Chapter 6 - Gianna’s Second Betrayal
Renzo took the phone.
“Mother?”
The call ended.
His face became unreadable.
Salvatore had heard.
For the first time since appearing from the dead, he looked frightened.
“Isabella.”
Renzo turned on him.
“You knew?”
“No.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Leora remembered Isabella Matera from photographs.
Elegant.
Private.
Widowed.
She lived mostly in Florence.
Or supposedly did.
Renzo called her Italian residence.
The staff said she had left four days earlier.
Destination unknown.
Leora returned to the financial records.
One company kept appearing around Isabella’s charitable foundation.
Ames International.
Tarquin’s family company.
Tarquin went pale.
“My father dealt with her.”
“Your father died,” Gianna said.
“Six months ago.”
Leora looked at him.
“How?”
“Heart attack.”
Nobody in the room trusted death anymore.
They discovered that Isabella and Tarquin’s father had controlled a private investment vehicle for twenty-two years.
It predated Conrad’s involvement.
Predated Elias’s investigation.
Predated almost everything.
Salvatore sat down.
“I thought I had destroyed it.”
“What?” Renzo asked.
“The original organization.”
He finally told the whole story.
Decades earlier, several families had created a cooperative network to protect shipping routes.
It evolved.
Protection became bribery.
Bribery became extortion.
Extortion became laundering.
Salvatore participated.
Then Renzo was born.
He wanted out.
Isabella did not.
“She believed power was security,” Salvatore said.
“And you married her?” Renzo asked.
“I loved her.”
“That seems to be everyone’s excuse.”
Leora felt that sentence.
Renzo looked at her.
Neither needed to explain.
By evening they had enough evidence to approach federal prosecutors independently.
Then Gianna disappeared.
Again.
This time voluntarily.
Leora found the note.
I have to fix what I started.
Renzo cursed under his breath.
Tarquin knew where she had gone.
Conrad’s house.
They arrived to find police vehicles outside.
Conrad Priest had been shot.
Alive, barely.
Gianna sat on the staircase covered in his blood.
“I didn’t do it,” she whispered.
Leora knelt beside her.
“I know.”
Gianna looked shocked.
“How?”
“Because you’re holding pressure on the wound.”
Paramedics took Conrad.
Before they loaded him into the ambulance, he grabbed Leora’s hand.
“Desk.”
“What?”
“My study.”
His fingers tightened.
“Your mother’s letter.”
Then he lost consciousness.
Leora entered Conrad’s study.
The desk drawer was locked.
Gianna knew the code.
Marisol’s birthday.
Inside lay a sealed letter.
Leora opened it.
Her mother’s handwriting.
My dearest Lee—
She stopped.
Renzo stood at the doorway.
“You can read it alone.”
“No.”
She surprised herself.
“Stay.”
He did.
Marisol wrote that Conrad had discovered her investigation but had not betrayed her.
Instead, he joined her.
He had spent years pretending loyalty to the network.
The marriage had begun as cover.
Then became real.
Leora lowered the page.
“My mother loved him.”
Gianna quietly said, “Yes.”
Leora looked at her.
“You knew?”
“I found the letters when I was sixteen.”
“And you never told me?”
“I hated you.”
The honesty was brutal.
Gianna’s eyes filled.
“My mother left. Dad married yours. Then suddenly you were there, and Dad trusted you with everything because you were brilliant and quiet and responsible.”
“You treated me like garbage.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because every time I looked at you, I saw everything I thought I wasn’t.”
Leora said nothing.
An apology did not erase eleven years.
But truth was at least a beginning.
The final page of Marisol’s letter contained a warning.
If Isabella ever learns Elias survived, she will finish what she began.
Leora looked at Renzo.
“Your mother ordered the attempt on my father.”
Renzo read the line himself.
His face hardened.
Then Gianna’s phone chimed.
She looked at it.
“What?”
Gianna turned the screen toward them.
A video call invitation.
From Isabella Matera.
Renzo answered.
The screen showed a dark room.
Isabella sat calmly at a table.
Behind her was Elias Vance.
Alive.
Bound to a chair.
Leora stopped breathing.
Isabella smiled.
May you like
“Hello, sweetheart.”
Then she placed a gun against Leora’s father’s head and said, “Now let’s discuss what your mother died protecting...”
