Chapter 6
I thought I was ready for whatever came next.
I was wrong.
The next file had no image. Only sound. Elena must have regained consciousness after they placed her in the car. I could hear her breathing, confused, hurt, trying to orient herself. Then Victor’s voice said she was awake, and Bianca answered that he should keep driving.
Elena asked where they were taking her. Nobody answered. Then a phone rang.
Bianca answered immediately. “Dad.”
Everything in me went still.
My father’s voice came through the speaker, distorted but unmistakable. Lorenzo Bellaforte. Dead for eighteen months. Feared far longer than that.
He asked what happened. Bianca told him Elena fell but was still alive. Then there was a pause, and my father said, in that same calm voice he used when discussing crew placements and punishments, “Then this is still fixable.”
I do not remember breathing for several seconds after that.
Bianca asked what he wanted her to do. He told her to bring Elena to the east house. I knew the place. Everyone in Bellaforte knew the place. My father used it for private family discipline back when fear was his idea of order. I shut it down after taking over.
Apparently I shut it down only on paper.
The recording continued. Elena told him I would find her. My father laughed and said I would believe whatever my family told me.
That line cut deeper than Bianca’s cruelty, deeper than Marco’s cowardice, deeper even than the revelation that my father knew. Because he was right. I did believe them. I believed the accident report. I believed the grief on Bianca’s face at the funeral. I believed Marco when he said nobody could have changed what happened. I even believed my father when he put a hand on my shoulder and told me some losses could not be fought.
Now I knew I had been comforted by the architect of the lie.
Bianca tried to defend him on the terrace. She said Lorenzo chose the family. She said he believed Elena was dividing us and that survival required ugly decisions.
I looked at her and finally understood the philosophy I had spent years dismantling without ever seeing its full shape.
They said family first.
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But what they really meant was power first, tradition first, control first.
People only counted when they were useful to those things.
