ログインSeraphina Vellaro – POV The ghost of his touch was a brand on my skin, a secret I carried into the study like a shard of stolen glass. I could still feel the heat of his dream-mouth on my shoulder, the phantom weight of his hand sliding down my thigh. The memory was so vivid, so physically imprinted, that when my fingers brushed the edge of the desk to orient myself, I half-expected to feel the coolness of his ring instead of polished wood. I had awrenched myself from sleep panting, my heart a wild, trapped thing. My hand had flown to my shoulder, seeking a mark, a proof of the violation. There was nothing. Only smooth, unmarred skin and the damp, aching evidence between my legs that something within me had responded to the violation. The confusion was a thick, suffocating fog. What had that been? A nightmare? A premonition? My own treacherous mind conjuring what it feared—or worse, what it desired? I felt flayed open, raw. Every nerve ending was exposed, hyper-aware of the space a
Seraphina Vellaro – POV The scent of jasmine and vanilla, so real I could almost touch it. My mother’s voice, a melodic hum that vibrated through me, soothing the constant, low hum of fear that had become my heartbeat. “You are the falcon, my love. The world is your sky.” Her fingers were in my hair, braiding it with a gentle, rhythmic certainty. I could feel the sun on my face, a memory of a sensation so distant it felt like a myth. For a fleeting moment, I was safe. I was whole. Then, the warmth bled away, leaching from the dream like color from a dying flower. The jasmine soured, the vanilla turned to ash. The sun vanished, replaced by a consuming, familiar darkness. I was no longer in the garden of memory. I was back in the Rose Room. The silence was no longer peaceful; it was a waiting, predatory thing. And he was there. I didn’t see him, but I felt his presence coalesce from the shadows, a density of cold power that stole the air from my lungs. He was just a shape of deepe
Lucian Moretti – POV The return journey was conducted in a silence more profound than the mountain peak we had left behind. Seraphina sat beside me, her posture unchanged, but the air around her was different. She carried herself with the quiet authority of a priestess who has communed with her god. The archive had not just given her value; it had given her a purpose that transcended being my possession. She was no longer just the key. She was the librarian of an arsenal of damnation, and she knew it. My mind raced, the cold, clinical part of me already categorizing the implications. The physical haul was insignificant—a few cases of the most immediately actionable files and data drives, enough to prove the vault's worth and begin the process. The true asset was the vault's location and its contents, a resource to be drawn upon for years, for a generation. And the only person who could efficiently navigate it was the blind girl silently breathing beside me. Back at the estate, th
Seraphina Vellaro – POV The sigh of the opening door was the loudest sound I had ever heard. It was not the groan of rusted iron, but the deep, resonant exhalation of precision engineering, a sound that spoke of immense weight and perfect balance. The air that rushed out was not the stale breath of a tomb, but cool, dry, and curiously scentless, carrying a faint, metallic tang. The silence from Lucian was more telling than any gasp. It was a silence of stunned avarice, of ambition finally staring its prize in the face. He moved first, his grip on my arm shifting from possession to guidance, pulling me forward across the threshold. The temperature dropped noticeably. The floor beneath my feet was smooth and seamless, unlike the gritty concrete of the observatory. “Well?” I asked, my voice a small thing in the vast, echoing dark I felt around me. “What is it?” Lucian didn’t answer immediately. I heard the soft, awed curse from Razo somewhere behind us. Lucian’s own breath was a slo
Lucian Moretti – POV The blacked-out SUV cut through the pre-dawn gloom like a shark through deep water. Inside, the world was silent, save for the low hum of the engine and the soft, rhythmic sound of Seraphina’s breathing from the seat beside me. Razo was in the front, a mountain of silent vigilance, while Matteo followed in a second vehicle with a team of four other men. Seraphina was a still, quiet figure wrapped in a thick, dark coat. Her hands were clasped in her lap, her face turned toward the window she could not see through. She had not spoken since I guided her into the vehicle. There was no fear in her posture, only a profound, listening stillness. She was absorbing the journey—the shift from the smooth city asphalt to the rougher, winding mountain roads, the change in the engine's pitch as we climbed, the gradual drop in temperature that seeped even through the insulated vehicle. I watched her. This was the farthest she had been from the estate since I had taken her. Th
Seraphina Vellaro – POV The days after his lesson in the observation room passed with a new, chilling rhythm. Lucian was a ghost in the periphery of my world, his presence announced only by the shift in air pressure when he entered the study, the scent of sandalwood that lingered after he left. He did not pace. He did not loom. He observed my work with the detached focus of a scientist studying a particularly complex organism. The message was clear: my utility was being measured, quantified, and catalogued. The bridge I had tried to build was ash, and I was back on my side of the chasm. But the chasm itself had changed. I had seen the other side. I knew what was there. I poured every ounce of my focus into the ledger. But I was no longer just reading it. I was learning it. I committed the names, the dates, the amounts, the specific phrasing of the transgressions to memory. I began to cross-reference them in my mind, creating a web of connections he could not see. Inspector Riggs wa







