Chapter 4 - The Bloodline UncoveredI looked up from my palette, my hazel eyes wide with innocent confusion. "I painted it from my dreams, Daddy. A lady with silver hair wore it around her neck when I was very little... before the fire at the big house."
Dominic took three fast steps forward, dropping flat onto his knees beside my wheelchair, his hands trembling as he gently framed my canvas, studying every brushstroke of the double-headed falcon.
"Marco!" Dominic roared toward the hallway, his baritone echoing through the estate like a rolling wave of thunder. "GET IN HERE NOW!"
Marco rushed into the conservatory within three seconds, his hand resting on his sidearm, his eyes scanning the room for danger. "Don Dominic! What's wrong?!"
"Look at this pendant, Marco," Dominic commanded flatly, his voice shaking with a raw, terrifying intensity. "Look at the crest!"
Marco stepped closer, his eyes landing on the double-headed falcon. His breath caught sharply in his throat. His jaw dropped in total, speech-bound horror.
"My God..." Marco whispered, taking a step backward. "That... that is the primary family crest of the Vance Syndicate in Boston!"
"The Vance family..." Dominic rasped out, his storm-gray eyes welling with heavy, unadulterated tears as he turned his head to look at my face.
Five years ago, Victor Vance—the ruthless, corrupt patriarch of the Vance family in Boston—had orchestrated a violent internal purge against his younger brother, Arthur Vance, burning Arthur's oceanfront estate to the ground to seize control of the family's multi-billion-dollar maritime shipping trust.
Arthur Vance and his wife had perished in the fire. Their two-year-old daughter—the sole legitimate heiress to the forty-percent voting proxy of Vance Maritime—had vanished without a trace, presumed dead in the flames.
I wasn't an abandoned, nameless orphan.
I was Lily Vance Moretti—the sole surviving heiress to New York and Boston's primary maritime empire, the child whose bloodline held the legal key to dismantling Victor Vance's corrupt syndicate forever.
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Dominic pulled my small body tightly into his broad chest, pressing his face against my hair as heavy, reverent tears spilled over his carved features.
"You aren't just my daughter, Lily," Dominic wept softly, kissing my forehead again and again. "You are the angel who is going to take our city back."
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