The display went dark, and my own reflection stared back at me, white as a sheet. Behind my shoulder in the black glass, the hallway of the Montecarlo Estate stretched long and empty. Oil portraits of my father, my grandfather, three generations of blood that built this Family from nothing. And me, the last of them, sitting with a document that said the heir I'd been raising carried none of it.
Five years. Not five days. Not five months. Five full years.
Every ounce of my energy, my time, my money, poured into raising a child whose origins I knew nothing about. And my real child? Boy or girl, alive or dead, I had no idea.
Memory dragged me back five years.
Eight months pregnant, I was rear-ended on purpose. A staged accident on the coast road, made to look like a careless driver running a light. By the time I reached the hospital, the amniotic fluid embolism nearly killed me. When I woke, a baby girl was lying beside me.
Dante was on his knees at my bedside, eyes rimmed red.
He told me he'd taken care of everything. Including the driver who'd deliberately hit me, already handed over to the Feds for prosecution.
For five years, I believed him without question.
I gave everything I had, loved that little girl like she was the most precious thing in the world.
If it weren't for the car accident on New Year's Day, when Dante took Carina to the fireworks show at the harbor, and the ER doctor who happened to be a college friend of mine, who quietly pointed out that my type O blood and Dante's type A blood could never produce a child with Carina's type B, I might never have known. The moment I left the hospital, without telling a soul, I arranged the blood verification through Dr. Marchetti as fast as I could. No one else. Not the Consigliere. Not my most trusted Capo. No one.
In the days I spent waiting for the results, the new term started at the estate.
A new governess arrived.
And suddenly I became the woman who couldn't measure up to Serafina Conti in my own daughter's eyes.
Meanwhile, Dante, who had never lifted a finger for Carina's lessons, volunteered to sit in on her tutoring sessions every single day. The two of them left the main house dressed to the nines each morning and often didn't come back until well after dark. The excuse was always the same: the kid was having too much fun and didn't want to stop her lessons.