Chapter 7 - The Ledger|
Across town in her Little Italy apartment, Isabella hadn't slept a wink.
Her laptop screen cast a blue glow over her face as her fingers flew across the keyboard. Spread out on the table around her were dozens of printed financial sheets, bank transfer receipts, and shipping manifests extracted from Marco’s flash drive.
"Unbelievable," she whispered to herself at 3:30 a.m.
It was worse than Marco had suspected.
Carlo hadn't just been skimming from the Brooklyn docks; he had been using a series of shell companies registered in Delaware—Apex Logistics, Blue Wave Holdings, and Vance Real Estate—to divert funds directly into accounts controlled by the Genovese family, the Morettis' fiercest rivals in New York.
He was selling out the Moretti empire from the inside out.
And the blue sapphire necklace?
Isabella found a scanned appraisal document buried deep within the drive’s hidden system folder. The real sapphire necklace—the 18th-century heirloom—had been sold at a private auction in Zurich three months ago for $1.2 million.
The necklace Marco had pulled from her bag tonight was a high-grade synthetic replica.
"He didn't just frame me," Isabella gasped, leaning back in her chair, her heart pounding. "He stole the real necklace months ago, replaced it with a fake, and needed a fall guy to get rid of the replica before an expert appraised it for the wedding!"
Carlo had used her to cover up a multi-million-dollar heist and treason against his own family.
Suddenly, her front door buzzer echoed loudly through the quiet apartment.
Bzzzz! Bzzzz!
Isabella jumped, her body going instantly rigid.
She walked carefully to her front window, pulling back the lace curtain an inch to look down at the street below.
Parked directly in front of her building was a dark gray Mercedes sedan.
A tall man in a tailored suit was leaning against the driver’s door under the streetlamp, smoking a cigarette, looking up at her window.
It wasn't Dante. It wasn't Carlo.
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It was Sal Moretti’s chief enforcer—a man known in the underworld as "The Executioner."
Franco.
