CHAPTER 80

Safehouse, Northern Italy – 3 Days Later

The fire crackled in the stone hearth, casting long shadows that danced across Griffin's face as he slept on the couch, his fourteen-year-old features deceptively peaceful in the firelight. His fingers twitched intermittently—dreaming in code again, Maria had observed earlier. The same restless movements that had appeared after the incident in Geneva, when something fundamental had shifted in her son. When the boy who had once built robots for school science fairs had somehow accessed and manipulated systems that shouldn't have existed outside government black sites.

The safehouse was a seventeenth-century monastery perched on a cliff overlooking the Ligurian Sea, its thick stone walls providing both physical and psychological shelter from the chaos they'd left behind. James had found it through contacts Alexandra preferred not to think about too closely—the kind of people who specialized in making problems disappear, in creating new identiti