Chapter 4 - The Ledger of Lies
The bakery stayed closed for the rest of the evening. Mr. Pike hadn't come back yet—undoubtedly enjoying the massive windfall Luca had handed him to get his truck fixed—leaving me alone with the twins as the mountain night settled over Gray Hollow.
After feeding Ash and Lena a dinner of chicken soup and fresh bread, I tucked them into their small twin beds upstairs. Lena fell asleep immediately, her thumb tucked securely into her mouth, but Ash remained awake for a long time, his amber eyes fixed on the ceiling.
"Mama?" he whispered as I pulled the faded blue blanket up to his chin.
"Yes, my love?"
"The big man... he smelled like the rain," Ash said simply, turning his face toward the wall. "He looked like he was waiting for the sun."
I didn't know how to answer that. I kissed his forehead, smoothed his dark curls, and walked downstairs into the dark bakery. The only light came from the neon open sign humming in the window, casting a dull red glow across the marble counter.
The leather-bound notebook sat exactly where Luca had left it.
For an hour, I simply stared at it. Every survival instinct I had developed over the last three years told me to throw it into the industrial oven and burn it to ash. Luca was a master of manipulation; his world was built on contracts, leverage, and beautiful lies designed to protect his family’s interests.
But as I looked at my hands—rough, calloused, and smelling permanently of yeast—I realized the anger inside me was a poison that was keeping me from truly moving forward. I needed to know what kind of lie he had concocted to justify three years of hunting me down.
I opened the book.
The first page wasn't written in Luca’s sharp, masculine cursive. It was a copy of a medical report from the Chicago Presbyterian Hospital, dated three weeks before I disappeared. The patient name listed was Vanessa Vance.
My sister.
According to the report, Vanessa had been admitted to the psychiatric evaluation wing after an intentional prescription overdose. Attached to the medical file was a series of encrypted text messages between Vanessa and a man named Marcus Vance—the head of the rival East Side syndicate that had been at war with the Morettis for a generation.
“If Luca doesn't sign over the shipping manifests by the end of the month, the girl dies,” one message read from Vance’s number.
Vanessa’s reply made my stomach drop into a bottomless pit: “I have a better idea. Luca loves her too much to break. But if I break her trust in him, she’ll run. And when she runs, she’ll take the Moretti lineage with her. Luca will destroy himself looking for her, and your men can step into the vacuum.”
My breath hitched as I turned the page. The next document was a forensic audio analysis of the security tapes from our Lake Forest estate on the night I left. The timestamp matched the exact hour I had walked down that hallway.
There was a transcription of the dialogue from inside our bedroom, verified by an independent court expert.
Vanessa: "Luca, stop, she's going to wake up." Luca: "Get off me, Vanessa. I’m calling the guards to have you removed to the clinic. Sarah is exhausted, let her sleep. If you touch her or come near this wing again, I’ll forget you’re her sister and bury you myself."
The words on the paper swam as a wave of cold reality crashed over me.
The laugh I had heard wasn't an intimate shared secret. It was Vanessa seeing me through the reflection of the hallway mirror, intentionally escalating the scene because she knew I was standing outside the door. She had set the trap, and I, blinded by the sudden terror of betrayal, had walked straight into it.
May you like
I dropped the notebook onto the counter, my knees giving way beneath me as I slid down against the wooden cabinets, the darkness of the bakery closing in around me.
He hadn't betrayed me. He had been trying to protect me from my own blood.
