Massimo arrived just in time to see his little daughter’s old cloth doll being used as part of a cruel humiliation.

The next recording showed what happened at the east house, and it broke something in me that none of the previous files had managed to reach.

Elena was sitting in a straight-backed chair. My father entered the room with Bianca at his side and Victor near the door. Elena’s head was bleeding lightly. She was hurt, furious, and still somehow proud enough to meet his eyes without lowering hers.

Lorenzo told her she had caused enough instability. Elena answered that she had only taught me to think. Bianca hated that line as much now as she did on the recording.

My father offered her a choice. She could disappear for six months. She could leave me. She could leave Sophie. In return, the family would remain calm and no further damage would be done. Elena refused each part so clearly it felt like being stabbed and proud at the same time.

Then the recording shifted. Sophie started crying somewhere off-screen.

I stopped the video.

The terrace disappeared around me again.

“She was there?” I asked.

Bianca closed her eyes. Marco answered. My father had brought my daughter to the east house so Elena would understand what refusing meant.

I looked toward the resort doors where Sophie had been taken inside with the doll.

My eighteen-month-old daughter had been used as leverage against her own mother while I knew none of it.

When I resumed the file, Elena begged for Sophie. Lorenzo told her to agree to leave. She refused again. The room filled with the sound of my daughter crying, and I could hear the moment Elena’s control broke—not because she feared for herself, but because she understood they were willing to use Sophie to break her.

Then Elena said something that finally made sense of the doll.

“That’s why Massimo is going to see everything.”

My father demanded to know what she meant. They searched her bag. Nothing. Her coat. Nothing. They did not realize she had already hidden the drive inside Sophie’s doll, the one object nobody in that room considered dangerous enough to search.

That realization stunned me almost as much as the recording itself.