🥀 THE WOMAN AT THE ENGAGEMENT

Chapter 03 - The Fiancée's Perfect Smile

Vanessa was waiting in the ballroom when Luca returned. The guests had resumed their conversations, but the room no longer felt festive. People kept glancing toward the library door. A waiter had replaced the spilled champagne, and the string quartet had started a waltz that no one seemed to hear.

Vanessa crossed to Luca with a composed smile. “I hope the poor woman is feeling better.”

“She’s my father’s sister.”

For the briefest instant, Vanessa forgot to look gracious. “I’m sorry?”

“Rosa Marchetti. The woman you told to leave.”

Vanessa recovered quickly. “I didn’t know who she was. She arrived without an invitation and began making upsetting claims. I was trying to protect the evening.”

“You recognized her.”

“I recognized an old woman who looked at me as though I’d stolen something from her.”

Luca watched her face. He had known Vanessa for three years. He had admired her poise, her ability to charm donors, and her instinct for understanding what a room wanted from her. He had mistaken her talent for composure as proof of honesty. Now he could not stop noticing the tiny pauses before she answered.

“Did you know my father had a sister?”

“Of course not.”

“Did you know he left a letter?”

“No.”

“Did you know there was a ledger hidden at the lake house?”

Vanessa’s eyes flickered. It was gone almost at once, but he saw it.

“Luca, this is becoming ridiculous. You have a woman appearing out of nowhere, an old letter, a maid repeating gossip, and now you’re interrogating me at our engagement dinner.”

“Then answer the questions and we can return to the party.”

She leaned closer. Her perfume was the same one she had worn on their first date, expensive and warm. “I love you. I’m going to marry you. Why would I want to hurt you?”

He wanted to believe the words. That was the dangerous part. He had built a future around the idea that Vanessa was the one person who understood the loneliness of being born into a powerful family. But he remembered the way she had grabbed Rosa’s arm, the way she had gone pale at the envelope, and the way she had tried to move Emma out of the room before Luca could ask a question.

“Because you may want something more than me,” he said.

Her smile vanished. “You’ve changed.”

“No. I’m asking questions I should have asked years ago.”

She left him standing beside the table and walked toward the terrace. Luca followed at a distance. Through the glass doors, he saw her take out her phone and speak in quick, angry whispers. She looked toward the house twice, then turned her back to the windows.

Emma came up beside him carrying a tray of empty glasses. “She said something about the papers being signed tonight,” she murmured. “I heard it in the pantry.”

“What papers?”

“I don’t know. But she said, ‘If he delays, we lose everything.’”

Luca’s attention sharpened. The engagement dinner had been planned as a private celebration, but Vanessa had insisted on inviting several lawyers, two trustees, and a representative from the family’s bank. She had said it was efficient to have them all in one place before the wedding. He had not questioned her.

“Find out which documents are waiting to be signed,” he said.

Emma’s face tightened. “If I ask the wrong person, they’ll know I’m involved.”

“Then don’t ask. Listen.”

She nodded and moved away.

Luca went to the terrace. Vanessa ended her call when she saw him. “You’re frightening the guests,” she said.

“Good. Perhaps they’ll stop pretending this is a normal evening.”

She laughed, but the sound had no warmth. “You’re going to throw away everything we have because a woman you’ve never mentioned before turned up with a story?”

“I’m going to find out what she knows.”

“And if she’s lying?”

“Then the truth will protect you.”

Vanessa stared at him. “You have no idea what the truth will do.”

Before he could answer, Marco appeared at the terrace door. “Sir, the man we caught in the records room has been identified. He worked for Bellini Holdings. He says he was sent to retrieve a folder from the old archives.”

“By whom?”

“He won’t say.”

Luca turned to Vanessa. “Does Bellini Holdings sound familiar?”

Her face went very still. “My father owns it.”

“Then perhaps you can ask him why his employee was trying to break into my house.”

Vanessa looked away, and in that small movement Luca saw not only fear but calculation. She was deciding how much to admit and what she could still save.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said at last. “But I needed to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That your father was really gone.”

Luca felt the air leave his lungs. “What does that mean?”

Vanessa’s eyes filled, though he could not tell whether the tears were genuine. “My father told me Daniel Moretti didn’t die in the lake. He said your family paid to hide him. He said the ledger could prove it.”

“Why would your father know?”

“Because he helped arrange it.”

For a moment, Luca could not speak. The story he had been given as a child was collapsing in the middle of a room full of witnesses, and the woman he intended to marry seemed to have been standing beside the truth all along.

“Where is your father now?” he asked.

“Dead. He died two years ago.”

“Convenient.”

She flinched. “I loved you before I knew any of this. I swear it.”

Luca studied her, then stepped away. “I don’t know what you loved. Me, the name, or the chance to make your father’s secrets worth something.”

Vanessa’s expression hardened. “Be careful, Luca. You’re not the only person who can lose everything.”

She returned to the ballroom before he could stop her.

Later, when the guests had gone and the staff were clearing the tables, Emma found a folded note beneath Vanessa’s abandoned champagne flute. It was written on hotel stationery, in a hand that did not belong to Vanessa.

The note contained one sentence:

The old woman must be silenced before the wedding, and the maid must take the blame.

At the bottom was a signature she recognized from the household payroll forms.

Marco Bellini.