Chapter 15 - NO MORE FAMILY WARS
Alessandro read the message twice. The old impulse rose immediately: gather men, close roads, settle it before sunrise.
Mara watched him reach for his phone. "Who are you calling?"
"Nico."
"To do what?"
He did not answer.
"You told me you wanted to be different from Enzo," she said. "Now is when that matters. Not when it's easy."
He put the phone down and called Rios. Detectives arranged the meeting using an undercover officer and a remote camera. Alessandro was ordered to stay away. He obeyed, though it cost him his last illusion of control.
At the designated parking garage, police found a frightened former Sterling bookkeeper named Owen Price. He carried encrypted files he had taken before Vittorio fired him. The threats were real, he said, but the caller's demand that Alessandro come alone had been added by someone monitoring his emails.
"They wanted him at the garage," Owen told Rios. "Enzo planned to make it look like he killed the witness."
The files contained hotel bills for meetings between Vittorio, Enzo, and a private contractor. They also showed regular payments tied to a person identified only by the initials M.V.
Then she found the dates. The payments began when she was six and continued until she turned eighteen. They were routed through the shelter where she had grown up.
"Someone was paying to keep me there," she said.
Alessandro remembered the lie about relatives in Ohio. Enzo hadn't merely hidden Isabella's daughter. He had financed the machinery that made sure the family never found her.
Owen produced one final invoice: a charge for destroying the 2008 gate records, submitted not by Enzo but by Victoria herself two weeks earlier.
May you like
Mara read it in stunned silence.
Victoria had been trying to erase the last surviving evidence of Isabella's death.
