Chapter 8 - The Voice That Was Not Sofia
We listened to the file in Rebecca's office. At first, the voice sounded like Sofia's. It spoke softly about protecting Emily and forgiving Luca. Then it claimed Sofia had authorized transfers to the Bellini charity and had wanted the documents destroyed. Emily gripped my hand. "That's Mom's voice," she whispered. Luca stared at the speakers, visibly shaken.
Rebecca asked a forensic audio specialist to examine the recording. He identified abrupt changes in room tone and several edits. The file was a composite assembled from older recordings. Its creation date was accurate, but the content had been manipulated. Vanessa's allies had tried to make Sofia retract her own evidence after she was dead.
"They thought I'd believe anything if I heard her voice," Luca said. His words were flat, but his hands trembled. Emily leaned against him. "We know what she really said." He nodded, yet I could see the wound the fake recording had opened. It was cruel in a way that money laundering was not: someone had weaponized grief.
The specialist recovered a fragment that the editor had failed to remove. In the background, a man said, "Adrian, we have to finish before the memorial." Rebecca preserved the finding and forwarded it to investigators. She warned us not to discuss it outside the legal team. The temptation to expose everything online was strong, especially after a local gossip account published a photograph of Emily arriving at the engagement dinner with a caption suggesting a family scandal.
I watched Emily read the comments. Some were kind. Others were vicious. She put the phone facedown. "They don't know me," she said. "Then they don't get to define you," I answered. She smiled faintly. Later she posted one simple photograph of Michael holding a pair of tiny socks. No explanation, no defense. Just a life she had chosen.
Luca began spending mornings at the safe apartment. He learned which tea helped Emily's nausea and which bakery made the cinnamon rolls she liked. He asked Michael about teaching, and to my surprise he listened to the answer. The mansion's most feared man seemed happiest assembling a crib in the spare bedroom. He read the instructions twice, muttered at a missing screw, and refused Marco's offer to do it for him.
I found him there one afternoon with the screwdriver resting in his palm. "Sofia wanted me to be different," he said. "I thought protecting the family meant controlling every threat before it reached our door. I never noticed the danger sitting at my own table." I told him I had been afraid to contradict Vanessa because I needed my job. "And you did it anyway," he said. "Because Emily needed someone," I answered. He looked at me for a long moment. "That's the kind of courage I don't know how to buy."
The compliment unsettled me more than I wanted to admit. Luca was older, powerful, and carrying a history I could barely imagine. I was not looking for a romance inside a crisis. But I began to notice the way he knocked before entering a room, the way he waited for an answer, the way he remembered that my mother preferred her coffee without sugar.
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That evening, Rebecca called with news. Investigators had located the original source recordings used to fabricate Sofia's voice. They were taken from private family videos stored in the Moretti mansion. Only a handful of people had access to that archive. One of them was Vanessa. Another was Marco.
For the first time, I wondered whether the man guarding us might also be the one reporting our every move.
