CHAPTER 6 — The Woman Everyone Had Been Lying To
The sniper disappeared before Leo's men reached the rooftop.
Professional.
Fast.
Silent.
Exactly like the assassin outside the hospital.
Back inside...
Leo stared at the folded paper again.
The date written beneath the address...
October 14.
Twenty-one years earlier.
The night his family mansion burned down.
Marco finally asked the question everyone feared.
"Boss..."
"What if the fire..."
"...was never an accident?"
Leo ordered every surviving file from that night.
Police reports.
Insurance claims.
Fire department records.
Birth certificates.
Adoption documents.
By midnight...
One document was missing.
Only one.
The death certificate of Leo's younger sister.
Someone had erased it.
Completely.
Meanwhile...
Clara sat alone.
Everything she believed about her childhood suddenly felt uncertain.
She remembered flashes.
A woman singing.
A large stone staircase.
A little boy calling her...
"Lulu."
Her parents had never called her Clara.
They always called her...
"Lulu."
She had assumed it was a childhood nickname.
Now...
She wasn't so sure.
Marco burst into Leo's office.
"We found the old family housekeeper."
"Eighty-six years old."
"Dementia."
"But she remembered one thing."
Leo stood.
"What?"
Marco swallowed.
"She said..."
"The little girl never died."
"Someone paid to make the world believe she had."
Silence.
Leo slowly closed his eyes.
His hands trembled for the first time in decades.
Because if the old woman was telling the truth...
Then the impossible had happened.
The waitress who had unknowingly saved the most feared mafia boss in Chicago...
...might actually be the little sister he had spent twenty-one years mourning.
Before anyone could speak again...
Every light inside the penthouse suddenly went dark.
Power outage.
Then...
A voice echoed through the emergency speakers.
Cold.
Calm.
Mocking.
"Welcome home, Leo."
"You've finally found her."
"But if you want your sister alive..."
May you like
"You'll have to kill her yourself."
END OF CHAPTER 6
