Chapter 4 - The Ghost of the Past"Alessandro, stop—don't listen to her, she's trying to turn us against each other!" my mother sobbed, her hands clawing desperately at my wrists.
"Answer me!" I roared, the suppressed rage of a lifetime finally shattering the dam.
Before my mother could force the words past her lips, Marco pushed his way through the cluster of terrified guests, holding a heavy, yellowed manila folder that looked decades old.
"Boss," Marco said, his voice grim. "When you told me to lock down the estate, I had the technical team raid the basement archives. Specifically, the private safe belonging to your uncle—Julian’s father."
Julian scrambled up from the dirt, wiping mud from his expensive suit, his face contorted in sheer panic. "Don't open that! Marco, you have no right—"
Crack.
I didn't even look at Julian as I backhanded him across the face with enough force to send him sprawling back into the dirt with a mouthful of blood and broken teeth.
"Keep talking, Julian, and I'll feed you to the harbor crabs piece by piece," I muttered coldly, then snatched the folder from Marco’s hands.
I flipped open the cover. Inside sat a pristine, un-redacted coroner's report from twenty-five years ago, alongside financial ledgers signed by my late uncle and... my mother.
The headline of the medical examiner's report hit me like a physical blow: Cause of Death: Acute Organ Failure (Trace elements of digitalis poisoning detected).
My father hadn't died of a heart attack on his yacht in Montauk. He had been murdered.
And according to the financial records in my hands, the poison had been purchased using a shell company jointly owned by my uncle and my own mother.
"You..." I looked down at Elena, my voice dropping to a terrifying, deathly whisper. "You killed him. You and Julian's father killed my father so you could merge the families and seize total control."
Elena stopped crying. She slumped back into the chair, the fight completely draining out of her frame. She looked up at me with tired, hollow eyes.
"Your father was weak, Alessandro," she said, her voice chillingly calm. "He wanted to pull out of the drug trade. He wanted to legitimize the Moretti name through real estate and banking. If he had his way, our empire would have crumbled within five years. We didn't just save the family business... we built the throne you are sitting on today."
Around us, the guests were backing away slowly, terrified of being caught in the blast radius of a Moretti civil war.
Isabella seized the distraction. With a sudden, desperate lunge, she reached into the bodice of her wedding dress and yanked out a compact, military-grade ceramic pistol—completely untraceable by metal detectors.
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Before anyone could react, she pressed the barrel hard against the trembling temple of little Emma, who had just been led back into the courtyard by the guard.
"Nobody move!" Isabella shrieked, her voice cracking with unhinged hysteria. "Drop your weapons! All of you! Drop them right now, or the brat’s brains paint this white rose garden!"
