Chapter 3 - HIS FIANCÉE ACCUSED THE INJURED MAID OF LYING IN FRONT OF THE ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD—UNTIL THE MAFIA BOSS DISCOVERED WHAT THE SECURITY CAMERAS HAD RECORDED
By morning, the Moretti mansion no longer resembled the place where Sophie had spent eleven months polishing silver and avoiding attention.
Two police vehicles stood outside the iron gates. The music room was sealed with evidence tape. Guests who had stayed overnight were quietly driven away, while reporters gathered across the street and tried to photograph the windows. Every staff member received instructions to preserve messages, schedules, and records from the previous six months.
Sophie watched the news from a hospital bed, the volume turned low. Her left ear still rang. The doctors had found no immediately life-threatening injury, but they had documented the head trauma and hearing changes, prescribed follow-up with an ear specialist, and warned that recovery could not be predicted that morning. She was grateful they had not promised what they couldn't know.
Mrs. Carter sat beside her with two cups of tea.
“Do you think they'll believe me?” Sophie asked.
“The camera recorded what happened.”
“Vanessa will say I provoked her.”
“Then she'll be lying on camera.”
Sophie almost smiled.
Her phone buzzed. A message from her younger brother, Owen, who had seen Luca's mansion on television and wanted to know whether she was safe. She told him she was in the hospital, that she was receiving care, and that she would explain when she could. She left out the part about a missing woman hidden behind a locked door. Some truths required more than a text message.
At ten, Detective Torres arrived with a victim advocate. She explained Sophie's options, asked permission to record an interview, and reminded her that she could request a break whenever she needed one.
Sophie described the knocking, the woman's request for water, Vanessa's arrival, the impact, and the threat about her job. Her voice shook when she repeated the words Vanessa had used about her rent and her brother's tuition.
“Did you ever agree to keep a person locked inside that room?” Torres asked.
“No. I didn't even know who she was.”
“Did anyone tell you the corridor was dangerous?”
“Only that I wasn't allowed to enter.”
“Why did you open the door anyway?”
“Because somebody was asking for help.”
Torres lowered her pen. “That was a reasonable thing to do.”
Sophie stared at her. The sentence was so simple. She had spent the night turning the scene over in her head, wondering whether obedience would have spared her injury. But obedience would also have left Anna in the dark.
At the estate, Luca met with his attorney, Daniel, and Detective Torres's forensic team. They reviewed the service corridor footage, the key-card logs, and Anna's statement. The investigators also found evidence that food and medication had been delivered through a concealed pantry hatch. The deliveries were recorded under a fictitious housekeeping account.
“Someone inside the estate helped Vanessa,” Daniel said.
“Find out who,” Luca replied.
“Carefully,” Torres added. “Your security team can preserve records, but let us conduct the interviews. We need evidence that will stand up in court.”
Luca nodded. He was accustomed to solving problems by command, pressure, and force. This time those habits would only give Vanessa's lawyers a way to attack the case. He had to protect Anna without turning the investigation into another battlefield.
Anna was recovering in a secure hospital room. She had begun speaking to a trauma counselor, though sudden noises still made her flinch. She told Luca that Vanessa had visited the music room every few days and threatened to harm anyone Anna contacted. Anna had scratched dates into the underside of the piano bench to keep track of time.
“Why did she keep you alive?” Luca asked.
Anna looked away. “Because I knew where the original foundation ledger was.”
“Where?”
“I hid it before she took me.”
“Can you tell Torres?”
“I will. But there's something else.”
She reached for his sleeve. “Vanessa isn't working alone. The wedding would have given her access to the Moretti family trust. Victor Bellini wants the trust, but he wants your name on the transfer papers even more.”
“Why?”
“Because the accounts hold evidence of what happened to Dad.”
Their father had died three years earlier, officially from complications after a stroke. Luca had never doubted the medical report. Anna saw his expression and shook her head.
“I don't know whether his death was a crime,” she said. “I know he was investigating Victor before he got sick. I found his notes inside the foundation files.”
Luca felt the floor tilt beneath him. He had spent years building the family business after his father's death. Now every decision he had made seemed to cast a longer shadow.
“Don't chase that alone,” Anna whispered.
“I won't.”
For once, he meant it.
At noon, Vanessa's attorney issued a statement claiming that his client had been the victim of a malicious campaign by disgruntled employees. The statement did not name Sophie, but described an unnamed housemaid as unreliable and suggested that the injuries she reported had occurred during a workplace accident.
The statement spread rapidly. A local television station replayed a photograph of Vanessa smiling at a charity gala. Commentators speculated about the wedding. Some wondered whether Anna's disappearance had been staged. Others repeated the suggestion that Sophie wanted money.
Sophie saw the headlines and felt her stomach drop.
“She's doing it again,” she whispered.
Mrs. Carter switched off the television. “A press release is not evidence.”
“But people will believe it.”
“Some will. That doesn't change what happened.”
An hour later, Sophie received a call from an unknown number. She let it ring. A voicemail appeared almost immediately.
A man's voice said, “Miss Bennett, you're a smart girl. Take a settlement, forget what you heard, and the problem disappears.”
There was no name, only a callback number.
Sophie played it for Torres, who instructed her not to respond and preserved the message. The detective explained that threatening a witness could have serious consequences and promised to investigate the call's source.
