Chapter 1

“Miss Vittori, please don’t be angry. I know I was wrong. I shouldn’t have shown up here.”

Lea was still sitting on the floor in front of me, looking every bit like a girl who had spent her entire life being mistreated.

Several guests rushed forward to help her up while glaring at me with open disgust.

“So you’re Valentina? The adopted daughter the Vittoris raised?”

“How dare you push Lea? You’re the adopted one. What gives you the right to bully the family’s real daughter?”

“An adopted girl will always be an adopted girl. Jealous the second the real daughter comes home.”

The whispers spread through the ballroom almost instantly, and every pair of eyes on me was filled with contempt.

“Please don’t say that about her.” Lea choked back a sob and stumbled toward me, clutching my wrist tightly with both hands. “It’s okay, Valentina. You can treat me however you want. I’m used to this kind of thing anyway.”

She paused as tears rolled heavily down her cheeks.

“Can you at least let me meet Mother once? I grew up outside the family. I don’t even know what my own mother looks like.”

The room exploded the second those words left her mouth.

“She’s too pitiful. The real Vittori daughter was abandoned outside while someone else took her place.”

“Valentina, you’ve stolen her life for years and now you won’t even let her see her mother? What kind of person are you?”

I frowned as the accusations flew around me.

When exactly had I stopped her from meeting her mother?

She simply hadn’t realized that I was standing right in front of her.

For years, the true power behind the Vittori family had never been my husband, Lorenzo. Publicly, he handled the business side of the family. Behind the scenes, everything passed through me instead. Every negotiation, every alliance, and every name placed on a removal list went through my hands first.

For security reasons, I almost never appeared in public. No one at family banquets had ever truly met me, and even the heads of the major families didn’t know who actually controlled the Vittori empire from the shadows.

Thanks to years of careful maintenance, I still looked like a woman in her early thirties. Even so, I never imagined my own daughter would mistake me for Valentina, the adopted girl.

“Please…” Lea suddenly dropped to her knees in front of me, crying so hard her shoulders shook. “Just let me see Mother once. The second I meet her, I’ll leave. I swear I’ll never appear in front of you again. Please, Valentina. I only want to see my mother.”

I looked down at her, my emotions twisting into something heavy and complicated.

Last month, trouble broke out in the family’s West Coast territory, and I had gone there personally to deal with it. I only returned before dawn this morning. On the flight home, I had spent hours wondering what I should say when I finally met the daughter I had lost for so many years.

I never expected our first meeting to become this, with me being framed by my own child.

“You should stand up first.” I bent down instinctively to help her. “Lea, actually, I’m not…”

Before I could finish, a furious voice exploded from behind us.

“What the hell is going on here?”