Chapter 3 - Leo’s Missing Recording
Dante did not sleep.
At 2:17 a.m., he sat at the kitchen island with a legal pad while Leo and Mia slept upstairs under the supervision of Rosa, the housekeeper who had worked for him since before either child was born.
He wrote down everything.
Javier.
The disabled cameras.
The black phone.
Celeste's call.
Sloane leaving.
Mia's warning about judges.
The missing tablet.
At the bottom of the page he wrote one question.
WHY LEO?
He stared at it until sunrise.
At seven, Leo appeared wearing dinosaur pajamas.
"Dad?"
Dante closed the notebook.
"Couldn't sleep?"
Leo climbed onto the stool beside him.
"Did Mom ever tell you something bad was happening at the company?"
Dante looked at him.
"Why would you ask that?"
"Because Aunt Celeste said Mom was paranoid."
Dante felt the first crack in something he had spent four years protecting.
Isabel's final year had been defined by illness, hospitals and exhaustion.
There had been arguments about Moretti Meridian.
Dante had dismissed them.
Not cruelly.
But repeatedly.
"You're tired," he'd once told her.
"Let Celeste handle it."
Isabel had looked at him for a long time.
"That's what frightens me."
Dante had not understood.
Now the memory felt like an accusation.
"When did Celeste say that?"
"Yesterday. In Grandpa's study."
Leo leaned closer.
"That's why I left the tablet recording."
"You intentionally recorded her?"
"I was playing spies first. Then she came in."
"Did she know you were there?"
"No. I was in the little passage."
The old lakefront estate had once belonged to Dante's father, Lorenzo Moretti. A narrow service corridor connected the study to the library.
Leo knew every hidden door.
"What did you hear?"
Leo thought carefully.
"A man said Bellaforte."
Dante's attention sharpened.
Bellaforte was the company's most valuable property, a historic lakefront hotel outside Chicago worth nearly two hundred million dollars.
Celeste wanted to sell it.
Dante had refused.
"What else?"
"He said something about eighteen percent."
Dante's face changed.
Isabel's Children's Trust owned exactly eighteen percent of Moretti Meridian voting stock.
Nine percent for Leo.
Nine for Mia.
Dante was trustee.
If he became legally incapacitated, died, or was removed as trustee by a court, Celeste was named successor.
"Anything else?"
Leo whispered, "Aunt Celeste said, 'Once he's out, I control the children’s vote.'"
Dante stood so quickly his stool scraped backward.
Leo flinched.
Dante immediately softened.
"Sorry."
"Is that bad?"
"Yes."
Very bad.
The Moretti voting structure was fragmented.
Dante personally owned twenty-seven percent.
Celeste owned fourteen.
Their mother, Bianca, owned eleven.
Several relatives and managers controlled the rest.
The children's eighteen percent made Dante effectively unbeatable on major corporate decisions.
Unless he lost control of the trust.
Dante called Nora Bell.
His late wife's older sister answered on the fourth ring.
"You know it's seven in the morning?"
"I need a trust lawyer."
"You have a building full of lawyers."
"I need one who doesn't work for Celeste."
Silence.
Then Nora said, "What happened?"
He told her.
Not everything.
Enough.
Nora's voice changed.
"I'm coming."
They had not been close since Isabel died.
Nora blamed Dante for ignoring Isabel's fears about the company.
Until that morning, Dante had privately thought she was unfair.
By eight-thirty, Nora was sitting in his kitchen wearing a navy suit and the expression of someone who had waited years for a terrible prediction to come true.
"The eighteen percent matters," she said.
"I know."
"No. I don't think you do."
She opened the trust agreement on her laptop.
"Isabel made you sole trustee because she trusted you as their father. But Section Twelve names Celeste successor if a court removes you for breach of fiduciary duty, incapacity or conduct materially harmful to the children."
Dante rubbed his face.
"She trusted Celeste too."
Nora looked at him.
"At first."
"What does that mean?"
Nora closed the computer.
"Three months before Isabel died, she told me she regretted naming Celeste."
Dante stared at her.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I tried."
"No, you didn't."
"I called you twice. You told me your wife was medicated and frightened."
Dante felt sick.
Nora did not soften the blow.
"You didn't want another problem."
He remembered.
He had been managing chemotherapy, two small children and a company crisis.
He had believed efficiency was kindness.
Let Celeste handle the legal work.
Let doctors handle Isabel.
Let assistants handle everything else.
"I was wrong," he said.
Nora's anger faltered.
"Yes."
That single word hurt more than a lecture.
Leo entered carrying an old charging cable.
"Dad, the tablet backed up sometimes."
Dante turned.
"What?"
"The blue tablet. When Mom's old computer is on."
Nora frowned.
"What computer?"
Isabel's silver desktop remained in the upstairs sitting room, largely untouched.
Dante ran upstairs.
The machine had not been turned on in months.
He powered it up.
The home network synchronization software loaded automatically.
Folders appeared.
Family photographs.
School projects.
Leo's videos.
Then a folder marked RECENT DEVICE BACKUPS.
Dante clicked.
Nothing from yesterday.
Leo's face fell.
"Maybe it didn't save."
Nora leaned forward.
"Wait."
At the bottom was an incomplete upload log.
One file.
Four hundred twelve megabytes.
Transfer interrupted at 3:03 p.m.
Filename:
SPYVIDEO_0617.MOV
The video itself was gone.
But the log showed something else.
It had synchronized briefly to the Moretti Meridian cloud server before deletion.
Dante stared at the screen.
Only company administrators could permanently purge that server.
Celeste was one of three people with that level of access.
Nora pointed to the deletion timestamp.
"Last night. 6:14."
Dante checked his own memory.
At 6:14, police had still been in his garden.
Celeste had been speaking to Detective Reeves.
Which meant someone else had deleted Leo's recording for her.
Dante looked at the administrator code.
VS-004.
He knew exactly who it belonged to.
Victor Sanz.
May you like
Moretti Meridian's chief financial officer.
And one of Dante's closest friends.
