Chapter 9 - Blood TestBy afternoon, the story had begun leaking.
Not the truth. Not yet.
Rumors.
The engagement was canceled. Vivian had attacked a maid. Vincent Moretti had thrown out the DeMarcos. A mysterious woman with a locket had been taken into Belladonna House.
By sunset, my face was online.
A grainy video from the ballroom showed me kneeling in broken glass while Vivian held the riding crop. It stopped just before Vincent arrived.
The caption called me “the plus-size maid who ruined a mafia engagement.”
I wanted to throw the phone across the room.
Instead, I sat in Vincent’s study while Ms. Hale explained what would happen next.
“We need a legal DNA test,” she said. “Private results first. Then we decide how to proceed.”
Vincent looked at me. “Only with your consent.”
The word consent made me trust him more than any promise.
I nodded.
A doctor arrived at Belladonna House within an hour. He swabbed the inside of my cheek, then Vincent’s. Lorenzo Moretti had been dead for seven years, but Vincent’s sample could prove whether we shared a paternal line.
After the doctor left, silence settled.
Vincent poured coffee he did not drink.
I sat across from him.
“You don’t have to pretend this is easy,” I said.
He looked up.
“It isn’t.”
“Because of me?”
“No.” He paused. “Because I spent years thinking my family’s worst secrets were buried with my father. Now I know one of them was living hungry across town.”
The words hurt because they were gentle.
“I don’t want your guilt.”
“You have it anyway.”
“I don’t know what I want from you.”
He nodded. “That makes sense.”
I studied him.
He was powerful. Feared. Rich beyond anything my mother and I had ever touched. But in that moment, beneath the sharp suit and colder reputation, he looked like a man who had just found a door in his childhood home and discovered someone had been crying behind it for twenty-eight years.
“Did you love Vivian?” I asked.
The question surprised us both.
He leaned back.
“I intended to marry her.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
A faint smile touched his mouth.
“No. It is not.”
“Why her?”
“Alliance. Stability. Family expectations.”
“That sounds miserable.”
“It was familiar.”
I thought of Vivian’s jeweled hand gripping the riding crop.
“She would have made this house colder.”
Vincent looked toward the window.
“It has been cold for a long time.”
That night, I dreamed of the tape.
My mother running. A baby crying. Men deciding what a woman and child were worth.
When I woke, someone was knocking urgently.
Rosa opened the door before I reached it.
“Miss Isabella,” she said, breathless, “you need to come downstairs.”
I followed her to the breakfast room.
Vincent stood by the table with Ms. Hale. Salvatore was near the window. The doctor was on speakerphone.
Vincent looked at me.
His face told me before the words did.
The doctor’s voice was careful.
“The probability of a sibling relationship between Vincent Moretti and Isabella Romano is greater than 99.8 percent.”
I sat down because my knees stopped trusting me.
Ms. Hale ended the call quietly.
Vincent did not move.
Brother.
The word did not arrive with music. It arrived with grief.
I had a brother.
A brother who had lived in the house my mother fled. A brother who had been raised by the man who signed my birth record and never found me.
Vincent walked toward me slowly.
“Isabella.”
I looked up.
He seemed unsure what to do with his hands.
I saved him.
“Don’t hug me yet.”
He stopped.
The corner of his mouth moved, almost a smile.
“Understood.”
I wiped my eyes angrily.
“I’m not crying because I’m happy.”
“I know.”
“I’m angry.”
“You should be.”
“I’m angry at your father.”
“So am I.”
“I’m angry at my mother too.”
He nodded. “That is allowed.”
Those three words broke something open.
All my life, I had protected my mother from judgment, even inside my own heart. She had suffered enough. Sacrificed enough. But a child abandoned by truth still bleeds, even when silence saved her life.
I covered my face.
Vincent knelt in front of me, not touching.
“She should have had help,” he said. “You both should have.”
I lowered my hands.
“Then help me now.”
His eyes sharpened.
“How?”
May you like
I looked at the locket.
“We make sure everyone knows her name.”
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