Chapter 7 - The Poisoned Ledger
Three days later.
The morning sun flooded Elena’s new private office on the second floor of the estate. The room was fitted with custom mahogany bookshelves, bulletproof glass, and three high-speed secure servers dedicated entirely to her financial tracking operations.
Elena sat at her glass desk, going through a stack of physical bank ledgers that Viktor had recovered from her father’s private safe at the Mancini manor.
Beside her, a cup of hot espresso was cooling down.
As her fingers swiped across the yellowed pages of an older ledger from five years ago, her eyes caught an abnormality in the ink stamps.
"That's strange..." she muttered to herself.
She pulled up her father's official medical examiner report on her secondary screen, comparing the dates of his alleged heart attack with a series of massive wire transfers made during his final week of life.
A cold feeling began to settle in her stomach.
The door to the office opened, and Leon walked in, wearing an unbuttoned white shirt and dark trousers, carrying a plate of fresh pastries his chef had made for her.
"You've been in here for four hours, sweetheart," Leon said gently, setting the plate beside her computer. "Take a break."
"Leon," Elena said, her voice dropping into a serious, tight tone. "Look at this."
Leon frowned, leaning over her chair, resting one hand on the back of her seat and the other on her desk. "What am I looking at?"
"My father's cause of death was listed as an acute myocardial infarction—a massive heart attack," Elena explained, pointing to the medical document. "His personal physician, Dr. Harrison, signed off on it within two hours of his death. No autopsy was performed because Dr. Harrison claimed Lorenzo had a long history of heart disease."
"Right," Leon said, his eyes scanning the text. "That’s what everyone was told."
"Look at these wire receipts from four days before he died," Elena said, bringing up a bank log. "Lorenzo transferred two million dollars from his personal reserve to an offshore medical research clinic in Switzerland. The clinic specializes in blood toxicology and heavy-metal detoxification."
Leon froze. His eyes narrowed into dangerous slits. "Why would Lorenzo be paying a toxicology clinic if he had a simple heart condition?"
"He wasn't suffering from heart disease, Leon," Elena said, turning to look up at him, her eyes wide with shock and rage. "He knew someone was poisoning him. He was trying to buy an antidote."
Leon’s jaw clenched so hard a muscle twitched near his temple. "Dr. Harrison lied on the death certificate."
"And look who authorized Dr. Harrison's private bonus payment two days after my father died," Elena whispered, tapping the screen to reveal the final signature on the ledger.
It wasn't Sylvio Stahl.
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It wasn't the Moretti brothers.
The signature belonged to Nadia Rostova—Leon’s chief intelligence officer.
