Chapter 1 - The Dead Man at the Dinner Table
The silver serving tray crashed when Hannah Miller recognized a man who had supposedly been dead for twelve years.
Charles Voss sat among forty wealthy guests at Cleveland Mafia boss Dominic Moretti’s mansion, smiling beneath a new name: Edward Whitcomb.
Hannah remembered him threatening her father, Robert, shortly before their family home burned.
Her mother died that night. Her younger brother, Noah, suffered terrible injuries. Her father disappeared.
Now Voss was sitting three feet away.
“Pick that up!” snapped Vanessa Kingsley, Dominic’s fiancée.
When Hannah whispered that the guest was using a false name, Dominic immediately noticed her terror.
He ordered his security chief, Frank D’Angelo, to investigate.
Minutes later, Hannah received threatening messages warning her to remember what happened to her family.
She finally told Dominic about Voss and a photograph she had discovered in Vanessa’s office.
The picture showed her father standing beside Voss and Dominic’s late father, Antonio Moretti.
Vanessa had forced Hannah to delete it, threatening to cut off Noah’s rehabilitation funding if she spoke.
Dominic soon discovered another disturbing connection.
The doctor who certified Voss’s death was Vanessa’s father, Dr. Samuel Kingsley.
Frank recovered the deleted photograph. It had been taken six weeks after the fire that supposedly destroyed Hannah’s family.
Her father had survived.
Then Hannah received a call from a man whose voice she hadn't heard in twelve years.
Her father.
He instructed her to find an envelope hidden inside her late mother’s wedding dress.
Inside were a letter and a brass token stamped 214.
Dominic recognized the number. It belonged to a sealed deposit box his father had forbidden him to open.
But before Dominic could read the letter, Vanessa appeared holding a pistol.
“Put it down, Dominic.”
At that moment, Frank reported that Robert Miller had arrived at the mansion gates carrying a photograph of Dominic as a little boy.
On the back, someone had written:
May you like
DOMINIC MORETTI — THE CHILD WE PROMISED NEVER TO TELL.
And for the first time in his life, Dominic wondered whether everything his father had told him about his childhood was a lie.
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