Chapter 71 - Whispers of Florence
My knees nearly buckled. I gripped the corner of the heavy oak nightstand to keep myself upright.
"A twin?" I whispered, my voice sounding hollow in the grand, vaulted room. "That's impossible. I grew up with Elena. There was no one else. My mother never spoke of another child."
"Your mother was the chief cryptographer for the council," Vincent said grimly. "She specialized in creating identities that didn't exist, and erasing the ones that did. When the council began fracturing thirty years ago, your mother took precautions. One daughter was raised in the light—Elena, the heir to the family's public legacy. One was kept hidden as an insurance policy—you."
"And the third?" My chest burned as I tried to pull in enough air. "Who is the third?"
"Her name in the archives is Valerie," Vincent replied, stepping closer, his hand coming up to touch my shoulder. His grip was firm, anchoring me against the vertigo spinning through my thoughts. "She wasn't kept as an insurance policy, Clara. She was handed over to my father when she was six months old. A blood hostage to guarantee your family's loyalty to the Moretti syndicate."
The horror of his words washed over me in waves. Maya let out a soft whimper from the bed, and I instinctively reached out to squeeze her foot through the heavy blanket.
"A hostage..." I murmured. "My mother gave away her own child?"
"Your mother gave away an infant to save you and Elena from being executed in the Palermo purges," Vincent said, his expression dark with ancient resentment. "My father raised Valerie in the shadows of the estate. She was trained as an operative, a ghost inside our own ranks. When my father went missing, she vanished with his personal files. And now, she has resurfaced using your mother's credentials in Florence."
"Then the woman on the intercom..." I looked toward the metal speaker mounted on the wall. "That wasn't Elena?"
"Listen to the cadence of her voice," Vincent murmured, tilting his head toward the door. "Your sister had a slight lisp when she spoke Italian—a habit from her childhood in Tuscany. The woman who just spoke had no lisp. Her accent was cold, polished, forged in the northern academies where my father sent his personal enforcers."
The realization settled over me like a burial shroud. We weren't dealing with a sister who had come to reclaim her family's honor. We were dealing with a woman who had been raised in cruelty, traded away like cattle, and molded by Vincent's tyrannical father into a living weapon.
"She doesn't want an exchange," I said, the puzzle pieces clicking into a terrifying picture. "She wants to wipe out everything that belongs to the family that abandoned her."
"Exactly," Vincent said. "She wants the Moretti bloodline dead, and she wants Francesca Vane's surviving daughters buried with it. That means she wants you, she wants me, and above all else, she wants Maya."
Before we could form another thought, the emergency lights in the corridor went out completely, plunging the suite into pitch-black darkness.
The backup generators hadn't just tripped; they had been manually severed.
May you like
In the sudden blackness, the cold draft of air from the lower catacombs rushed up through the floor vents, carrying with it the unmistakable, sulfurous tang of ignited thermite.
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