Chapter 2
Isabella’s hands trembled as she reached for Lily, pulling her gently against her side.
“Mom, what’s wrong?” Lily asked, sensing the tension crackling in the air.
“Nothing, sweetheart,” Isabella said, though her voice betrayed her. “Give me a moment with Mr. Moretti.”
Lily looked between us, then nodded and stepped back toward a nearby bench, watching curiously.
I stood slowly, my legs unsteady beneath me. “Eight years, Isabella. You disappeared for eight years.”
“I had to,” she said. “You don’t understand what was happening then.”
“Then explain it to me now.”
She glanced at Lily, then lowered her voice. “The night I found you in that alley, you were dying. I got you to safety, and two days later, men came looking for me. They knew I’d helped someone. They knew things about your enemies I was never supposed to know.”
“What men?”
“I never learned their names,” she said. “But they made it clear that staying near you meant a target on my back. And by then, I already knew I was pregnant.”
The word hit me like a blow.
“Pregnant,” I repeated. “With Lily.”
Isabella nodded, tears gathering in her eyes. “I was terrified, Alessandro. I didn’t know if you’d survive your own war, let alone protect a child born from a night neither of us planned. So I ran. I changed my name. I raised her alone.”
I looked over at Lily, sitting patiently on the bench, swinging her legs, watching us with the same fearless curiosity she’d shown me an hour earlier.
“She’s mine,” I said quietly. It wasn’t a question anymore.
“Yes,” Isabella whispered. “She’s yours.”
My knees nearly buckled. Hours earlier, I had learned the child I’d loved for nine months belonged to another man. Now I was learning a daughter I never knew existed had been living, breathing, growing up somewhere in this city the entire time.
“Why now?” I asked. “Why tell me today, of all days?”
“I didn’t plan this,” Isabella said. “I work as a housekeeper for a family two blocks from here. Lily wandered off during our walk home. I never imagined she’d find you. I never imagined you’d be sitting in this park.”
“Fate has a strange sense of timing,” I murmured.
Isabella managed a small, sad smile. “That’s what I thought too.”
I looked at Lily again, and something in my chest, already broken that morning, cracked open in an entirely different way.
“I want to know her,” I said. “I want to be part of her life.”
Isabella’s expression tightened with fear. “Alessandro, you know what kind of life you lead. What kind of danger follows you. I ran to protect her from exactly that.”
“And I understand that fear,” I said. “But she’s my daughter. I can’t walk away now that I know.”
“There are things you don’t know,” Isabella said carefully. “About why I really disappeared. It wasn’t only about protecting her from your enemies.”
I frowned. “What else was there?”
Before she could answer, my phone buzzed insistently in my pocket.
I glanced down, expecting a business matter.
Instead, it was a text from my former fiancée, Camille, the woman who had destroyed me publicly just hours earlier.
We need to talk. It’s not what you think. Someone else set this up. Please, Alessandro.
I stared at the message, confusion tangling with the shock still coursing through me.
“Everything alright?” Isabella asked, noticing my expression shift.
“It’s Camille,” I said slowly. “She’s saying someone set her up. That the DNA results were manipulated.”
Isabella’s face went pale in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Camille Reyes,” Isabella said quietly. “That’s her name?”
“Yes. Why?”
Isabella’s eyes flicked toward Lily, then back to me, filled with something I hadn’t seen in her before.
Fear.
“Alessandro,” she said carefully, “I think I know exactly why you’re only finding out about Lily now, after eight years of me hiding her from you. And it has nothing to do with your enemies. It has everything to do with Camille.”
