Four Orphan Girls Raised To Be The Mafia Heir’s Wife. And I Only Wanted His Empire. Chapter 09
The Setup
Edward is in Europe when they come for me.
Victoria and Camille move fast. They’ve been waiting for this. The moment the old Don is out of the country, they strike.
The accusation: I sold family secrets to a rival operation. Leaked the details of our shipping routes, our distribution network, our contacts overseas. Handed it all to the Morettis.
The evidence is clean. Professional. Planted on my work computer: encrypted messages to a Moretti associate. And in my personal account, a wire transfer. Two hundred thousand dollars from a source I’ve never heard of.
In mafia world, being called a traitor is a death sentence. You don’t get a trial. You get a room with no windows and men who don’t ask questions.
Victoria calls an emergency family council. No Edward. No protection. Just the elders, Alistair, Camille, and her, demanding that the “rat” be dealt with immediately.
I sit in that room with twelve men staring at me like I’m already a corpse.
They take my phone at the door. Two of Alistair’s men stand behind my chair. Not security. A message. I’m not here as family. I’m here as the accused.
The elders sit around the long table, stone-faced. These are men who’ve buried problems before. I can feel them measuring me. Deciding if I’m worth the trouble of keeping alive.
Then Camille stands up.
“Wait.”
Every head turns.
“I looked into this myself. The messages are forged. The IP traces back to an overseas server with no connection to Iris. And the wire transfer is a legitimate donation from a charity fund. She’s been anonymously sponsoring students for years. The paperwork is clean.”
She pulls out a name. The hacker who planted the evidence. Has him brought into the room. The man is shaking so hard he can barely stand.
He points at one of Alistair’s captains. “He paid me. He told me what to plant and where.”
The room shifts. Victoria’s face goes white. The elders turn their eyes to Alistair, and what I see in their faces isn’t anger. It’s disgust.
A frame job this sloppy, this obvious once exposed. It makes him look weak. Desperate. Unfit.
After the council clears, Camille finds me in the hallway.
She doesn’t smile. She just looks at me with those sharp, calculating eyes.
“We’re even.”
We’re not even. We both know that. But this is how it works between us now.
Three weeks ago, I went to her with an offer. I’d found holes in the Ashford family’s finances. The kind that could bring down her father’s operation if the wrong people saw them. I gave her the problems and the solutions in one folder.
The deal was simple. If I stay standing, her family’s secrets stay buried and she gets credit for fixing them. If I go down, those documents end up on every rival family’s desk by morning.
She’s not my friend. She’ll never be my friend. But she’s smart enough to know that keeping me alive is cheaper than letting me die.
We’re not allies. We’re two people with knives at each other’s throats who’ve agreed not to cut. For now.