Chapter 3: Eight Months of Silence
Chapter 3: Eight Months of Silence
Julian sent Adrian, Camila, and the hotel staff out of the room.
He contacted an independent hospital and requested an ambulance under a false name. Until it arrived, he remained beside Elena.
She lay beneath a cashmere blanket, one hand resting over her stomach.
“You believe I abandoned you,” she said.
“I didn’t know what else to believe.”
“You believed the letter.”
“What letter?”
Elena looked at him.
“The letter saying I had fallen in love with someone else.”
Julian’s face hardened.
“There was no letter.”
She stared at him.
“Adrian showed it to me.”
Julian’s pulse pounded.
“He came to the house the morning after you disappeared. He said he found a letter in your dressing room. It claimed you had taken money and left Europe with another man.”
“I never wrote it.”
“I know that now.”
“You began divorce proceedings.”
“I was advised to protect the companies until I found you. I never completed the divorce.”
“Adrian told me you had.”
Julian lowered his head.
Every detail of the last eight months began rearranging itself into something monstrous.
The blocked accounts.
The carefully selected investigators.
The reports claiming Elena had traveled under false passports.
All of it had passed through Adrian.
“What happened that night?” Julian asked.
Elena hesitated.
Then she spoke.
“Three days before I left, I found an envelope inside your father’s old desk. It had been pushed behind a drawer.”
Julian’s father, Lorenzo Rossi, had died seven years earlier when his car plunged from a mountain road.
Inside the envelope, Elena had discovered financial ledgers, construction reports, and a flash drive.
The documents connected Adrian to shell companies that had stolen hundreds of millions from Rossi developments.
But the theft was not the worst part.
One construction report concerned the collapse of a Rossi-owned apartment tower in Genoa nine years earlier.
Seventeen people had died.
The official investigation blamed defective concrete supplied by an outside contractor.
The documents showed Adrian had approved the cheaper materials and paid inspectors to falsify safety reports.
“Your father discovered it,” Elena said. “He planned to expose Adrian.”
Julian’s voice was barely audible.
“My father died two days before he was supposed to meet federal prosecutors.”
Elena nodded.
“I copied the files. Before I could show you, Adrian came to the house.”
“How did he know?”
“I made the mistake of calling your attorney, Stephen Crowe.”
Julian closed his eyes.
Crowe had been Adrian’s recommendation.
“He told Adrian,” Julian said.
“Yes.”
Adrian showed Elena photographs of Julian entering hotels with women.
They were fake, but convincing.
He claimed Julian knew about the stolen money and intended to blame Elena if investigators ever uncovered it.
Then he showed her live surveillance from Julian’s office.
A red laser dot appeared over Julian’s chest.
“He said a sniper was watching you,” Elena whispered. “He told me that if I warned you, you would die before I finished the first sentence.”
Julian’s hands curled into fists.
“He forced me to leave the mansion. He took my phone and passport. Camila was waiting near the gate.”
“What did she do?”
“She drove the car.”
Before Julian could respond, Elena suddenly grabbed his wrist.
A contraction tightened across her abdomen.
He leaned toward her.
“Elena?”
She breathed through the pain.
When it passed, she whispered, “Adrian didn’t just make me disappear.”
May you like
Her fingers tightened around Julian’s wrist.
“He kept me imprisoned for eleven weeks.”
