Chapter 3
Elena’s next recording hurt more because it was too familiar.
She sat in our old bedroom with the camera hidden low and said that if they succeeded, they would not even need to separate us by force. I would do their work for them myself. I would get tired of the warnings, tired of the fear, tired of being told someone in my own bloodline was moving against me. Then I would push her away and call it exhaustion.
I remembered our last real argument with sudden, brutal clarity.
She had stood in front of me with tears in her eyes and told me somebody in my family wanted her gone. I told her she was seeing enemies everywhere. I told her grief had changed the way she looked at people. I told her she needed rest.
Standing on the terrace with Sophie beside me, I realized those words had not been born in me alone. They had been nurtured there.
The next video showed Marco sitting across from Elena in a locked room at Villa Aurelia. He looked nervous. She looked furious.
“You have five minutes,” she told him.
Marco warned her that Bianca knew she had been watching the drivers and following the villa routes. Elena said Bianca should have given her fewer reasons to look. Then Marco said the sentence that changed the direction of everything.
“You need to leave.”
Elena stared at him. “Massimo?”
“No. The estate.”
I turned slowly toward him when the recording ended.
Marco would not meet my eyes. Bianca was already telling everyone he had gone to the villa only to calm Elena down, that he was trying to prevent a family disaster. But I kept listening to the truth rather than the excuse.
In the recording, Elena asked him what this was really about. He admitted the old faction did not believe I should run Bellaforte alone. My father’s structure had never truly died. Bianca wanted it restored. The older men wanted influence back. Elena had become the most dangerous obstacle because I listened to her in private even when I did not listen enough in public.
Then Elena asked the question that had apparently haunted Marco ever since.
“My own sister-in-law wants me gone?”
Marco did not answer directly. He only said Bianca believed Elena had changed me and that the family needed the old version of me back.
When the file ended, Sophie’s small voice rose from beside Rafael.
“Mommy didn’t change Daddy bad.”
I looked at her and felt something crack so quietly inside me that nobody else could have heard it.
May you like
“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”
What Elena changed was the part of me they had depended on being willing to obey blood even when blood was wrong.
