See the conclusion here.

Matteo turned back to face her, his eyes dark and heavy with a truth he had kept buried for years.

“No, Cameron,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “ Sofia was an only child. She had no sisters. No cousins. I hired three private intelligence firms to trace her entire bloodline, and there is no record of your family ever intersecting with hers.”

Cameron’s heart hammered against her ribs. She looked down at the photograph again, her stomach twisting into a cold knot. The resemblance was far beyond a coincidence—it was a precise mirror.

“Then why do I look like this?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Is this why you hired me?”

“I didn’t hire you,” Matteo replied slowly, placing his hands flat on the wooden desk. “My head of security hired you from a basic temp agency this morning. He didn’t know. Nobody knew. But the moment you walked through that door, I thought I was losing my mind.”

He reached back into the locked drawer and pulled out a heavy manila folder, sliding it across the polished desk toward her. It was stamped with a faded red seal.

“Two years ago, after the crash, the authorities gave me a closed casket,” Matteo continued, his gaze locked onto hers. “They told me the fire left nothing behind except her ring. But three weeks ago, I received an anonymous package containing medical records and a DNA report.”

Cameron picked up the folder with a cold, hesitant hand. She flipped it open. Inside were recent surveillance photos of herself—leaving her modest apartment, riding the subway, entering the Duca penthouse. Beside those photos were medical charts from a private clinic she had never heard of, dated five years ago.

“Sofia didn’t die in that car, did she?” Cameron whispered, horror dawning on her.

“The woman in the car wasn’t Sofia,” Matteo said, his voice tight with controlled fury. “Someone staged the accident. Someone took my wife, altered her memories, gave her a new identity, and placed her back in the city as a cleaning woman—completely unaware of who she really was.”

The room seemed to tilt. Cameron dropped the folder onto her lap. She looked down at her bruised hands, then at the small boy asleep against her side, his tiny fingers still clutching her apron for dear life. Memories—or the absence of them—rushed through her head. She remembered waking up in a hospital room three years ago with no past, no family, and only a name given to her on a fresh birth certificate.

Leo stirred in his sleep, breathing softly against her chest.

Matteo walked around the desk, stopping right in front of her. For the first time, the cold, invincible titan of New York looked entirely human, his eyes gleaming with unshed tears. He slowly knelt on the cold floor before her, mirroring the exact posture Cameron had used with his son moments earlier.

“You don’t remember me,” Matteo said, reaching out with a hesitant, trembling hand to touch the hem of her apron. “And you don’t remember him. But he knew you the second you walked into this room. A child’s heart doesn’t forget.”

Cameron looked from the photograph on the desk to the powerful man kneeling at her feet, and finally down to the little boy holding onto her like a lifeline. The missing years of her life suddenly took on a terrifying, undeniable weight.

“What do we do now?” she asked quietly.

Matteo gently laid his hand over hers and Leo’s joined hands, his grip warm and fiercely protective.

“Now,” Matteo said, his eyes burning with lethal promise, “we find out who took you from us—and we make them pay.”