Chapter 3 - The Impossible File
The study smelled of expensive leather, aged bourbon, and a hint of dark mahogany. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined the walls, interspersed with heavy velvet drapes that blocked out the morning sun. Orion immediately curled up at my feet, his heavy chin resting squarely on my left shoe, pinning me to the spot.
Dante walked behind a massive mahogany desk, but he didn't sit down. Instead, he rested his knuckles against the polished wood, leaning forward as he fixed his penetrating gray eyes entirely on me.
"Sit," he instructed, gesturing to a leather armchair opposite him.
I hesitated before sinking into the chair, keeping my hands neatly folded in my lap. "Mr. Moretti, if this is about the restaurant bill, or if someone complained—"
"This isn't about the restaurant," Dante cut in, his voice smooth, low, and laced with an underlying current of danger. He picked up a thick manila folder resting on his desk, sliding it across the surface toward me. "This is about you, Olivia Marshall. Or rather, about the ghost living under that name."
A cold knot formed in my stomach. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't," Dante replied, his eyes narrowing. "According to the public registry, you were born in Brooklyn, raised by a single mother who passed away four years ago, and graduated from NYU with a degree in art history. You work two jobs to pay off a sixty-thousand-dollar student loan debt. Completely ordinary. Utterly invisible."
"It's the truth," I said defensively, my chin lifting a fraction of an inch. "Check all you want."
"I did," Dante said softly, leaning back into his leather chair and crossing his arms over his chest. "My men didn't just check the public registry, Olivia. They checked banking records, hospital admissions, encrypted municipal archives, and facial recognition databases across three continents."
He tapped a finger against the manila folder. "And do you know what we found?"
"What?" I breathed, my throat suddenly dry.
"Nothing." Dante's gaze pierced right through me. "Not a single photograph of you exists prior to your eighteenth birthday. No dental records match your childhood vaccinations. Your social security number was issued out of a dormant federal pool in 2016, right before you enrolled at NYU. And most fascinating of all..."
He leaned forward again, lowering his voice to a hypnotic whisper.
"...Orion hasn't allowed a single human being within ten feet of him since the night he was brought to my estate as a traumatized, feral pup rescued from an underground fighting ring in Eastern Europe. The only person he ever let touch him—the only person whose scent he actively searched for in my memories—was a little girl who disappeared from a high-security witness protection safehouse in Prague twenty years ago."
The room spun. The rich smell of leather and bourbon suddenly vanished, replaced by a ringing in my ears so loud it drowned out my own thoughts.
"That's... that's insane," I choked out, gripping the arms of the chair until my knuckles turned white. "I've never been to Prague. I'm twenty-six years old. I grew up in Brooklyn."
"Did you?" Dante asked quietly, walking around the desk until he was standing right beside my chair. He reached down, his large, warm hand gently brushing a stray lock of hair away from my forehead, his fingers lingering near my temple. "Because when my tech specialist ran facial progression algorithms on your childhood photos, matching them against classified international databases... your face didn't belong to an ordinary Brooklyn girl."
He looked down at me, his eyes dark, intense, and unreadable.
May you like
"Your face belongs to the daughter of the FBI informant who betrayed my father's inner circle twenty-two years ago—an informant everyone in the underworld believes was executed along with his entire family."
***
