Chapter 10 - The Unfinished War
The photograph felt like ice against my fingertips.
My mother. My grandfather.
And Antonio Romano.
Not as enemies standing across a mahogany boardroom table, but as allies. As family.
Luca took the typed letter from Franco’s hand. He unfolded it slowly, the heavy paper crinkling in the freezing wind that swirled snow across the terrace floor.
His eyes scanned the words, and with every second that passed, the tension in his shoulders coiled tighter and tighter, turning his body back into solid iron.
“What does it say, Luca?” I whispered, terror rising in my throat like bile. “What does it mean?”
Luca didn't answer immediately. He looked up from the page, his eyes shifting from the letter to my face, then toward the dark forest that lined the perimeter of the estate.
“Antonio Romano didn't want you dead to steal your docks, Emma,” Luca said, his voice dropping into a register so dark it made the hair on my arms stand up.
“Then why?”
“Antonio Romano wasn't your grandfather’s enemy,” Luca said quietly. “He was your grandfather’s partner. Twenty years ago, Vincent Moretti didn't lose the war against my father. He faked his exile. He and Antonio created an off-shore syndicate in Switzerland designed to absorb both the Moretti and Romano fortunes the moment Antonio’s lineage merged with Vincent’s.”
The truth hit me like a physical blow.
“Isabella,” I breathed. “Isabella wasn't meant to marry you to merge the families.”
“No,” Luca said, crushing the letter in his fist. “The wedding was a decoy. A distraction to draw my attention away from the legal transfers. The syndicate was never meant to belong to Isabella. It was registered to Vincent’s first-born grandchild.”
He looked straight into my eyes.
“To you.”
My head spun. “I don't understand. If the fortune was mine, why did Antonio send men to kidnap Sofia? Why did he put a contract on my life?”
“Because Antonio didn't write that contract,” Luca said.
He smoothed the crumpled letter flat against the glass table, pointing to the signature at the very bottom beneath the foreign consulate seal.
It wasn't Antonio Romano’s signature.
It wasn't Isabella’s.
It was signed in a sharp, elegant hand that bore a name I had heard only in whispers during my four months in Chicago:
*Elena Moretti.*
The world stopped.
The air froze in my lungs.
Elena.
Luca’s late wife. Sofia’s mother.
The woman who had supposedly died three years ago in a twisted car crash on Lake Shore Drive—the crash that had broken Luca’s heart and silenced Sofia’s laughter.
Luca stared at the signature on the page.
For the first time since I had met him, I saw genuine, unadulterated shock in his eyes. A crack appeared in his impenetrable armor, revealing the raw, bleeding wound of a man whose entire reality had just been revealed as a lie.
“She’s alive,” Luca whispered. The words were barely audible over the whistling wind.
“Boss,” Franco spoke up, his hand dropping to the radio transmitter on his lapel. “We have three black SUVs approaching the main gate. They aren't local plates. They bypassed the outer perimeter sensors using our internal security bypass codes.”
The bypass codes.
Codes that only two people in the world possessed: Luca Moretti, and the woman he had buried in an empty tomb three years ago.
From inside the house, Sofia’s joyful laugh echoed through the French doors, followed by the soft clinking of her hot cocoa mug against the kitchen counter.
Luca turned his head toward the sound of his daughter’s voice.
Then he looked at me.
At the bruises on my arm that had brought me into his arms. At the bloodline that tied me to a fortune and a war I had never asked for. And at the weapon resting securely in his holster.
A loud horn sounded from the driveway below.
The iron gates of the estate were slowly, mechanically swinging open in the falling snow.
Luca reached out. He caught my hand in his, his grip hard, unyielding, and fierce.
“Emma,” he said, his eyes burning into mine with an intensity that promised either our salvation or our destruction.
“Yes?”
“Go inside to Sofia. Lock the vault doors behind you.”
“Luca, no,” I pleaded, clutching his coat. “Who is in those cars? What are they coming for?”
Luca drew his weapon with a cold, terrifying finality, stepping toward the edge of the stone terrace as the headlights of the three black vehicles illuminated the falling snow on the circular drive.
May you like
He looked back over his shoulder, his voice steady against the howling wind.
“They’re coming for our family,” Luca said. “And this time, nobody survives the lie.”
