Chapter 8 - The Paper Trail
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Inside Elena’s private study in the penthouse, the remnants of the tragedy still lingered.
The morning after the attack, Matteo sat at his dining room table, surrounded by dozens of printed financial documents. His head pounded from the scotch, but his chest felt hollow with a cold, growing realization.
Spread across the wood were offshore bank account statements, tax schedules, wire confirmations, and handwritten notes linking his father, Don Antonio Moretti, to millions in laundered funds.
These were the papers he had found on Elena’s desk when he walked in yesterday evening. Seeing them, he had assumed she was working with the FBI to bring down his family. In a blind rage, he had confronted her, refused to listen to her explanations, and struck her down.
Now, sitting in the quiet morning light, he looked closer at the pages.
"She’s meticulous," Matteo whispered to himself, his voice trembling slightly.
Elena was obsessed with order. She locked her desk drawers every single time she left the room. She never left papers lying out in the open. Yet these highly sensitive, illegal documents had been sitting right in the center of her desk in an unsealed folder, almost begging to be noticed.
Matteo grabbed his phone and dialed Vivian Rinaldi.
"Matteo?" Vivian answered, her tone smooth and composed. "Have you talked to the lawyers? How is the situation being handled?"
"Vivian," Matteo said slowly, his grip tightening on the phone. "How did you know Elena had those files?"
There was a half-second pause on the line. Just half a second. But to a man raised in the mafia, that brief beat of silence was an ocean.
"I... I told you," Vivian said quickly. "I suspected she was digging into the shell companies last week."
"I never asked you to check her study," Matteo said, his voice dropping an octave. "So how did you know?"
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"Matteo, don't do this right now," Vivian deflected smoothly. "Focus on keeping the police away from the penthouse."
Matteo hung up without another word. The seed of doubt had been planted, and for the first time, he realized he might have been played for a fool.
