PART 3: THE MAFIA BOSS DISCOVERED THE GIRL HE SAVED MIGHT NOT BE HIS DAUGHTER… BUT THE BIGGEST BETRAYAL WAS STILL WAITING. 🩸💔

For the first time in seventeen years, I didn’t know whom to trust.

Not my enemies.

Not my men.

And certainly not the woman I had once been willing to die for.

I stared at Sofia.

“Tell me the truth. Right now.”

She shook her head, tears slipping down her cheeks. “Not here, Luca. Please. There are things you don’t understand.”

I stepped closer.

“Then help me understand.”

Before she could answer, Marco’s phone rang.

It was Dr. Bennett, the surgeon overseeing Elena’s operation.

Marco answered, listened for several seconds, then looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face.

“Boss, you need to hear this.”

He put the call on speaker.

“We ran the preliminary tests,” the doctor said. “There’s an unusual finding in Elena’s medical history. Her blood type is AB-negative, but we also discovered a genetic marker that warrants further investigation.”

I glanced at Sofia.

She was trembling.

The doctor continued. “We can’t establish paternity from these results. We’ll need proper genetic testing and the family’s medical history.”

“Understood,” I replied. “Do whatever she needs.”

Then the doctor added something that made Sofia suddenly grip my arm.

“There’s another issue. Someone accessed Elena’s medical records before she arrived here. The access wasn’t authorized.”

“Who?”

“We’re investigating. But the person left a note in her electronic file.”

Marco leaned toward the phone.

“What note?”

The doctor paused.

“Do not let Luca Mancini near this girl.”

Silence swallowed the corridor.

I slowly turned toward Sofia.

She looked as though the floor had disappeared beneath her feet.

“Who knew I would be here?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” she whispered.

I grabbed my coat from Marco.

“Then we’re going to find out.”

But Sofia caught my hand.

“Luca, if you leave this hospital, you may never see Elena again.”

I looked down at her fingers wrapped around mine.

“Explain.”

She drew a shaky breath.

“Seventeen years ago, I discovered that someone inside your organization had been selling information about you. I found proof that a man you trusted was arranging meetings between your enemies and your own men.”

“Who?”

She closed her eyes.

“Enzo Caruso.”

For a moment, I couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of my own heart.

Enzo was more than my lieutenant. He was the man who had stood beside me through every betrayal, every war, every night when the world seemed determined to bury us.

An hour earlier, I had nearly lost him in an ambush.

Now Sofia was telling me he had betrayed me.

“You’re lying.”

“I wish I were.”

“Enzo would never sell me out.”

“Then ask him what happened the night I disappeared.”

I stared at her.

“What does that have to do with Elena?”

Sofia opened her mouth, but a nurse hurried toward us.

“Mr. Mancini? Your friend is awake.”

Enzo.

I left Sofia standing in the corridor and followed the nurse into the intensive care unit.

Enzo lay beneath the harsh white lights, his face drained of color, machines monitoring his condition. His eyes opened when he saw me.

“Luca,” he rasped.

I pulled a chair beside his bed.

“I need you to answer one question.”

His gaze shifted toward the doorway.

Then he saw Sofia standing behind me.

His entire expression changed.

Not surprise.

Not confusion.

Fear.

“Oh, God,” he whispered. “You found her.”

I leaned forward.

“Found whom?”

Enzo struggled to speak.

“The girl.”

My hands тιԍнтened around the chair.

“Is Elena my daughter?”

He shut his eyes.

A single tear slipped toward his temple.

“I tried to stop it,” he whispered. “I swear to you, Luca. I tried.”

“Stop what?”

Before he could answer, the heart monitor began beeping faster. A nurse rushed to his side, ordering us to step back.

Enzo caught my wrist with the little strength he had left.

“Don’t trust the DNA test,” he breathed.

Then he looked directly at Sofia.

“Tell him what you did with the second baby.”

The room went still.

I turned toward her so slowly that even Marco seemed to hold his breath.

“Second baby?”

Sofia’s face crumpled.

“I wanted to tell you.”

“Tell me what?”

She looked at Enzo, then back at me.

“When Elena was born, I was told she had a twin brother.”

My mind struggled to catch up.

“A twin?”

Sofia nodded.

“They told me he died before I could hold him. I never saw his body. I never received a death certificate. But I was young, frightened, and alone. I believed them.”

“Who told you?”

She looked toward Enzo.

He had begun to lose consciousness again.

Then Sofia whispered a name I hadn’t heard in seventeen years.

