Chapter 4 - The Truth UnveiledThe leather folder slipped from Julianne's manicured fingers, scattering papers across the hardwood floor.
"Elina... wait!" Julianne gasped out, stepping around the desk, but I backed away toward the open doorway, my hands shaking uncontrollably, tears stinging behind my eyes.
"I had a twin sister...?" I choked out, my voice cracking into sharp, terrified pieces. "Isabella was my twin sister?!"
"Elina, listen to me—"
"What is going on here?"
Dante’s deep, booming baritone filled the dark library as he stepped through the double oak doors. He wore a dark shirt with his sleeves turned back, his sharp gray eyes instantly locking onto my pale, tear-streaked face, then dropping to the scattered adoption files on the floor.
Dante’s expression transformed into pure, dark, protective focus.
He walked across the room in three heavy strides, stepping between Julianne and me, looking down into my eyes with an expression of intense, agonizing honesty.
"You knew," I whispered, my hazel eyes looking straight into his. "You knew from the night you walked into Ristorante Orelio, didn't you, Dante? You knew I was Isabella's twin."
Dante didn't lie to me. He took a slow, deep breath, reaching out his broad hands to gently, firmly frame my face, his thumbs stroking my cheekbones to steady my trembling.
"I didn't know the night I met you, Elina," Dante confessed softly, his voice thick with raw emotion. "I saw a woman who looked like my dead wife, carrying my son’s peace in her hands. But two days after I brought you here, my private investigators uncovered the sealed adoption records from Saint Jude's."
"Why didn't you tell me?!" I wept softly, resting my trembling hands against his broad chest. "Why did you keep it a secret?!"
"Because nineteen years ago," Dante revealed, his baritone dropping into a low, lethal register, "Isabella’s adoptive father, Richard Sterling, paid the director of Saint Jude's fifty thousand dollars to separate the twins, taking Isabella because she was born first, and leaving you behind in state care."
My jaw dropped open in total, horror-stricken shock.
"And eight months ago," Dante continued, his gray eyes flashing with a terrifying, apocalyptic fury, "when Isabella found out the truth about her adoption... she threatened to expose Sterling’s illegal offshore holding companies. Three days later... her yacht exploded off the coast of Maine."
I stopped breathing. The air in the library went ice-cold.
Isabella hadn't died in an accident.
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She had been murdered by her own adoptive father to protect his corporate empire.
And now, the man who had ordered her death had just realized that her twin sister was alive inside the Vance estate.
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