All Chapters of THE BILLIONAIRE'S REJECTED WIFE WAS THE MAFIA HEIRESS: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

Ethan didn't sleep that night. He sat in the beige apartment with Sorensen's scanned files open on his laptop, the old black and white wedding photograph blown up as large as the resolution would allow, staring at a little girl in a pale, formal dress standing beside a bride he didn't recognize, both of them smiling at a camera that had apparently caught them off guard. Isabella Romano. Six or seven years old in that photo, twenty six years distant from the woman he'd married at a courthouse three years ago believing her name was Isabella Hart. He called Daniel at four in the morning. Daniel answered on the second ring, which told Ethan his friend hadn't been sleeping either. "You found something," Daniel said, not a question. "I found everything and nothing at the same time." Ethan rubbed both hands over his face. "Daniel, I need you to cancel my calendar. All of it. The board meeting Thursday, the Kane litigation prep, all of it." There was a pause on the line, the sound of Dan

The shattered glass turned out to belong to a champagne flute, dropped suddenly from the hand of a Cross family cousin who had gone dead pale, staring at his phone, at a headline that had just landed across every major financial feed in the country.BLACKWOOD INDUSTRIES VP RESIGNS AMID FRAUD ALLEGATIONS. INTERNAL DOCUMENTS SUGGEST FALSIFIED RECORDS USED TO SABOTAGE CEO'S MARRIAGE, TRIGGER DIVORCE FROM ROMANO HEIR.Isabella read the headline over the cousin's shoulder before anyone thought to stop her, and felt the entire room's attention shift toward her like weather changing direction.Someone had leaked it. The word Romano sat right there in a public headline, in print, attached to her name, attached to a story that until this exact moment had belonged only to a handful of people who'd sworn discretion, people she had trusted, in one form or another, with the single most dangerous fact of her entire life.The room's low, warm hum of conversation died in stages, tab

The blast had come from the estate's old carriage house, not the main residence, a fact that took nearly eleven agonizing minutes to reach anyone outside the property, and felt, to Isabella, like eleven minutes stretched across an entire year of her life, the kind of time that refuses to move at any recognizable pace once genuine fear finally takes hold of it. She'd been in the kitchen when the sound hit, a low, heavy concussion that rattled the windows and sent a startled flock of birds up off the lawn all at once. She was on her feet and moving before she'd consciously decided to move, Nico's voice already shouting something down the hall, security pouring past her toward the side of the house where a column of black smoke had begun rising against the pale morning sky, thick and dark in a way that told her, even before anyone said a word, that whatever had burned had burned fast. "Stay inside," Nico barked, already halfway out the door, radio in one hand, weapon in the other. "Be

Nico found Isabella at the estate's small private chapel just after dawn, the one place in the house she'd always gone as a child when she needed to think without an audience, sitting alone in the front pew with her coat still on, like she hadn't been able to decide whether she was staying or leaving."You look like you didn't sleep either," he said, sitting down beside her."I keep thinking about that name. Marguerite." Isabella didn't look at him. "I keep thinking about the fact that I've spent my entire life believing I understood this family, and apparently there's a room I've never been allowed to see inside."Nico was quiet for a moment, weighing something, and Isabella, who had known him her entire life, recognized the particular stillness of a man deciding how much truth a person could actually handle in one morning."Ethan came here last night," he said finally.Isabella's head turned sharply. "What.""Showed up at the g

Ethan reached the estate forty minutes after seeing the news, having driven the entire way with one hand gripping the wheel and the other holding the ultrasound photo against his chest like it might somehow keep everyone in that image safe just by being close to his heart, an irrational, desperate gesture he made no attempt to talk himself out of.The gate was chaos by the time he arrived, two fire trucks pulled up the long drive, a cluster of unmarked black cars, men in dark suits directing traffic with the crisp efficiency of people who had clearly done this before. Nico spotted him from thirty yards away and was at his window before Ethan had even fully stopped the car, his expression unreadable in a way that told Ethan nothing about whether he'd made a terrible mistake driving here at all."You shouldn't be here," Nico said, though something in his voice had shifted since their conversation three nights ago, less hostile now, worn down by the morning's events into someth