Chapter 10 - The Ledger of Stolen Daughters
The boathouse sat on the edge of the freezing, grey waters of Lake Michigan.
The wind whipped spray against the iron-barred windows.
Inside, the air smelled of engine fuel, salt, and damp stone.
I walked slowly down the concrete ramp, supported gently by Luca’s arm.
My left shoulder was bound tightly in white medical gauze beneath an oversized black cashmere sweater.
Every step sent a sharp throb through my collarbone, but I refused to stay in bed.
I needed to see the woman who had tried to steal my existence.
Behind us walked Daniel and two armed guards.
In the center of the damp holding cell, chained by both wrists to an iron ring in the floor, sat Vanessa Bellini.
She looked unrecognizable.
Her emerald designer dress was covered in mud and grime.
Her diamond jewelry had been stripped away.
Her hair hung in tangled, greasy strands over her hollow face.
When the heavy steel door creaked open, she raised her head.
Her red-rimmed eyes widened in sheer disbelief as she saw me walking beside Luca.
“You’re alive,” Vanessa croaked, her voice dry and hoarse.
“I am,” I said calmly, stopping four feet from her.
Vanessa let out a ragged, hysterical laugh that echoed off the wet stone walls.
“The invincible Elena Moretti.”
She looked up at Luca, her eyes filled with poisonous spite.
“You really think you won, Luca?”
Luca didn't answer.
He simply stood beside me, his hands resting in his coat pockets, radiating pure, lethal power.
“You took everything from me,” Vanessa hissed at me.
“I was raised as a Bellini princess! I was supposed to run this city beside him!”
“You were living a lie built on stolen blood,” I answered, my voice steady and cold.
I took the black leather ledger from Daniel’s hands and held it up.
“Your father didn't love you, Vanessa.”
Vanessa flinched.
“Shut up.”
“Look at the dates,” I continued, opening the ledger to the records from twenty years ago.
“Carlo Bellini adopted you from an orphanage in Detroit three weeks after I disappeared.”
Vanessa shook her head violently, the iron chains rattling against the floor.
“No! He chose me! He gave me his name!”
“He chose you because you had dark hair and brown eyes,” I said, reading the handwritten notes in Carlo’s own pen.
‘Subject matches physical description of Moretti infant. Suitable replacement for biometric bypass.’
Vanessa froze.
The air seemed to leave her lungs.
“You weren't his daughter,” I said, my heart feeling a strange mixture of pity and revulsion.
“You were a pawn. Just like I was supposed to be.”
“He used you to maintain the illusion so he could drain my mother’s money.”
Vanessa stared at the open ledger, tears cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
Her entire reality—her status, her identity, her hatred—collapsed into meaningless ash.
“What... what are you going to do to me?” she whispered, looking at Luca in pure terror.
Luca looked down at her with complete indifference.
“My sister decides,” Luca said flatly.
Vanessa looked at me, trembling from head to foot.
She expected me to order a bullet between her eyes.
That was the law of the Chicago syndicate.
Blood for blood.
I looked at the chains around her wrists.
I looked at the cold, dark water outside the barred window.
I had spent my entire life scrubbing floors, invisible, surviving on kindness and quiet strength.
I wasn't going to let their dark, bloody world turn me into a monster.
“Give her a passport,” I told Daniel.
Daniel blinked, stunned.
“Miss Elena?”
“Give her five thousand dollars and put her on a cargo freighter to South America,” I said.
“If she ever sets foot in North America again, shoot her.”
I looked straight into Vanessa’s weeping eyes.
“You spent your life pretending to be me. Now you get to spend the rest of your life being nobody.”
Vanessa collapsed onto the wet concrete, sobbing silently into her chains.
Luca watched me.
A look of deep, profound pride shone in his dark eyes.
May you like
“Take her away,” Luca commanded Daniel.
We turned and walked out of the cold boathouse, back into the crisp, bright Chicago morning.
