Chapter 8 – The Stolen Sister

I stared at the medical report on the floor, the words blurring together.

Twins.

Teresa had given birth to twins. Antonio had taken Luca and given him to Tessa to raise. But what happened to the second baby?

I picked up the paper, my hands shaking so violently the paper rattled. I ran back into the conservatory.

Luca and Teresa were still sitting together, talking softly. They looked up when I burst into the room.

“Hannah, what’s wrong?” Luca asked, instantly alert, slipping back into protector mode.

I walked over and handed him the pathology report. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t.

Luca frowned, reading the document. His eyes scanned the first page, then the second. His brow furrowed in confusion, then realization, and finally, absolute horror.

He looked at Teresa.

“Mom,” Luca whispered, his voice barely audible. “You had twins?”

Teresa froze. The color drained entirely from her face, leaving her looking like a porcelain doll. She stared at the paper in Luca’s hand as if it were a venomous snake.

“Where did you get that?” she breathed.

“Vanessa dropped it in the kitchen,” I said gently. “Teresa… what happened to the other baby?”

Teresa covered her face with her hands, a low, agonizing moan escaping her lips. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated heartbreak—a wound that had been buried for thirty-six years, ripped open in an instant.

“Antonio took her,” Teresa sobbed, her body rocking back and forth in the chair.

“Her?” Luca asked, dropping to his knees beside her. “I have a sister?”

Teresa nodded, her tears falling freely now. “A little girl. She was born twenty minutes after you. You were so healthy, Luca. You cried so loudly. But she… she was so small. She was struggling to breathe.”

“What did Antonio do?” Luca demanded, his voice hardening with rage toward his dead father.

“Tessa only wanted a boy,” Teresa cried. “She wanted an heir for the family. When she found out there was a girl, she told Antonio to get rid of her. She said a weak, sickly girl was useless to the Moretti legacy.”

I felt physically sick. They treated children like livestock.

“Did he kill her?” Luca asked, the words clearly tasting like ash in his mouth.

“No,” Teresa shook her head rapidly. “He didn’t kill her. But he wouldn’t let me keep her. He said if I kept the girl, people would ask questions about why she looked exactly like the boy Tessa was raising. He said it was too dangerous.”

“So where is she?” Luca asked, gripping his mother’s hands tightly.

“He gave her away,” Teresa whispered, looking out the conservatory windows into the dark, rain-soaked garden. “He took her from the hospital that night and gave her to an associate. A man who was leaving Chicago. He told me she was going to a good family, far away from this life.”

“Do you know the man’s name?” I asked.

Teresa looked at me, her eyes clouded with decades of repressed grief. “No. Antonio refused to tell me. He said it was better if I didn’t know. But…”

She stopped, looking back at Luca.

“But what, Mom?”

“Before he took her,” Teresa said softly, “I begged him to let me hold her one last time. He gave me three minutes. I wrapped her in a blanket, and I took the only thing of value I had on me, and I pinned it to her clothes.”

“What did you pin to her?” Luca asked.

“A small silver bracelet,” Teresa said. “It had my grandmother’s initials engraved on the clasp. G.C. I prayed that someday, she would find out it meant she belonged to someone who loved her.”

The room went dead silent.

My heart stopped beating. The air in my lungs turned to ice.

I stumbled backward, bumping into the glass table, nearly knocking over a candle holder.

“Hannah?” Luca asked, standing up, concerned by my sudden reaction. “Are you okay?”

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe. My hands flew to my throat, specifically to the thin silver chain I wore hidden beneath my collar every single day of my life.

It wasn’t a necklace. It was a delicate silver baby bracelet, strung onto a chain because it was too small to fit my adult wrist.

My mother—the woman currently recovering in the hospital—had given it to me when I turned eighteen. She told me she bought it at a pawn shop when I was a baby because we were too poor to afford real jewelry.

Trembling uncontrollably, I reached behind my neck, unclasped the chain, and pulled it out from under my shirt.

The silver bracelet dangled in the dim light of the conservatory.

Teresa’s eyes locked onto it.

She slowly stood up from her chair, her gaze fixed on the silver metal, her breath hitching in her chest.

“Hannah,” Teresa whispered, taking a hesitant step toward me.

I looked down at the tiny clasp of the bracelet. I had polished it a hundred times. I knew exactly what was engraved on it, even without looking.

Teresa reached out with a shaking hand and touched the silver bracelet. She let out a choked, disbelieving sob.

She looked up into my eyes. For the first time, I realized why I had always felt so comfortable around her. Why we shared the same quiet mannerisms. Why my dark hair and pale skin mirrored Luca’s so perfectly.

“My God,” Luca breathed, staring at me, the pieces snapping together with terrifying clarity.

“My mother…” I stammered, tears streaming down my face. “The woman who raised me… her maiden name was Collins. Her brother… my uncle… he was an associate for the Moretti family in the seventies.”

Teresa covered her mouth with both hands, weeping uncontrollably. She took another step toward me, reaching out, afraid to touch me, afraid I might break or disappear.

“You didn’t go far,” Teresa whispered, her voice breaking. “You came back to me.”

I didn’t hesitate. I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around the woman I had spent eleven months calling “ma’am.”

Teresa held me tighter than I had ever been held in my life. She buried her face in my shoulder, crying out thirty-six years of stolen motherhood.

Luca stood beside us, tears streaming down his own face, and wrapped his massive arms around both of us, pulling us into a fierce, protective embrace.

The broken family was finally, completely, whole.

But as we stood there in the warmth of the conservatory, the heavy mahogany doors to the grand foyer violently burst open.

“Nobody move!” a deep voice bellowed.

We broke apart, spinning toward the entrance.

Standing in the doorway, drenched in rain and holding a massive tactical shotgun aimed directly at Luca’s chest, was the one man I thought was dead.

Marco Bellini’s assassin from the bank vault.

“You really thought you could wipe out the Bellinis without consequence?” the assassin growled, cocking the shotgun with a terrifying, metallic clack.

Before Luca could reach for his gun, the assassin pulled the trigger.