Chapter 1 - THREE MINUTES
Gabriel Costa grabbed Tessa Montgomery beside Victor Moretti’s private booth at the St. Regis gala and reminded her that staff belonged behind the rope.
Victor noticed the red marks Gabriel’s fingers left on her arm.
When Tessa insisted she needed to speak with him, she did something nobody expected.
She asked Victor to dance.
He gave her three minutes.
On the dance floor, Tessa revealed that her younger brother Liam owed $50,000 to Oakmont Holdings and that Gabriel had personally threatened them inside their Queens apartment.
Victor immediately spotted a problem.
Gabriel had told him Oakmont stopped making private loans eight months earlier.
Liam’s loan was only six weeks old.
Then gunfire tore through the ballroom.
During the chaos, someone brushed against Tessa and planted a flash drive in her apron. Victor later discovered gun oil on her sleeve.
Gabriel claimed a shooter had touched her.
His explanation didn’t hold up.
Neither did his denial that he had threatened Liam.
Tessa remembered Gabriel wearing his gold watch on his right wrist because his left wrist was bandaged. Victor knew Gabriel always wore the watch on his left—and had not been bandaged when Victor saw him earlier that evening.
Victor let Gabriel leave.
Then he opened the flash drive.
Inside were secret Oakmont records showing more than $38 million in payments and stolen funds.
Even worse, someone had been watching Tessa long before Liam borrowed money.
A surveillance file warned:
DO NOT ALLOW CONTACT WITH V.M.
Then Tessa found an old photograph of her mother outside St. Catherine’s Hospital beside Victor’s supposedly dead father.
A night nurse arrived carrying Tessa’s infant bracelet—and another bracelet bearing Victor Moretti’s name with the exact same birth date.
She revealed that identities had been altered that night.
Then an elderly man approached the hotel office.
Victor recognized his voice.
His father.
The man who had supposedly been dead for eleven years.
And as the door began to open, the nurse grabbed Tessa’s hand.
“Whatever he tells you, don’t let him see your birth certificate.”
“Why?”
May you like
“Because the moment he does, he’ll know we finally found the wrong daughter.”
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