The Moretti Family’s Useless Eighth Daughter Was Actually a Hidden Powerhouse Chapter 02

The Moretti Family’s Useless Eighth Daughter Was Actually a Hidden Powerhouse Chapter 02

So I started doing absolutely nothing, without a shred of guilt.

I slept through piano lessons, pretended to faint during riding lessons, and folded paper airplanes in advanced mathematics.

From kindergarten through college graduation, I successfully became a joke to both New York high society and the city’s underworld.

For a while, my parents actually wondered whether something was wrong with me.

They took me to the most famous psychologists in New York, London, and Zurich.

In the end, the doctors gave them more or less the same opinion: my cognitive development might be delayed, and my emotional responses seemed unusually weak.

The Moretti family eventually accepted their fate.

They stopped forcing me to study and treated me like a fragile, beautiful canary, safely sheltered beneath the family’s wings.

Until today.

Eight rival families from Europe and North America struck at the same time.

It was a long-planned siege.

Every buck in the massive accounts controlled by Alessandro was frozen ten minutes before the market opened.

The contacts Matteo had built over years seemed to vanish all at once. Every important number went dead.

Enzo’s security unit had never lost a fight. Now an unknown force had disarmed every one of them in the underground garage.

Even Elio, the hardest-working of us all, had just smashed his third keyboard, and the Moretti Group’s internal firewalls were still collapsing layer by layer.

“Damian Falcone, you have gone too far.”

Alessandro braced both hands against the table. His knuckles had gone white from the pressure.

After several sleepless nights, his voice was raw.

Damian gave a quiet laugh.

He set down his espresso and unhurriedly straightened his suit cuff.

“Alessandro, our families have known each other for years. You make it sound so personal. I’m helping the Moretti family end a war it can’t win. The money shorting you overseas is five times your cash reserves. By midnight, Moretti Holdings stock will be worth about as much as scrap paper.”

He stood, walked over to my father, uncapped a fountain pen himself, and held it out.

“Sign it, Don Vittorio. At least you can save your wife and children’s lives.”

My father’s hand shook violently.

He stared at the pen as though it were a blade at his family’s throats.

My fingers stopped over the game console.

The blocks piled to the top of the screen.

Game Over.

I finally looked up at Damian Falcone’s still-courteous face.

“Damian, can you speed this up? I’m hungry.”

I yawned.

The entire conference room went silent.

All eight rival representatives turned to look at me.

Damian turned toward me, pity plain in his eyes.

“Don Vittorio, even Alessia is hungry. Sign sooner, and you can at least take her out for one last decent dinner.”

“Alessia, shut up.”

Enzo whipped around and glared at me.

His eyes were bloodshot and his voice was harsh, but his body shifted half a step toward me on instinct, blocking a rival representative’s predatory stare.

I said nothing and started a new game.

That was what my seven brothers were like.

When they saw me doing nothing, they wanted to drag me off the sofa and teach me how to be a functional human being.

But when danger showed up, they still instinctively treated me like the little sister who knew nothing and had to be protected.

Damian sighed softly.

He walked back to the head of the table and adjusted his cuff links.

“Apparently, the Morettis still haven’t accepted reality.”

He snapped his fingers.

The conference-room doors swung open.

Several men in black suits pushed in a metal cart.

There was no food on it. Only a bright-white cutting board.

Beside it lay a surgical blade that made everyone in the room go silent.