Chapter 8 - DANTE WAS NOT WHO THE FAMILY SAID HE WAS
Dante sat down slowly.
I put Giulia on speaker.
No one moved.
His mother cried silently for almost a minute before speaking.
“Dante, forgive me.”
He stared at the phone.
“Who is my father?”
Giulia inhaled.
“Carlo Romano.”
My father.
The room disappeared.
I heard Elias swear.
Dante did not move.
I could not breathe.
“That’s impossible.”
Giulia explained.
Before I was born, before Dante was born, she and Carlo had loved each other.
Their families separated them.
Giulia married Lorenzo.
My father later married my mother.
Months after Giulia’s wedding, she discovered she was pregnant.
Lorenzo knew.
“He raised me anyway?” Dante asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he loved you.”
For once, a family secret contained something kind.
Then the horrifying implication reached me.
If Carlo Romano was Dante’s father—
Dante and I—
“No,” Giulia said immediately.
As though she understood my silence.
“Isabella, Carlo was not your biological father.”
I gripped the table.
“What?”
My mother had been pregnant when she met Carlo.
My biological father died in a construction accident before I was born.
Carlo married her and raised me as his own.
Two families had hidden two different paternities.
Dante and I shared no blood.
Still, my entire identity shifted in minutes.
“Who was my biological father?”
“Anthony Mercer.”
I turned toward Elias.
He looked as shocked as I felt.
“Mercer?”
Giulia continued.
“Elias’s uncle.”
Elias sat down.
My biological father had been his mother’s younger brother.
Killed at twenty-four.
That made Elias my cousin.
The man I had chosen as forensic accountant because my father once trusted him had unknowingly been family.
“Did my father know?” I asked.
“Carlo always knew.”
I thought of the man who raised me.
Nothing changed.
Nothing that mattered.
Then Dante finally spoke.
“Why is proof of this inside North Meridian?”
“Because Vittorio used paternity to control ownership.”
If Dante was not Lorenzo’s biological son, Vittorio believed he could invalidate parts of Lorenzo’s estate plan.
But Lorenzo legally adopted Dante at birth.
The challenge would fail.
Unless someone destroyed the adoption record.
“Who tried?” Elias asked.
Giulia whispered:
“Vittorio.”
Then she admitted why she reactivated North Meridian.
She was trying to move assets beyond reach before old Moretti loyalists discovered Vittorio’s original plan.
“Why use Isabella’s signature?” Dante demanded.
“I didn’t.”
Everyone froze.
“What?”
“I moved my own accounts.”
“Then who moved the foundation money?”
Giulia went silent.
A new possibility emerged.
Someone else had piggybacked onto her transfer.
Someone with foundation access.
Someone close to Isabella.
I began reviewing staff in my head.
Natalia.
Auditors.
Legal counsel.
Then one name struck me.
Jonathan Price.
The foundation’s chief financial officer.
The man I trusted with every donor-control system.
I called his phone.
Disconnected.
Elias checked his laptop.
Jonathan had boarded a private flight two hours earlier.
Destination:
May you like
Cayman Islands.
And thirty-eight million dollars had just vanished from North Meridian.
