Chapter 3 - The Arithmetic of Betrayal
The sentence hung in the air like smoke.
I stopped with my hand on the brass doorknob, my fingers curling around the cold metal until my knuckles turned white. I didn't turn around immediately. I couldn't. The numbers in my head began to tear apart the neat, angry narrative I had built over the last twenty minutes.
Four years and two months since Sophia vanished from my brownstone in Brooklyn.
Three years since Lily was born.
If Sophia had left in October, and Lily was three years old now—meaning she had been born around December of the following year—that meant Sophia hadn't been pregnant when she left. Or, if she had been, the timeline didn't align with my departure from her life.
I turned back slowly. Isabella was standing by the desk, her fingers resting on the edge of the open file where she had clearly flipped back to the financial transfer records while my back was turned.
“Where did you get those numbers?” I demanded.
“I didn't need to guess,” Isabella said, sliding a single sheet of paper across the polished wood toward me. It was a medical intake form—a pediatric vaccination record from a clinic in Queens, dated six months ago. The mother’s name was listed as Sophia Carter-Moretti. The child’s birth date placed her conception squarely in a period when I was supposed to have been completely estranged from her.
“She used your surname,” I whispered, staring at the ink.
“Not just mine—yours,” Isabella corrected grimly. “Look at the clinic address, Dominic. It’s three blocks away from the townhouse your father bought under a shell corporation in Astoria. The one Victoria managed through her personal foundation.”
The room seemed to tilt. My mother hadn't just paid Sophia off and shipped her to London. According to these records, Sophia had never left New York. Or she had returned almost immediately, living in an apartment paid for by the very woman who claimed to have banished her, raising a child whose existence was known to everyone in my inner circle except me.
“Enzo,” I said, my voice dangerously low. “Tell me you didn't know about the Astoria property.”
Enzo shifted his weight, his eyes dropping to the floor. It was all the confirmation I needed.
“Your mother said it was containment,” Enzo muttered, the defense sounding hollow even to his own ears. “Sophia wouldn't take the European settlement. She came back three months after the wire transfer, standing in the lobby of the Manhattan office with a passport in one hand and a refusal letter in the other. She didn't want the three hundred thousand. She wanted out of the contract. Victoria gave her the Astoria flat as a compromise—a secure place where she could live quietly under an alias, provided she never contacted you, never came near the businesses, and kept her mouth shut.”
“And the child?”
“Born in the flat,” Enzo said. “Dr. Morehouse delivered her. Same doctor who delivered you.”
The anger that had fueled me a moment before evaporated, replaced by a cold, suffocating dread. This wasn't a simple story of a greedy family buying off a gold-digger. This was a cage built with velvet bars, maintained by my mother with surgical precision, while I spent four years drinking scotch and convincing myself I was the victim of a broken heart.
Before I could speak, a heavy thud echoed from the hallway outside the study.
It wasn't a knock. It was the sound of the double doors to the East Wing gallery being pushed open with enough force to rattle the antique sconces on the wall.
Footsteps approached—fast, uneven, and frantic. Not the measured tread of security guards.
The study door flew wide open before Enzo could reach it.
Standing in the doorway was a woman with damp dark hair clinging to her temples, wearing a plain gray wool coat soaked through with melting snow. Her face was pale, her breathing ragged, and her dark eyes—eyes I would know across a crowded room through a century of midnights—locked directly onto mine.
May you like
“Dominic,” Sophia gasped, clutching the doorframe for balance. “Don't let them take her again.”
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