Chapter 4
“I can explain,” Camille said quickly, backing further into her own penthouse.
“Then explain,” I said, my voice ice cold.
Camille glanced nervously between Isabella and me, clearly calculating how much she could still control.
“I found out about Lily a few months after we started dating,” she admitted. “A private investigator I hired for something else stumbled onto her. I panicked.”
“So you paid Isabella to disappear from my life permanently,” I said.
“I paid her to protect her own daughter,” Camille corrected. “I told her the truth—that you were dangerous, that any child connected to you would never be safe. I did her a favor.”
Isabella’s eyes flashed with anger. “You manipulated me. You used my fear for my daughter’s safety to keep her father a secret.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Camille snapped, then seemed to realize how that sounded.
I stepped closer, my presence filling the room the way it did in boardrooms and back alleys alike. “And the baby you told our families was mine?”
Camille’s bravado finally cracked completely. “I was pregnant when we started dating. By someone else, someone I’d already ended things with. I panicked when the timeline didn’t work, and by then, our engagement was already public. I thought if I could just get through the wedding, no one would ever question it.”
“You lied to an entire family,” I said. “You lied to me for eight months.”
“I loved the life you gave me,” Camille said, tears spilling now. “I loved everything that came with being your fiancée. I just didn’t think through the parts that would eventually catch up with me.”
“And when the DNA test proved the baby wasn’t mine,” I said slowly, “you decided a public confession was safer than me discovering Lily existed at all.”
Camille said nothing, which was answer enough.
I turned to Isabella; her expression was a complicated mixture of anger and relief, eight years of secrets finally collapsing into clarity.
“I need you to understand something,” I said to Camille. “You didn’t just lie to me. You kept a father from his daughter for two years, using fear as a weapon against a woman who was only trying to protect her child.”
“Alessandro, please,” Camille said. “We can still fix this. We can still—”
“There is no ‘we,'” I said. “There hasn’t been one since this morning, and after what I just learned, there never will be again.”
Camille’s face crumpled, but I felt nothing beyond the certainty that I needed to leave.
I looked at Isabella. “Let’s go.”
We left Camille’s penthouse in silence, riding down in the elevator without a single word between us, the weight of everything we’d both learned pressing down like stone.
Outside, the cold air hit us again, sharper now than it had felt in the park hours earlier.
“Thank you,” Isabella said quietly, “for believing me. For not blaming me for hiding her.”
“You were protecting our daughter,” I said. “I understand fear better than most people ever will.”
Isabella looked at me carefully. “What happens now? With Lily?”
“Now,” I said, “I want to know everything I missed. Every birthday, every first step, every scraped knee I wasn’t there for.”
Isabella’s eyes filled with tears again, different this time, softer.
“She’s going to be thrilled,” Isabella said. “She’s wanted a father her entire life.”
“She already found one today,” I said. “She just didn’t know it yet.”
As we walked toward the car, my phone buzzed once more.
It was Rourke.
“Boss,” he said the moment I answered, “you need to see the financial records we pulled on Camille. This goes deeper than just hiding a kid. She’s been moving money through accounts connected to people who don’t like you very much.”
