Chapter 4
The third recording was made three weeks before Elena died.
She was inside her car.
Rain struck the windshield.
“I confronted Marcella today,” she said. “She knows I found the White Table list.”
Elena held up a small notebook.
I recognized it.
One of my father’s old household books.
Not money.
Names.
Favours.
Marriages.
Old family obligations people pretended no longer mattered.
Marcella had been using it like a map.
Elena continued.
“She told me Nico can keep the title if he stops interfering with how the family protects itself.”
I almost laughed.
That was how cowards described theft.
Keep the title.
Lose the decisions.
Marcella stepped forward.
“Elena did not understand what was happening then.”
I paused the recording.
“What didn’t she understand?”
Marcella looked around the ballroom.
Hundreds of white flowers.
Candles.
A wedding cake nobody would cut.
Adrian Cross waiting upstairs for a marriage that had become evidence.
She finally answered.
“Your father started the White Table.”
That stopped me.
Our father had been dead five years.
He had also spent most of my childhood telling me one man could never trust family completely.
Apparently he had built a mechanism to prove himself right.
Marcella explained.
The White Table existed before I became boss.
A private group meant to keep one leader from changing the organization too quickly.
My father expected Marcella to inherit influence within it because she understood old alliances better than I did.
When I took control and dismantled half those alliances, she saw it as betrayal.
“You thought you were fixing everything,” she said.
“I was stopping men from using children and wives as currency.”
“You were tearing out foundations.”
“Then the foundations deserved to go.”
Her face hardened.
Vivia was watching her.
That mattered.
Marcella noticed too.
Then she made the mistake.
She pointed at my daughter.
“And look what Elena turned her into. Four years old and already trained to distrust her own family over a dress.”
Vivia flinched.
I moved before Rafe did.
Not violently.
I simply stepped between them.
“She didn’t distrust family.”
I looked at Marcella.
“She distrusted you.”
The distinction landed.
Then I resumed Elena’s recording.
My wife looked directly into the camera.
“If Marcella ever becomes angry about Vivia wearing this dress, understand why.”
She placed one hand over the seam.
“Because I’m going to put the White Table list where she’ll never think to look.”
Marcella whispered:
“No.”
May you like
I opened the USB’s next folder.
The list was there.
