Why, of all the ways a powerful man threatens a woman, had Luca’s mind gone straight to banks?

And then I remembered something he had let slip six weeks before our wedding, carelessly, the way he let most things slip: that Vance Enterprises was in the middle of securing a two-hundred-million-dollar syndicated loan for a commercial waterfront development.

An enormous deal.

The kind of deal that requires clean balance sheets, flawless credit metrics, and — above all — zero public scandal.

The kind of deal that a domestic violence arrest, or a whistleblower daughter-in-law, could bring crashing down.