---- Chapter 11 Giovanni POV: My security team worked miracles. Within a day, they had used back channels and a significant amount of cash to temporarily restore a cached archive of Isabella's social media. It was a ghost of her digital life, a snapshot of what had been erased. | spent hours scrolling through it, a digital archaeologist digging through the ruins of my own life. The early pictures were full of life. Us in Italy on our honeymoon, young and ridiculously happy. Her, laughing, at a family barbecue. Her face was open, unguarded. She looked at me in those photos with a pure, uncomplicated love that now felt like a punch to the gut. | kept scrolling, year by year. A slow, subtle change began to emerge. The posts became less personal. More photos of her art, her photography-landscapes, abstract images. Fewer pictures of us. The last photo she ever posted of me was over a year ago. A year ago. The same time | had started sleeping with Sofia. The realization hit me with the force of a physical blow. She hadn't just found out. She had known. For months. Maybe the ---- whole year. She had been watching me, her heart breaking in silence, while she planned her escape. The quiet dinners, her feigned illnesses, her distant smiles-it wasn't stress. It was a performance. She was an actress, and | was the fool who believed the play was real. A deep, gut-wrenching regret, an emotion | had always considered a weakness, consumed me. | had done this. | had taken her light and snuffed it out with my own selfish, stupid pride. | scrolled to the very end of the archive. The last thing she ever posted, just before she wiped her entire existence, was a single, cryptic image. It was a picture of a birdcage, its door wide open, the bird long gone. There was no caption. There didn't need to be. The days that followed were a blur of whiskey and misery. | stayed in the empty mansion, the silence a constant, screaming reminder of her absence. The place felt haunted by the ghost of her, of us. The echo of her laughter in the hallway. The scent of her perfume | imagined on a stray pillow. Sofia called. Endlessly. | ignored her. The thought of her, of the cheap, tawdry affair that had cost me everything, filled me with a nauseating disgust. An email notification popped up on my phone. A calendar reminder. 'Bella's Birthday Dinner @ Eleven Madison Park'. | had completely forgotten. Her birthday had been last week. The same day Sofia had sent me that picture of the promise ---- ring. Anew wave of self-loathing washed over me. | stumbled through the house, looking for something, anything, of her. In the back of a junk drawer, | found it. The small silk pouch she had left on the bed. | had thrown it in here in my rage. | opened it again. The melted gold slug felt heavy and cold in my hand. It wasn't just her ring. It was our life. Our future. Our family's legacy. She hadn't just left me. She had melted it all down into something ugly and unrecognizable. The regret curdled, transforming into a hot, vengeful fury. This wasn't just an escape. This was an attack. A direct assault on me, on the Moretti name. This was a violation of every code we lived by. She wanted a war? She would get one. | called my lawyer. "| want to file a missing person's report for my wife, Isabella Moretti," | said, my voice cold as steel. "And | want to file an injunction to freeze all assets under the name Isabella Rossi. Claim she is mentally unstable, a danger to herself. Claim she was coerced. | don't care what you have to do. Just get it done."