I Saved His Daughter And The Mafia Boss Won’t Let Me Leave Chapter 15
That night, Roman holds a press conference.
He puts it all out there. Every medical record. Every hospital admission. Every emergency report from the last years of Derek’s mother’s life. The death certificate. All of it.
The records tell the whole story. She’d been in critical condition multiple times before she passed. Organ failure. It was coming no matter what anyone did.
And Derek — her own flesh and blood — not once. Not a single time did he show up at that hospital.
Roman sits behind the microphones. His face could cut glass.
“Sera Malone spent years at that woman’s bedside. She did everything her own son refused to do.”
“And now the man who couldn’t be bothered to visit his dying mother is going on television pointing the finger at her.”
“Our legal team will pursue every defamation claim to the fullest extent of the law. Every single one.”
A reporter raises a hand.
“Mr. Ashford — is your marriage to Miss Malone real? Her previous marriage ended very recently. Don’t you think this all happened a little fast?”
Roman holds up the marriage certificate.
“Sera is my wife. Legally and in every other way that matters.”
“A woman like her — honestly, it doesn’t matter when I married her. It would always feel like I should’ve done it sooner.”
“I plan to spend the rest of my life making up for everything she’s been through.”
That night, he hands me his phone.
The whole internet has flipped. Every single comment section. Every headline. All of it. People are tearing Derek apart. People are defending me. Strangers who’ve never met me.
My eyes burn so bad I have to blink about ten times.
“Thank you.”
Roman lifts my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles. Slow. Warm.
“Mrs. Ashford. You don’t thank your husband.”
My face goes nuclear.
Lily crawls up onto the couch and carefully puts one arm around me, one arm around Roman. Squishing us together.
“Mommy. Daddy.”
“We’re not splitting up. Okay?”
Roman looks at me.
“You heard her.”
I nod.
“Whatever Lily says.”
Across town, Derek hurls his phone at the wall. It shatters into pieces.
Victoria sits across from him. She’s smiling.
“Relax.”
“Once Roman goes down, Sera comes crawling right back to you.”
Derek’s eyes narrow.
“What are you thinking?”
Victoria slides a photograph across the table.
Lily. Walking to school. Walking home. Same route. Every day. Time-stamped.
Meanwhile, Tommy Brennan goes down hard.
The audit finds everything. Falsified materials data. Cooked books. Fake certifications. The whole operation is rotten.
Sandra panics. To save whatever’s left of the Brennan family, she walks into the police station herself. Hands over a recording and a stack of text messages.
She’s crying. Mascara everywhere.
“I thought she was just Roman’s ex-wife. I thought if I helped her, she’d put in a good word and save our family.”
“I didn’t know. She was using me from the start.”
The recording is Victoria’s voice. Cold. Precise. Every word calculated.
“Keep pushing Lily. Keep setting her off.”
“The more unstable that child looks, the easier it is to argue Roman can’t take care of her.”
The police pull the phone records. They trace the calls to Victoria’s old assistant. They pull her bank records.
And there it is. A wire transfer from three years ago. A big one.
The Crane family had been bleeding money. Victoria was desperate. But she couldn’t let Roman find out her side of the family was broke.
So she had her assistant stage a kidnapping.
The plan was simple. Grab Lily. Stash her in a rental house outside the city. Wait for Roman to pay up. Then “find” the child and play hero.
But the guy who was supposed to be at the house got spooked and ran.
Lily was left there. Alone. In an empty house. For hours.
When they found her, she was curled up in a corner. Shaking. Barely responding to anyone.
She’s been terrified of everything since.
Roman listens to the whole thing. His knuckles go white on the armrests. I can hear the leather creak under his grip.
“I always thought it was a rival. Someone from the business.”
His voice is barely a whisper.
“It was her own mother.”
The detective places two more wire transfer records on the table.
“The three men who grabbed Lily recently — paid by the same shell company.”
“The plan was to get her out of the country. Victoria would file for custody overseas as the biological mother, then take control of Lily’s trust.”
He pauses.
“One more thing. The mechanic who serviced your car the day before the crash — he got a payment from the same account.”
My blood goes ice cold.
“So the crash — that was Victoria too?”