Chapter 4 - THE SISTER WHO DIED TWICE
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Vincent dismissed the guard and shut the door.
For the first time since I had met him, he looked like a man who had no idea what to do next.
“My sister died in a car accident,” he said. “Seven years ago. I identified her body myself.”
“Could you have been mistaken?”
“No.”
He spoke with such certainty that I almost believed him.
Then he took the photograph from the folder and studied the woman's face again.
“She had a scar beneath her left ear. Isabella got it when she fell off a horse at fourteen.”
The woman in the footage had a small dark mark in precisely that place.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
“Then who did you bury?”
Vincent looked at me.
“That is what I'm going to find out.”
He made a call to an old family physician who had signed Isabella's death certificate. The doctor had retired years ago, but he answered after the third ring.
Vincent asked one question.
“Did you examine my sister's body before the funeral?”
The doctor's silence lasted too long.
Finally, he whispered, “Your father told me the body had been positively identified.”
“Did you examine it?”
“No.”
Vincent ended the call without another word.
The revelation left a bitter taste in my mouth. A powerful family could bury almost anything, including the truth about its own dead.
But the connection to my mother made the mystery personal.
I searched through her old letters until I found a photograph of her standing beside a younger Vincent's father, Anthony Moretti. Between them stood a girl with dark hair and a familiar scar beneath her ear.
Isabella.
On the back, my mother had written a date from twenty-two years earlier and a name I had never heard before.
Project Lark.
“What does that mean?” Vincent asked.
“I don't know.”
He sat beside me, leaving a careful distance between us.
“My father ran the family before I did. He believed every problem could be solved with money, threats, or silence. If your mother knew something about him, she may have spent years trying to protect you from it.”
“Protect me from what?”
He didn't answer.
Instead, he told me about Isabella.
She had been stubborn, compassionate, and furious at the way their father treated people. At nineteen, she had threatened to leave the family and expose several of Anthony's illegal businesses.
Three months later, she died in a car crash on a road outside the city.
Vincent had been twenty-nine. He inherited the empire, buried his sister, and spent years convincing himself that grief was a weakness he could survive by never allowing anyone close.
“Vanessa knew about Isabella?” I asked.
“She claimed she did. She said Isabella's death was a tragedy that had brought our families closer.”
“Did you love Vanessa?”
Vincent looked at the floor.
“I loved the woman I believed she was.”
It was the first time he had said anything that sounded like a confession.
I should have felt sorry for him.
Instead, I wondered whether he had ever questioned the people closest to him—or whether he had simply believed whatever suited his world.
“Why did you end the engagement?” I asked.
“Because she tried to make you risk your life for her entertainment.”
“Even before you knew about the photograph?”
His eyes met mine.
“Yes.”
The answer landed somewhere deep inside me.
For a moment, neither of us spoke. The space between us seemed smaller than it had before, charged with everything we were afraid to admit.
Then Vincent reached for my hand.
I let him take it.
His thumb moved gently across my knuckles, a gesture so ordinary that it almost undid me.
“I won't ask you to trust me,” he said. “I'll earn it.”
I pulled my hand away before I could forget why I needed to be careful.
“Start by telling me everything you know about Project Lark.”
His expression darkened.
“I've never heard that name.”
A sharp knock interrupted us.
Vincent's security chief entered, carrying a document recovered from the family archives.
It was an old medical report bearing Isabella's name.
The report listed a blood type that did not match the records from her funeral.
Attached was a photograph of a young woman holding a newborn baby.
My heart stopped.
The woman was Isabella.
The baby wore a hospital bracelet bearing my surname.
Mitchell.
I looked at Vincent.
“Why was your sister holding a baby with my last name?”
He took the report from me.
On the bottom, someone had stamped a single word in red ink.
TRANSFERRED.
Vincent's phone rang.
An unknown number.
He answered.
A woman's voice came through, trembling but unmistakable.
“Vincent, if you want the truth about Isabella, meet me at the old circus grounds.”
“Who is this?”
A pause.
May you like
Then the woman whispered, “Your sister.”
The line went dead.
