Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Moretti Daughter They Denied: Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 10

The bone-china espresso cup slipped from my hand and shattered outside my father's study.The conversation inside stopped.I stood beneath the hallway lights, shaking so hard from fever that my teeth clicked. White porcelain lay around my shoes, the painted Moretti crest split down the middle.My mother opened the door and looked at the broken cup before looking at me.“Serena, what is wrong with you? It's the middle of the night.”My skin burned with a fever of nearly 103 degrees. I had one hand against the wall just to remain standing.She noticed none of it.“I came down for water,” I said. “It slipped.”Behind her, my father remained at his desk.Matteo Moretti was the Don who controlled Chicago's most powerful Mafia family. Later that week,he would induct Bianca into the Moretti council as his chosen successor.But I had just heard the truth.Bianca was adopted.I was their biological daughter.For eighteen years, they had lied about my birth so I would surrender everything to her

It was after midnight when I arrived at Black Pine.The isolated house belonged to the Moretti Family. My father used it to hide witnesses and discipline people who had disobeyed him.Rocco, one of his longtime enforcers, ran the property with his wife, Dana.The moment I entered, Rocco took my phone and ID. Dana emptied my bag onto the floor.Three sweaters, four paperbacks, a bottle of fever medicine, and my prepaid cremation receipt fell at her feet.She picked up the medicine.“The Don warned us that you like putting on a show when you want sympathy.”“I have a fever. I need that.”“You need to confess.”She locked the medicine in a kitchen cabinet and dropped several sheets of paper onto the table.The title had already been printed across the top:Statement Admitting My Attempt to Steal the Moretti SuccessionRocco pushed a pen toward me.“Sign it.”“I didn't try to steal anything.”“Then you stay here until you're ready to tell the truth.”The first night, my fever climbed until

My father didn't speak for a long time.The celebration went on outside his study. Bianca had just received the obsidian brooch, and champagne glasses chimed beyond the door. My mother came in smiling and asked why he wasn't accepting congratulations from the allies.He lowered the phone with care, as if one careless movement might make the sheriff's words real. “Serena is dead.”My mother's smile locked in place. “Who told you that?”“The county sheriff.”“That girl is lying again. She doesn't even have proper identification. How could the police possibly know—”“The DNA confirmed it.”The room went silent.My mother gripped the edge of the desk until her knuckles whitened. “That's impossible. She called me two hours ago.”My father looked at her as though he'd never seen her before. “She called you?”“She said she was bleeding and needed a hospital. I thought she was trying to make us bring her back.”He snatched up his keys. Within minutes, he was heading north with Dr. Julian Hayes

After the recording stopped for the third time, the only sound in the storage room was my mother's muffled crying.My father stayed on the bench and replayed the line about bringing him my chart. Again and again, he listened to me say I had been ready to ask him to save me, as if repetition might send him back to the rear seat of the Cadillac.But he had already been in that car with me.He hadn't opened the hospital invoice. He had looked at his frightened, sick daughter and seen a rival.By the time they returned to Chicago, the Moretti council had gathered at the estate. My death had occurred in a property controlled by the Family, under the watch of two sworn soldiers. The safe house's calls led straight to Dominic and my father. No one could dismiss it as private grief.The oldest Family attorney placed my grandfather's succession documents on the dining table. He had served three generations of Morettis, and for the first time in my life, he said my name as though it carried weig

The Moretti case took two years to reach trial.My father's lawyers first planned to lay everything on Rocco and Dominic. They drafted a defense claiming I had a history of manipulating the household and that my father merely wanted to remove me from a dispute over succession until I calmed down. They described Black Pine as a retreat. They called the locked cellar a security precaution.My father read the brief once and tore it down the middle.“The order was mine,” he told them. “Every time she asked for a doctor, somebody reported it up the chain. I chose not to believe her.”One lawyer warned that the admission could add years to his sentence.“Then put the years where they belong.”He pleaded guilty to unlawful imprisonment and obstruction of medical care. Existing racketeering and extortion counts tied to Moretti Freight were folded into the same case, and the court sentenced him to eight years in federal prison.At the plea hearing, prosecutors played the safe-house calls in chr