He Left Me For Dead, Now Our Son Calls Another Man Daddy.

Chapter 3 The Delayed Torture

For three years, I barely used half the rooms in my own house.

Dust settled on the furniture in the Moretti mansion. Staff crossed the north wing as quickly as they could, and nobody said Aria's name around me.

Aria was dead. I had signed the papers and buried an empty casket.

Elena's voice carried across the foyer.

“Dante, for heaven's sake, it's been three years. We have to do something about her studio. It’s morbid. Let me change the curtains, bring some life back into this place.”

I crossed the foyer before she finished and closed my hand around her arm. She stopped.

“Don't touch that room. Don't speak her name. Stay out of the north wing.”

The north wing had stayed locked since the funeral. Her clothes still hung in the closet, and her books remained on the nightstand. I kept the only keys.

I let Elena go and walked away. Her perfume followed me down the hall, too sweet and too strong.

In Aria's rooms, I sometimes caught lemon verbena and old paper, though I knew there could be nothing left after three years.

I ended up outside Aria's restoration workshop in the basement. When I unlocked it, stale air and the smell of dried linseed oil came through the door. Nobody had entered since her last day there.

Dust coated the workbench and her old leather toolbox, the one she had owned before she became my wife. I lifted it onto the table and opened it.

Her tools were still arranged by size. When I ran a hand over the velvet lining, one corner shifted under my finger. I pulled it up and found a false bottom.

There was a folded sheet of paper underneath.

It was an appointment confirmation from a private clinic in Monaco.

The name at the top was *Aria Moretti*.

The appointment was scheduled for the day *after* the explosion.

I read the last line, then read it again.

*Procedure: Obstetric Ultrasound. Gestational Age: 12 weeks.*

Twelve weeks.

The paper shook in my hand. Aria had been pregnant on the ship. When I left her in the fire, she had been carrying my child.

My son. The Moretti heir.

I braced both hands on the workbench. For three years, I had mourned Aria without knowing she had carried our child into that fire.

My phone buzzed. Michael, my right-hand man, was calling.

“Boss, we found something on the piece from the Zurich black-market auction.”

“I don't have time for this.”

“You need to hear it, sir. There's a hidden restorer's mark, an ‘A.M.’ in floral script. It is her old signature, the one she stopped using after you married.”

I looked down at the clinic paper again.

Michael continued, “The restoration payment came through a newly activated anonymous trust. Aria's maternal grandmother set it up and funded it.”

The clinic form crackled in my fist.

The trust and the old mark had appeared after the explosion. Aria had survived.

*She had never died.*

She had escaped with my son and let me bury her.

I crushed the paper in my fist. When I forced my hand open, the clinic letter was a wad of creases.

She had watched me mourn while she raised the Moretti heir under another name.

“Where did the payment come from?”

“Florence, sir. A small private studio.”

Alive. Both of them.

In my head, my son was already *mine*.

I left the workshop and called Michael back before I reached the stairs.

“Get the jet. We're going to Florence. Now.”

He paused. “Sir, what are your orders?”

I stared at the ultrasound image printed on the clinic form.

“Seal every exit. I want the city under martial law by the time I land.”