Chapter 1 - The Secret Beneath the Wedding Cake
“Drop that cake, Rachel, and I'll make sure your sick mother loses every penny of her medical funding.”
Victoria Sinclair smiled as she threatened the injured maid.
Twenty-eight-year-old Rachel Foster stood trembling beneath a five-tier wedding cake in Damian Russo's Savannah mansion. Her bruised shoulder was giving out, but Victoria refused to let her stop.
Two hundred guests watched.
Nobody helped.
Until Damian Russo crossed the ballroom.
The forty-two-year-old Mafia boss caught the enormous cake before it crashed. His heavily tattooed hands steadied its wooden base.
Then he noticed Rachel's bruises.
“Who hurt you?”
Victoria insisted the maid had injured herself.
Damian didn't believe her.
Then something rattled inside the cake.
Hidden beneath its wooden platform was a brass key, a folded paper, and a metal cylinder engraved with the name of Damian's father, Vincent Russo.
Vincent had been dead for eight years.
The cylinder belonged to his private collection.
Rachel eventually admitted that Victoria had injured her after catching her examining an old family photograph. It showed Vincent beside an unfamiliar woman holding a baby.
Rachel had also overheard Victoria discussing altered trust documents and a dangerous secret.
When Damian opened the cylinder, he discovered a document titled FINAL DECLARATION OF PATERNITY.
The child's name had been covered with black tape.
On the back, his father had written:
The child was never supposed to survive.
Before Damian could remove the tape, Thomas Whitaker, his father's missing attorney, warned him not to uncover the name.
Then Victoria appeared.
When Damian demanded an explanation, she whispered two words.
“Your brother.”
Damian's younger brother, Anthony, had supposedly died seventeen years earlier.
But moments later, Damian's security chief announced that a stranger was demanding entry.
The stranger claimed to be Anthony Russo.
And then Damian heard a voice he had spent seventeen years trying to forget.
“Don't remove that tape, Damian. Not until you hear what our father did to us.”
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The wedding cake had delivered something far more dangerous than a family secret.
It had brought a dead man home.
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