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Chapter 14: Under the Ashes

Author: Emel Emerald
last update Last Updated: 2025-04-18 17:32:27

Leya departed in silence from her mother's flat. The Roman streets slumbered half-awake, the sky bruised by the heaviness of a sun yet to rise. Her boots created soft reverberations on the pavement as she walked—no direction, no destination.

She needed to think.

To breathe.

Her father had given his life to protect something. Someone. A woman, a fund, a secret so explosive that it had pushed a man like Samuel Blackwood, a man with the power to kill with words, to fake his own death and conceal the evidence in a wax-sealed document.

And now it was hers.

Her mother's words reverberated in her mind:

"He said to her if the truth came out… it would destroy everything."

She looked at the letter again. The burned edges. The cut-off sentence.

".If they find out who you are—"

Who was she?

Not just a wife.

Not just a daughter.

There was something in her blood—something buried in her family tree—that made everyone either wanting to control her… or murder her.

Her hands shook.

She needed that miss
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