Three years old, clutching a gray stuffed lamb, she pulled the sleeve of the most powerful man in Chicago and whispered, *Please don't trust that woman.* By midnight the party was over. By dawn, Alessandro Rienzi learned the wedding he was about to walk into wasn't a marriage at all — it was a heist wearing a white dress.

Alessandro did not sleep that night. He sat in his study, drinking black coffee, surrounded by the architectural blueprints of his own estate.

If Victor Thorne and his fake niece were planning a heist, they were after one specific thing. The Rienzi master ledger. It was an encrypted, biometric hard drive that contained the routing numbers, passwords, and access codes to over two billion dollars in offshore accounts. It was the lifeblood of his entire empire.

The drive was kept in a state-of-the-art, titanium-reinforced safe hidden behind a false wall in his study. The safe required dual authentication: a six-digit rolling code, and Alessandro’s right thumbprint.

“She said the fingerprint is easy,” Alessandro muttered to himself, remembering little Amara’s warning.

He looked down at his right hand. He realized with sickening clarity how many times Genevieve had casually held his hand, how many times she had handed him a glass of wine, ensuring his prints were left perfectly intact on the crystal. She had already lifted his biometric data.

But the rolling code was something only he knew, and it changed every twenty-four hours.

Unless the safe was placed into a 'trust transfer' mode.

Alessandro’s father had implemented a paranoia-driven fail-safe in the family trust. In the event of a legal marriage, the biometric safe automatically required a manual reset to add the spouse's credentials. During that twenty-minute reset window, the safe would unlock using only the biometric print, bypassing the rolling code entirely.

The reset window was programmed to trigger exactly one hour after the marriage certificate was digitally filed with the city.

“By the time he says I do, we’ll have full access,” Alessandro repeated Genevieve’s stolen words.

It was a brilliant, flawless plan. They were going to marry him, wait for the digital ink to dry, walk into his study during the chaos of the wedding reception, and drain two billion dollars in less than ten minutes. And then, according to Amara, they were going to use poison to make sure the groom didn't survive the honeymoon.