Chapter 3 - MY FATHER HAD BEEN WATCHING ME IN ZURICH
I wanted to say the documents were fake.
Then Dante showed me photographs.
Zurich.
My apartment building.
The café where Leo and I ate breakfast on Sundays.
His preschool.
Me pushing a stroller when he was six months old.
Someone had watched us for years.
My father died eleven months ago.
The surveillance continued six months after his funeral.
“Who?”
Dante answered:
“Someone who inherited his files.”
“Victoria?”
“No.”
Thank God.
“Then who?”
“Your cousin, Marcus Carter.”
I barely remembered Marcus.
Older by nine years.
Polite.
Always around Dad’s business.
Apparently not harmless.
Marcus managed Carter Development after Anthony’s death.
He also inherited the debt structure Anthony had built with Salvatore Moretti.
And my father’s private intelligence network.
“What did he want with Leo?”
“The same thing Anthony did.”
Control.
The Moretti trust had changed after Salvatore lost some authority, but biological descendants of Dante still carried valuable future claims.
Leo was not just Dante’s son.
He was a legal trigger.
I hated the word.
Then I asked:
“Did you know where I was?”
Dante looked at me.
“No.”
I searched his face.
“Never?”
“I spent fourteen months trying to find you.”
My anger flickered.
Then hardened again.
“You’re Dante Moretti.”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling me you couldn’t find one woman and a baby?”
“I could have.”
“What stopped you?”
“Victoria.”
I turned toward her.
She had arrived five minutes earlier and remained by the door.
“She made me promise that if I found you, I would not bring Moretti security into your life until Salvatore was neutralized.”
Victoria stepped forward.
“She was right to leave.”
Dante looked at her.
No disagreement.
Then my sister said:
“I knew you’d go somewhere Dad couldn’t easily reach.”
“You knew about Switzerland?”
“No.”
“But I knew you’d choose somewhere clean.”
That hurt more than I expected.
She knew me.
Enough to predict my escape.
Then Dante said he finally traced me two years ago.
But instead of contacting me, he monitored from a distance.
I stood.
“You watched my son grow up and never came?”
“No.”
He looked ashamed.
“I learned only that you were alive. I didn’t know about Leo until the airport.”
“Then what were you monitoring?”
“Threats near you.”
Someone from Carter Development had made repeated trips to Switzerland.
Marcus’s people.
Dante quietly blocked two attempts to access my residency records.
I never knew.
Then Mia’s phone rang.
She looked at the screen.
“Elena.”
“What?”
“Your father’s remains.”
The cemetery office had called.
The relocation authorization had been challenged.
By Marcus Carter.
Why would my cousin fight over where Dad was buried?
Because there was something in the coffin.
Dante went still.
“What?”
Victoria whispered:
“Dad didn’t die naturally.”
May you like
The grave relocation was never about family sentiment.
Someone was terrified an exhumation would reveal how Anthony Carter really died.
