Chapter 1 - The Silence of the Stone Fortress
The autumn sun rose slowly over the outskirts of New York, laying pale gold across the iron railings of the Moretti estate. The three-story mansion of gray stone stood behind those railings the way a fortress stands behind its walls — quiet and closed against the world. Two guards walked the perimeter without hurry. A third stood at the gate. None of them lifted his eyes as the first delivery truck of the morning passed on the far side of the lane. Inside the great hall, Aleandro Moretti sat alone at a long oak table that could have seated twelve. He was thirty-eight years old. His black suit had been pressed the night before. A small cup of espresso cooled beside his hand, and he had not touched it in almost twenty minutes. He was the most powerful man on the outskirts of this city, but in the private accounting of his own heart, he was a man who had already lost the only thing worth counting: his daughter Sophia, who had died of leukemia years ago. Since that Tuesday, the Moretti estate had ceased to be a home; it had become a fortress of work where staff walked on soft shoes and never spoke the name Sophia. Behind the great mansion, at the far end of the kitchen garden, lived Elena Rossi and her three-year-old daughter, Mia. Mia had her mother's curly brown hair, enormous eyes, and a spirit that couldn't be tamed by stone walls. While Elena warned Mia to stay away from the master's side of the house, little Mia gripped her one-eared cloth rabbit, Bunny, her mind already wandering toward the forbidden paths of the vast estate, completely unaware that a single stray step was about to shatter the frozen silence of the Moretti dynasty forever.
