“What the f**k are you talking about?” Marco growled, his voice low, dangerous.
Luca swallowed hard, his fingers twitching against the hospital bed.
“Ella,” he rasped. “She’s not who you think she is.”
Marco’s mind spun. “Then who the hell is she?” he demanded.
Luca took a shaky breath, his voice hoarse but sharp.
“Her real name isn’t Eleanor Moreau,” he said. “It’s Angela Green.”
Marco’s brows furrowed, the name ringing a faint bell. “And she’s also known as…” Luca’s voice turned even darker. “Maria Moretti.”
Marco’s stomach dropped.
“Moretti?” he echoed, his heart pounding dangerously fast.
Luca gave a slow, pained nod. “She’s Rafael Moretti’s mother.”
The room went silent.
For a second, Marco thought he had misheard. But the way Luca was looking at him—grim, serious, haunted—told him he hadn’t.
“No,” Marco muttered, shaking his head. “Rafael’s mother died years ago.”
Luca let out a rough, bitter laugh.
“That’s what we were meant to think,” he said. “She faked her death, Marco. Changed her face. Changed her name. And then she waited.”
Marco felt his throat close up.
“Waited for what?” he asked slowly, his chest tightening with dread.
Luca’s eyes darkened.
“For the perfect family to infiltrate,” he said. “For the perfect child to take.”
Marco’s breathing became shallow.
“You’re telling me she’s been planning this for years?”
“Decades,” Luca corrected. “She’s a legend in the underworld, Marco. They call her La Serpente—The Snake. She doesn’t just kill her enemies.”
His voice lowered to something terrifying.
“She replaces them.”
Marco’s pulse roared.
His mind flashed back to every moment Ella had been with Matteo.
The gentle touches. The whispered words. The way Matteo clung to her like she was the safest place in the world. The way he had called her Mommy.
His heart slammed against his ribs.
“She took him,” Marco said, his voice raw with fury.
Luca gave a short, grim nod. “And she won’t just keep him.”
Marco’s hands clenched into fists.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Luca took a shaky breath before saying the words that would haunt Marco forever.
“She doesn’t just want to take Matteo.”
He paused, looking Marco dead in the eye.
“She wants to make him Rafael.”
The air left Marco’s lungs.
His fingers dug into the mattress of Luca’s hospital bed, his mind struggling to process the horror of what he had just heard.
“You’re telling me,” Marco said, his voice deadly quiet, “that she’s planning to turn my son into Rafael?”
Luca’s jaw tightened.
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
Marco’s entire body shook with rage. His son. His innocent, beautiful Matteo.
Ella wasn’t just kidnapping him. She was planning to erase him. To mold him into the image of the son she had lost. To turn him into Rafael Moretti.
The man he killed.