That evening, Luca asked Sophie whether she would meet him at the estate with her advocate and Mrs. Carter present. She agreed only after Torres confirmed the police had finished documenting the corridor. The house was familiar and frightening at once. The same chandeliers glowed above the same marble floor, but the silence felt different.
Luca waited in the drawing room rather than summoning her to his office.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Sophie sat across from him. Her left ear was covered by a small protective dressing. She turned her right side toward him, and he adjusted his chair without comment.
“I saw the statement,” she said.
“So did I. My lawyers are preparing a response, but I won't ask you to become a public spectacle.”
“She called me a liar.”
“She did. And we have evidence contradicting her.”
“Then why does it still feel like she can take everything away?”
Luca considered the question. “Because she used things you needed to frighten you. Your wages. Your apartment. Your brother. She made it sound as though safety was something she could grant or remove.”
Sophie stared at him. “You understand that?”
“Not the way you lived it,” he said. “But I understand what power can do when someone uses it badly.”
For a moment neither spoke.
Then Luca placed a folder on the coffee table. “This is a written guarantee of your wages while you recover, independent of whether you return to work. My attorney can explain it to yours or to an adviser you choose. No conditions about your testimony.”
Sophie did not touch the folder.
“I don't want to be bought,” she said.
“Then don't sign anything today. It's your decision.”
That answer surprised her more than the offer.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because you were hurt in my house while trying to help my sister. And because doing the right thing should not cost you your home.”
She looked down at her hands. “Anna asked for water. That's all. She sounded so thirsty.”
Luca's face tightened. “She told me you answered her. She remembers your voice.”
“Is she getting better?”
“Slowly.”
“Could I see her?”
“If she wants that, yes.”
Sophie nodded, then surprised herself by saying, “I want to see her because she deserves to know someone heard her. Not because she's your sister.”
A faint smile crossed Luca's face. “I think she'd like that.”
The meeting ended without promises of romance, without declarations, without Luca asking Sophie to trust him simply because he was powerful. Yet as she walked toward the front door, she felt something she had not felt since the service door struck her head: the possibility of choosing what happened next.
Daniel intercepted Luca before he could follow her out.
“Sir, the recovered camera archive includes a clip from six months ago.”
Luca took the tablet. The footage showed the west entrance on the night Anna vanished. A black SUV arrived at 2:14 a.m. Two men unloaded a covered wheelchair. Vanessa stepped out and opened the service door.
Then another figure emerged from the passenger seat.
Luca leaned closer.
The man wore a gray overcoat and walked with a slight limp. He turned toward the camera for less than a second, but the face was unmistakable.
“That's impossible,” Luca whispered.
Daniel's expression was grim. “I checked the original file. It hasn't been altered.”
Luca watched the figure again. He remembered standing beside a hospital bed three years earlier, listening to a doctor tell him there was nothing more to be done. He remembered the funeral, the condolences, the sealed coffin.
On the screen, the man glanced toward Vanessa and gave a small, impatient gesture.
It was Luca's father.
And he was very much alive.
Sophie had never expected the mansion to become a place where people asked her permission. When she returned for the meeting, the front gate guard greeted her by name and directed her to a parking space near the entrance so she would not have to walk far. Mrs. Carter had arranged for a quiet room away from the staff corridors. None of it erased the injury, but the details mattered. They showed that someone had considered what the evening might feel like for her.
Before Luca arrived, Sophie wandered to the drawing-room window and looked at the garden. She remembered the first day she came to interview for the job. The grounds had seemed impossibly grand, all clipped hedges and white stone fountains. She had worn a borrowed blazer and shoes that pinched her heels. Vanessa had passed her in the foyer without acknowledging her. Luca had been away on business. Mrs. Carter had offered tea and asked about her experience, not her family connections. Sophie had gone home believing she had found a place where hard work would be enough.
She wondered now whether any wealthy household could offer that kind of safety, or whether she had simply mistaken quiet corridors for kindness. The question frightened her because she still liked parts of the estate: the early morning smell of coffee, the warm kitchen when the bakers arrived, the little greenhouse where Mrs. Carter grew herbs. She did not want one woman's cruelty to steal every good memory, but she also refused to pretend those memories outweighed what had happened.
When Luca entered, she noticed the exhaustion around his eyes. He looked less like the untouchable man from the newspapers and more like a brother who had spent the night discovering how much he had failed to see. She did not pity him. Pity would have made the distance between them too easy to ignore. Instead she asked a practical question.
“Does Anna have someone with her?”
“A nurse and a counselor. Daniel is outside the ward, but only because she asked for security.”
“Good.”
Luca sat down without taking the chair nearest the door. Sophie noticed that too. He had left her a clear path out. It was a small courtesy, and she suspected he had learned it from someone who understood trauma better than he did.
May you like
Later, after their conversation, Sophie asked Mrs. Carter to drive her past the neighborhood where she lived rather than directly home. She wanted to see the ordinary storefronts, the laundromat, the diner with the crooked neon sign. The city continued despite the scandal. People carried groceries, argued over parking spaces, and hurried toward buses. Sophie watched them and realized that she wanted her own life back, not merely protection inside Luca's.
That determination stayed with her when the next morning's headlines arrived. Whatever secret the Moretti family was hiding, she would testify about what she had seen, insist on proper medical care, and make her own decisions. The powerful men and women around her could fight over their empires. Sophie Bennett intended to keep her name and her voice.
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