“Victor Mancini.”

My father.

The man who had died before I inherited the family empire.

The man who had taught me that weakness was the one unforgivable sin.

Impossible.

My father had been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ for years before Elena was born.

Unless someone had used his name.

Unless the lie had started long before I ever knew there was a lie.

I backed away from Sofia.

“Why would my father have anything to do with your children?”

She shook her head desperately.

“I don’t know. But three days after the birth, a man came to my apartment. He said that if I ever told you about Elena, both children would be in danger.”

“Both?”

She nodded.

“I thought her brother was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.”

A sharp knock interrupted us.

Marco appeared in the doorway, holding a tablet.

“Luca, we’ve identified the person who accessed Elena’s records.”

“Who?”

“Someone using credentials from inside our organization.”

He turned the screen toward me.

The access had occurred just forty minutes before the ambush that nearly killed Enzo.

And the account belonged to a man who had supposedly been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ for twelve years.

My younger brother, Matteo Mancini.

I stared at the screen.

Matteo had vanished after a car explosion outside Milwaukee. We had recovered his watch and enough evidence to believe he had died in the fire.

I had attended his funeral.

I had watched his coffin lowered into the ground.

Yet someone had just used his idenтιтy to access my daughter’s medical records.

“Find him,” I ordered.

Marco hesitated.

“There’s more.”

He swiped to another pH๏τograph.

It showed a security-camera image from the hospital parking garage, captured twenty minutes before Elena’s crash.

A man in a dark coat stood beside a black SUV.

Even through the grainy footage, I recognized his face.

Enzo’s younger brother.

A man who had supposedly left Chicago years ago and never returned.

Marco lowered his voice.

“He wasn’t alone. Someone was sitting in the pᴀssenger seat.”

He enlarged the image.

My stomach turned cold.

The pᴀssenger was a young man, perhaps seventeen, with dark hair and a familiar scar beneath his left eye.

The same crescent-shaped scar Elena had.

Except this time, it was beneath the right eye.

The boy looked directly into the security camera.

And beneath the image was a message sent anonymously to my phone.

YOU SAVED THE WRONG CHILD, LUCA.

Another message arrived immediately afterward.

YOUR DAUGHTER IS STILL OUT THERE.

I looked toward Sofia.

She had read the message over my shoulder.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “That isn’t possible.”

“What isn’t possible?”

She looked at the pH๏τograph again.

Then she said the words that shattered everything I thought I knew.

“That boy isn’t Elena’s brother.”

Her voice broke.

“He’s the child I gave birth to seventeen years ago… and he’s the son of the man who ordered you killed tonight.”

Before I could demand another word, the lights in the intensive care unit went out.

Alarms erupted throughout the corridor.

Marco drew his weapon as emergency lights flickered red across the walls.

A nurse screamed from Elena’s room.

I ran.

Her bed was empty.

The window stood open despite the freezing wind, and the heart monitor had been ripped from its stand.

On the pillow lay a folded piece of paper.

My name was written across the front.

I opened it with shaking hands.

Inside was a single sentence.

“If you want your daughter back, bring me the original Mancini family ledger—and come alone.”

At the bottom, someone had signed a name.

A name I had buried with my father.

VICTOR MANCINI.

My ᴅᴇᴀᴅ father.

And as I stared at the signature, Marco’s radio crackled to life.

A man’s voice came through, calm and unmistakably familiar.

“Hello, Luca.”

I stopped breathing.

It was the voice of the man whose funeral I had attended twelve years earlier.

My brother Matteo.

“There’s one thing you should know before you come looking for Elena,” he said.

A pause.

Then he delivered the final blow.

“The girl you donated blood to tonight isn’t the only child Sofia gave birth to. And if you open that ledger, you’ll discover that neither of those children belongs to you.”

The radio went silent.

I looked at Sofia.

She was crying so hard she could barely stand.

Then she whispered something that made the entire world tilt beneath my feet.

“Luca… I lied about one thing.”

I stepped toward her.

“What?”

She looked me straight in the eyes.

“Your father didn’t die twelve years ago. I saw him alive last week.”

And suddenly, I understood.

The ambush.

The stolen medical records.

The missing girl.

They weren’t separate events.

They were pieces of a plan that had been seventeen years in the making.

But there was one question I couldn’t answer.

If my father was alive…

WHO HAD WE ACTUALLY BURIED IN HIS GRAVE?

PART 4: Luca opens his father’s grave—and discovers a secret that will turn the entire Mancini empire against him. 🩸💔