Chapter 60 - The Echo in the Dark
Midnight settled over Villa Rossi with an unnatural, breathless stillness.
The celebrations had ended, and the estate had fallen into silence. Julian was asleep in the master suite upstairs, exhausted after days of unrelenting legal and physical warfare.
Unable to sleep, I sat alone in the private library on the ground floor, wrapped in a silk robe, illuminated only by the dying embers of the hearth and a single reading lamp. On my lap lay my mother’s leather-bound diary.
I turned the fragile pages with reverence, reading Margaret’s thoughts from thirty years ago—her love for Arthur, her terror when the threats began, and her fierce, desperate determination to keep me safe from the Vance family’s insatiable greed.
Then, I turned to the final entry, dated three days before she fled to Boston.
My eyes scanned the elegant script, and suddenly, the air in my lungs turned to liquid ice:
*“God forgive me for what I have done. Arthur believes there was only one child born in that private clinic in Geneva. But the doctor took the second child before I could even hold her. Charles Ross took my sweet Clara into the dark, threatening to slaughter them both if I ever spoke of the twin. Francesca will live in the light, but my Clara... my poor, stolen Clara is condemned to grow up in the serpent's den...”*
A twin sister.
I sat completely paralyzed, the diary slipping from my numb fingers and tumbling onto the Persian rug. I had a twin sister. Jason didn't just target me because of the trust—the Ross family had raised another version of me in secret.
Suddenly, the estate’s perimeter alarms began to wail with ear-splitting ferocity.
*Beep! Beep! Beep!*
The lights in the library flashed red. The glass doors leading out to the lake terrace shattered inward with an explosive roar, raining shards of crystal across the hardwood floor!
"Francesca!" Julian’s frantic shout echoed from the grand staircase above.
Giancarlo stumbled into the library doorway, clutching a bleeding shoulder, his pistol drawn. "Signora! The security grid has been compromised from the inside! Someone used an identical biometric key—"
A silenced gunshot cracked through the room. Giancarlo collapsed with a groan.
I scrambled backward against the bookshelves, my heart pounding violently against my ribs as heavy boots crunched over the shattered glass of the terrace doors.
Through the drifting fog of the midnight lake, a figure stepped out of the shadows and into the dim firelight.
She wore black tactical leather, a suppressed pistol held loosely in her right hand. But as she raised her head and pushed back the hood of her jacket, my breath completely tore from my throat.
She possessed my face. My cheekbones. My slate-gray eyes.
May you like
She looked at me, her lips curling into a cold, cruel, venomous smirk that made my soul freeze in terror.
"Hello, little sister," the woman whispered, raising the barrel of the gun directly at my heart. "Did you really think you were the only Rossi who was owed an empire?"
