Chapter 2 - THE SECRET ISABELLA KEPT FOR EIGHT YEARS
For several seconds, nobody moved.
Central Park continued around us as if nothing had happened.
Joggers passed.
A dog barked somewhere beyond the trees.
Children shouted near the playground.
But all I could hear was Isabella’s last sentence.
There’s something he needs to know about you.
Lily looked between us.
“Mom?”
Isabella’s eyes never left mine.
I stood slowly.
Eight years had changed her.
The frightened young woman who once knelt beside me in a filthy Queens apartment was gone.
Her dark hair was pulled into a simple knot beneath the white cap of her maid’s uniform. Fine lines of exhaustion touched the corners of her eyes.
But I remembered those eyes.
I remembered waking on a narrow couch with a bullet wound in my side and finding her holding a bloody needle.
I remembered asking her name.
She had lied.
I learned that later.
By the time my men found the apartment, she was gone.
“Isabella what?” I asked.
Her mouth tightened.
“Rossi.”
My chest went still.
Rossi.
I knew the name.
Too well.
Antonio Rossi had once been an accountant for my father.
He disappeared after being accused of stealing three million dollars from the Moretti organization.
My father ordered him found.
He never was.
“You’re Antonio Rossi’s daughter.”
Lily frowned.
“Grandpa Antonio?”
Isabella closed her eyes.
That confirmed it.
I took one step closer.
“Tell me what I need to know.”
“Not here.”
“You approached me in public.”
“I didn’t know Lily was talking to you.”
Lily lifted her scholarship letter.
“I was being nice.”
Isabella looked at her daughter.
“I know, sweetheart.”
Then back at me.
“Please. Not in front of her.”
My instincts told me to refuse.
My heart told me something else.
Thirty minutes later, we were inside a private room at one of my restaurants near Fifth Avenue.
My security men waited outside.
Lily sat at a small table eating chocolate cake because apparently emotional revelations required dessert.
Isabella stood near the window.
I remained across from her.
“Well?”
She swallowed.
“The night you were shot eight years ago, you weren’t the only person being hunted.”
“I know.”
“You don’t.”
I said nothing.
“My father had found proof that someone inside your family was selling information about Moretti shipments, bank accounts, and protected witnesses.”
“Antonio stole money.”
“No.”
Her response came immediately.
“He moved it.”
“For what?”
“To hide families.”
“What families?”
“Men who wanted out.”
That answer was dangerous.
Nobody simply left my father’s organization.
“At least twelve,” Isabella continued. “Drivers. Bookkeepers. Two warehouse managers. One man whose teenage son had been threatened.”
“And my father let Antonio move millions for them?”
“No. Your father thought Antonio stole it.”
I felt old anger shift into uncertainty.
“Who framed him?”
She looked toward Lily.
Then whispered:
“Your uncle Vittorio.”
My father’s younger brother.
Dead five years.
The man who taught me how to shoot.
The man who kissed my mother’s cheek at Christmas and told me family was the only thing that mattered.
“Be careful.”
“I have been careful for eight years.”
“Careful people don’t walk into my life with claims like that.”
“I didn’t walk into your life.”
She pointed toward Lily.
“She did.”
Lily looked up from her cake.
“Sorry.”
“No,” I said quietly. “You’re not.”
Isabella’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
Then she reached into her purse.
She removed an old envelope.
My name was written across the front.
Not Alessandro Moretti.
Sandro.
Only three people ever called me that.
My mother.
My father.
And Vittorio.
I opened it.
Inside was a photograph.
My uncle.
A younger Sofia beside him.
My fiancée.
The woman who had confessed that morning that the child in her womb belonged to someone else.
I stared at the picture.
“When was this taken?”
“Seven years ago.”
Sofia looked barely twenty.
Vittorio stood behind her with one hand on her shoulder.
Too familiar.
My stomach tightened.
“What does this have to do with Lily?”
Isabella looked terrified.
“Everything.”
She sat.
“After I saved you, your uncle found me.”
“How?”
“My father had contacted him before the ambush.”
“Why?”
“Because Antonio still believed Vittorio might protect you.”
I laughed without humor.
“He tried to kill me.”
“I know that now.”
She continued.
Vittorio found Isabella three days after the ambush.
He told her my survival had complicated everything.
He wanted to know what I remembered.
She refused to answer.
Then he threatened her father.
Two weeks later, Antonio disappeared.
Isabella never saw him again.
“But before he vanished,” she said, “my father gave me something.”
“What?”
“A bloodstained shirt.”
I frowned.
“Yours.”
The room became silent.
“He took it from my apartment after I treated you. He said if anything happened to him, I was to keep it.”
“Why?”
“He wouldn’t tell me.”
My eyes drifted toward Lily.
A terrible possibility entered my mind.
No.
Impossible.
“Isabella.”
She began crying before I asked.
That frightened me more than any answer.
“What?”
“Seven years ago, I got pregnant.”
I looked at Lily.
Then back at her.
My voice came out low.
“Who is her father?”
Isabella pressed both hands together.
“I thought it was Michael.”
“Who is Michael?”
“The man I married.”
Past tense.
“He died four years ago.”
Lily stopped eating.
“My dad’s not dead.”
Isabella turned sharply.
Lily looked confused.
“You said he moved away.”
Isabella’s face broke.
“I was trying to protect you.”
“Mom?”
I stood.
“Take Lily outside.”
“No.”
“Isabella.”
“No more secrets.”
Lily watched us with wide eyes.
Isabella wiped her face.
“Michael was never Lily’s biological father.”
The little girl went completely still.
My heart began pounding.
“How do you know?”
“Because two months after she was born, she got sick.”
“What kind of sick?”
“A blood disorder. Not serious now. But they needed genetic testing.”
She looked at me.
“Michael wasn’t a match.”
“That proves nothing.”
“I know.”
“So?”
“My father had told me to keep your shirt.”
The meaning hit me.
“You tested it.”
“Yes.”
The room vanished around me.
My knees almost weakened.
“What did it show?”
Isabella started crying.
“The laboratory said there was a ninety-nine-point-nine-eight percent probability.”
I could barely form the question.
“Of what?”
She looked at Lily.
Then at me.
“That you were Lily’s father.”
No one breathed.
Lily stared at me.
Her scholarship letter slipped from her lap.
I heard the paper hit the floor.
Then she whispered:
“You’re my dad?”
Before I could answer, my phone rang.
My security chief.
I almost ignored it.
Then I saw the alert.
URGENT.
I answered.
“Speak.”
“Boss, Sofia is gone.”
My body tightened.
“What?”
“She left the mansion twenty minutes ago. Took no luggage. Her phone was found in the nursery.”
“Find her.”
“There’s more.”
I looked at Isabella.
“What?”
“We found a letter.”
“What letter?”
His voice changed.
“She says the baby’s father is someone you know.”
A pause.
“Vittorio’s son.”
I closed my eyes.
My cousin Luca.
The man currently second in command of my organization.
May you like
The man who had stood beside me at breakfast while Sofia confessed the baby wasn’t mine.
And suddenly, Isabella’s secret was no longer the most dangerous truth in the room.
