Chapter 22 - The Ghost of the Past
The villa in Palermo was a sprawling white-stone estate perched directly over a secluded cliffside cove. Bougainvillea spilled over terracotta walls, and the air smelled of salt, citrus, and ancient earth. For the first three days, our lives fell into a rhythm that felt almost dangerously domestic. We swam in the private cove, ate fresh seafood prepared by a local chef who treated Dominic like visiting royalty, and spent long, lazy evenings talking on the terrace under a canopy of stars.
On the fourth night, the illusion of ordinary life fractured.
I was sitting in the estate’s expansive library, going over the final architectural blueprints for the downtown clinic, when a sharp, unfamiliar knock echoed against the heavy wooden door of the study.
“Come in,” I said, not looking up from the blueprints.
The door creaked open, but it wasn't Dominic, and it wasn’t Salvatore.
A woman stood on the threshold. She looked to be in her late thirties, dressed in a sharp, immaculate silk pantsuit. Her dark hair was pulled back into a severe chignon, and her eyes—a striking, pale amber—scanned the room with an unsettling familiarity.
“You must be the nurse,” she said, her voice smooth, dripping with a cool, aristocratic detachment.
I set my pen down slowly, leaning back in my chair. “And you must be someone who skipped the security checkpoint at the front gates. Who are you?”
A faint, ironic smile touched her lips. She stepped further into the room, her heels clicking rhythmically against the antique tiles. “My name is Isabella Moretti.”
The name hit the room like a physical blow. The Moretti family—the very syndicate Dominic had gone to war with just months ago, the ones who had tried to wipe out his shipping lanes and destabilize his empire.
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“You’ve got a lot of nerve walking into this house,” I said, my hand instinctively sliding toward the small emergency scalpel I still kept hidden in my desk drawer out of habit. “Dominic isn’t here right now, and if you think you can walk out the way you came in—_”
“Relax, Dr. Hayes,” Isabella interrupted, raising a gloved hand placatingly. “I’m not here to start a war. If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t have had time to reach for the medical hardware in your drawer. I’m here because my family’s war with Dominic is over, and a new one is about to begin.”
