Chapter 6 - Sofia’s Child
Nobody knew.
Not Isabella.
Not Daniel.
Not even Carlo, as far as Lorenzo knew.
Sofia had told Lorenzo the night before the crash.
Eight weeks pregnant.
They had argued.
Not about the baby.
About leaving New York.
Sofia wanted to take their future child somewhere the Moretti name meant nothing.
Lorenzo refused.
Then she left the house.
The next morning, her car crashed.
I felt sick.
Mia slept upstairs while we talked.
Daniel paced.
“You never told us?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
Lorenzo’s voice broke.
“Because I blamed myself.”
Daniel stopped.
For the first time, the brothers looked less like mafia heirs and more like two damaged men.
Lorenzo continued.
“I thought if I had agreed to leave, she would’ve stayed home.”
Isabella cried silently.
I asked:
“Did Sofia know about the counterfeit drugs?”
“Yes.”
“Did she have evidence?”
“Some.”
“Could the baby be why Irene said what she did?”
Lorenzo frowned.
“I don’t know.”
Then federal investigators returned with Irene’s preliminary interview.
She denied drugging Mia intentionally.
Claimed the candy was medication she accidentally mixed with sweets.
Absurd.
But she revealed something else.
Sofia’s crash had been staged to recover a package.
A medical file.
Not the shipping ledger.
A paternity test.
Everyone looked at Lorenzo.
His expression changed.
“What paternity test?”
Nobody knew.
Daniel sat down slowly.
“Oh, God.”
I turned.
“What?”
He looked at me.
“Sofia talked to me before she died.”
Lorenzo’s face hardened.
“What did she say?”
“She asked if I knew anything about fertility clinics Dad invested in.”
Isabella frowned.
“Why?”
Daniel swallowed.
“Because Sofia discovered embryos had been stored under false names.”
The room went silent.
Lorenzo and Sofia had struggled to conceive.
They had undergone IVF two years earlier.
No pregnancy.
At least officially.
“What are you saying?” Lorenzo asked.
Daniel looked sick.
“I think someone lied about the embryos.”
Federal agents investigated the old fertility clinic.
Records had been altered.
The director was dead.
But archived billing remained.
One embryo transfer had occurred secretly under a coded patient.
Not Sofia.
Another woman.
A surrogate.
I felt my skin crawl.
“Who?”
The records listed:
Rachel Bennett.
My mother.
I stopped breathing.
“No.”
Daniel stared at me.
Isabella covered her mouth.
My mother.
The woman who raised me.
Dead when I was nineteen.
The timeline made no sense at first.
Then investigators found the year.
Thirty-one years earlier.
Not Sofia’s embryo.
Vittorio Moretti’s.
The fertility clinic scheme was older.
My mother had been a surrogate for a Moretti family member.
My birth certificate listed no father.
I had always assumed abandonment.
Now DNA tests were ordered.
The result arrived two days later.
I was not related to Lorenzo.
Thank God.
But I was related to the Moretti family.
Vittorio Moretti was my biological father.
I was Lorenzo and Daniel’s half-sister.
I vomited when I learned.
Daniel did too.
For a different reason.
He had slept with me.
Loved me.
Fathered Mia with me.
Except—
The lab technician called back.
There was a problem.
Daniel’s DNA did not match Vittorio.
Another secret.
Daniel Moretti was not Vittorio’s biological son.
Isabella stared at the report.
Daniel looked at his mother.
“Mom.”
She sat down.
Thirty-nine years of silence collapsed.
Daniel was the biological son of Thomas Hale, Isabella’s first love.
Vittorio knew.
He raised Daniel as his own for appearances.
That meant Daniel and I were not biologically related.
The relief was enormous.
The betrayal remained.
Lorenzo, however, was my half-brother.
That explained something.
Why his brain reacted to my voice?
Not directly.
But my voice resembled my mother Rachel’s.
And Rachel had worked at the Moretti estate when Lorenzo was a child.
Lorenzo remembered her singing.
Subconsciously.
Mia sang the same song I learned from Rachel.
The heart-rate response was not magic.
It was memory.
Deep.
Buried.
Human.
When Lorenzo woke and saw me, he called me Sofia because I resembled his wife slightly.
But the song carried an older memory.
Our shared father’s secret daughter had unknowingly returned to the family home.
Mia was not merely Daniel’s child.
She was a descendant of the Moretti bloodline through me.
Carlo had likely known.
That was why he saw her as leverage.
Inheritance.
Power.
Legacy.
Everything criminals ruin children with.
I wanted none of it.
“I don’t want money.”
The family attorney blinked.
“You may be entitled to—”
“No.”
“Clara.”
“No empire. No shares. No criminal inheritance.”
Lorenzo nodded.
“Good.”
I looked at him.
“Good?”
“I wish I had made that choice earlier.”
Daniel stared at him.
“Easy for you to say now.”
Lorenzo looked at his brother.
“Yes.”
No argument.
Progress.
Then Marco entered.
“We found Carlo.”
Everyone stood.
“Where?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“Arrested?”
Marco shook his head.
“He sent a message.”
“To whom?”
Marco looked at me.
“Clara.”
My stomach dropped.
“What does it say?”
He handed me a phone.
One line.
BRING MIA’S RABBIT TO THE OLD MORETTI CHURCH OR ELENA DIES.
I stared.
“Elena?”
We checked the medical wing.
Empty.
Her car remained outside.
Security footage showed Elena leaving through a service corridor with a man wearing a paramedic uniform.
Carlo had taken her.
The nurse who had protected Mia.
The woman who first saw Lorenzo respond.
And now he wanted the rabbit.
But the drive had already been removed.
Daniel said:
“He doesn’t know that.”
Lorenzo’s expression hardened.
“Then we use it.”
I looked at him.
“No guns around my daughter.”
“She won’t go.”
“The message says bring Mia’s rabbit.”
“Not Mia.”
Correct.
I held Mr. Buttons.
The toy that had slept beside my child for three years.
Now bait in a mafia trap.
May you like
I hated this family.
And somehow, impossibly, it was mine.
