenly grabbed the lead rope.
“Don’t make a scene in front of the witnesses. It’s one retrieval. The doctor said it wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Let go.”
At the sound of our raised voices, Lark began backing away violently.
Desperate not to lose control on camera, Bianca wrapped the rope tighter around her wrist.
The next second, the bar of the stock was rammed open.
Lark reared high.
Bianca screamed and fell.
And Lark’s right hind leg slammed into the metal latch on the gate.
The sound of bone breaking wasn’t loud.
But in that instant, my whole world went silent.