Chapter 2 - THE SECRETS WE BURIED
The silence in my private office was heavier than the steel vaults beneath the estate. I sat behind the mahogany desk, my fingers steepled, watching the woman who had just turned my meticulously ordered world into a chaotic storm of ghosts. She sat across from me, trembling but keeping her chin high. Her daughter, a fierce little spitfire named Mia, was asleep on the leather sofa, exhausted from the evening's terror. Titan, my Doberman, lay at the foot of the couch, his dark eyes locked on the door, guarding the child as if she were his own.
"Your file says your name is Clara," I began, my voice a low, gravelly rumble that usually made grown men sweat. "It says you moved here from Seattle three years ago. It says a lot of things. All of them lies."
She reached up, her fingers wrapping around the black-and-gold pendant resting against her collarbone. The metal caught the dim light of the desk lamp. "A lie was the only thing keeping us alive, Lorenzo."
Hearing my real name again sent a visceral shock through my system. I stood up, the chair scraping against the hardwood floor, and paced to the window overlooking the estate grounds. Armed guards were already doubling their patrols based on my orders. The night was pitch black, a fitting canvas for the war that was about to reignite.
"Fifteen years ago, I woke up in a burning safehouse surrounded by the bodies of my father, my brothers, and my mother," I said, not turning around. "I was bleeding out from a bullet to the chest. Someone dragged me through the smoke. Someone pulled me into an alley, stabilized my wound, and vanished before my father's loyalists found me. My father’s pendant was missing from his vault, assumed stolen by the assassins." I finally turned to look at her, my eyes narrowing. "Who are you, really?"
"My name is Serafina," she whispered, the walls she had built finally crumbling. "My father was the architect who designed that safehouse. When he realized your family's enemies—the Morretti syndicate—had paid him to leave a blind spot in the security grid, he tried to warn your father. But he was too late. The Morrettis killed him. I was hiding in the vents when the breach happened. I saw everything. I saw them slaughter your family."
A cold, murderous rage coiled in my stomach. The Morrettis. The family I had supposedly wiped out ten years ago to secure my empire. "If the Morrettis are dead, who is hunting you?"
Serafina looked up, her eyes wide with a terror that cut straight through my armor. "Because it wasn't just the Morrettis, Lorenzo. They didn't have the codes to breach the inner sanctum. Someone inside your family let them in. And they know I saw his face."
Before I could demand a name, the intercom on my desk buzzed violently. It was Marco, my head of security.
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"Boss," Marco's voice was tight, urgent. "We went to secure Renata in the holding cells. She’s dead. Cyanide pill. And boss... the perimeter alarms just got tripped. We have multiple armed bogeys converging on the main gate."
They hadn't waited for her to be fired. They had come to finish the job.
