They Took My Birthright, I Took Their Power のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 1 - チャプター 10

Isabella moved faster than I expected.The next morning, I sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows of my top-floor office in the Vitale Building, soaking up the sun.It was the one place in this building that still belonged to me.The intercom on my desk buzzed. The receptionist was patching through a video call.The screen lit up, and my uncle Vincenzo's face appeared.Behind him were the olive groves of our old home in Sicily, green trees stretching all the way up the hillside.“Luca, have you eaten breakfast?”My uncle's voice was gentle, his Sicilian accent thick.“I have, Uncle.”I looked at his graying hair and felt a pang in my chest.After my father died, my uncle was the only blood relative I had left.He was my father's younger brother, and the current chairman of the Family Council.Back then, he had been the one to persuade the Council to appoint Isabella as the family's acting head.He had never married, and he had loved me like his own son since I was little.But his health h

July arrived before I knew it.The ballroom on the top floor of the Bay Hotel was brilliantly lit.Tonight was the annual memorial dinner honoring the old Don on the anniversary of his death. More than three hundred family members had turned out.By family tradition, the first candle at the annual memorial dinner had to be lit by a member of the Vitale family.It was more than a tribute to the old Don. It was a public declaration of who truly held power in the Vitale family.I stood beside a marble pillar at the edge of the ballroom.At the head of the long table, before the old Don's portrait, Isabella stood in an exquisitely tailored black velvet gown, her expression gentle and solemn.Riccardo, in a well-cut suit, stood beside her. They looked like a match made in heaven.My uncle had been invited too, but he was seated at a table farther from the stage.He gazed up at Isabella on the stage, his face full of pride.The ceremony began.The emcee's voice rang out across the ballroom.

The air in the corridor seemed to freeze.The only sound was the faint hum from the air conditioning vent.Riccardo drew a deep breath and tugged at his tie.His movements still held their poise, but his fingertips trembled slightly.“Luca, do you really have to go this far?”He looked at me in that pained, heartbroken tone, as if I were a hopeless sinner.“Isabella has stayed up countless nights for this family. Do you see none of the effort she's put in?”“You're using a dead rule to erase more than a decade of her work. That's not fair.”He was trying to pin me down with the moral high ground, as he always did.I looked at his face, so full of grievance, and couldn't help laughing.“Fair?”I turned to Isabella, who had been silent all this time.“Isabella, why don't you tell him what you were really doing on all those sleepless nights?”Isabella's throat moved. She said nothing.I pulled another stack of documents from my bag and flung them straight at her chest.The papers scattere

“Return it?”I looked at Isabella's tear-streaked face. I didn't step back, and I didn't flinch.“What will you return it with?”I took another document from Orsini and flipped straight to the last page.“To cover the hole left by the money you siphoned into overseas shell companies, you drained the family's working capital and took out a fifty-million-dollar loan from private lenders, pledging the estate's land and other family assets as collateral without authorization.”My voice echoed down the corridor.“Now Beacon Capital has put its investment on hold. Your cash flow is drying up.”“With interest and default fees piling up on a fifty-million-dollar loan, even if you sold every asset you have left, you might not clear it.”Isabella froze where she stood.She had thought her hidden books were well concealed. I had torn them open to the bone.Riccardo could no longer maintain his polished act.He shoved Isabella aside and jabbed a finger at my nose, his voice hoarse and cracking.“L

A week later, the midsummer sun filtered through the branches of the century-old olive tree in the yard, casting dappled light and shadow.The Vitale Building had been reclaimed by the trust, and a new team of professional managers was carrying out a sweeping overhaul.Isabella had been tried before the Family Council for betraying the family.The verdict was unanimous: every position and all authority stripped, her name struck from the family rolls, and she was banished from the East Coast for good.Without the Vitale family's protection and power, the gentle mask she was so proud of shattered completely.I heard she went around begging for help, but even those who once bowed and scraped before her now avoided her.Riccardo had tried to flee to Europe overnight, but the Family Council had already frozen the assets under his control.At the airport, his cards were declined at the check-in counter, and the debt collectors, with several debts now come due, caught up with him there.Now h