LOGINLEONA’S POVI had been staring at my father’s files for nearly an hour when I finally noticed it.Not a name. Not a photograph. A gap. My eyes moved slowly down the handwritten index.R-18.R-19.Then…R-21.I frowned. I went back to the beginning Then I checked again.There was no R-20.I pulled the files apart, checking every folder, every envelope, every loose sheet.Nothing.My father’s records were meticulous. He didn’t skip numbers. He especially wouldn’t skip one in the middle of an investigation. I sat back.“Where did you go, R-20?”The question hung in the room. I picked up my mother’s journal. Maybe she’d left something behind. I flipped through the pages, searching for anything that might correspond with the missing file.Then I remembered something.A sentence I’d read before but dismissed because I didn’t understand it. I found the page.My mother’s handwriting was faded in places, but the words were clear.“The house where travelers once slept beneath the Rinaldi name s
Leona’s POV By the time I returned to my temporary apartment, my head was pounding.I locked the door behind me and spread the documents across the small table. For hours, I went through them. Names, Accounts, companies, transfers. Some appeared once, others appeared repeatedly. Then I noticed one. I stopped.Vetra Holdings.The name appeared several times throughout my father's records, although sometimes it was written under a different company name.I pulled another file closer. There it was again. An older name.Vetra Mercantile Group.I frowned. Why had the company changed its name? I opened my laptop and searched for it. The first results were ordinary. Business listings, news articles and corporate information.Nothing suspicious. So, I kept searching. The more I looked, the more I realized that Vetra Holdings had existed long before its current owners. It had changed names. Changed offices. Changed directors.At first, I thought that was normal. Companies changed ownership al
LEONA’S POVI barely slept that night.The key lay on the table beside me, catching the faint light that slipped through the curtains.I had stared at it for so long that its shape had become familiar.Small. Old. Brass.A lion engraved into the top. And yet, somehow, this little piece of metal had survived everything that had destroyed my family.I picked it up again.Alessandro had trusted me with it. He hadn’t told me what it opened. Maybe he didn’t know. Or perhaps he had known exactly what it opened and deliberately allowed me to discover it myself. Either way, I knew one thing.The answer was somewhere in Verona. And I had already seen it. I just hadn’t understood it yet. I reached for my mother’s journal. The leather cover was worn from the number of times I’d opened it since arriving in Verona. I placed it on my lap and began turning through the pages again.I’d read them so many times that some sentences were practically memorized.The river. The lion. The house.The place wh
DANTE’S POVI had seen photographs of the Rinaldi building before.But photographs never carried history properly.They didn’t show the cracks in the stone. They didn’t show the places where time had tried to erase a family and failed. They didn’t show the weight that settled over a place when too many memories had been buried inside it.I stood beside the car, looking up at the building.For a moment, I was fifteen again.Too young to understand what the adults around me were discussing.Too young to understand why my father had suddenly stopped allowing me into certain rooms.Too young to understand why the name Rinaldi had disappeared from our conversations almost overnight.But I remembered this building.Not clearly. Pieces.My father’s car parked outside. Men in dark suits. My father speaking with Domenico Rinaldi and a man who had always seemed to be somewhere nearby.Alessandro Bellini.I hadn’t thought about him in years.“That’s him,” Luca said beside me.I looked at him.“Y
Dante’s POV The pensione looked insignificant.Three floors, old stone and faded sign above the entrance.Nothing about it suggested that a woman I had spent two months searching for had once slept inside.I stood across the street and stared.“Don’t approach the clerk,” I told Luca.“Why?”“Because if someone rehearsed his story, they’ll know exactly what he was supposed to say.”“And if we question him?”“He’ll repeat it.”“So what do we do?”“Watch.”We remained there for nearly an hour. People came and went. A woman carrying groceries, an elderly couple, a delivery man. Nothing, then a man stepped out of the pensione.He paused, looked around and then, walked away.I narrowed my eyes.“Follow him.”Luca immediately reached for his phone. One of our men moved after him. I watched until they disappeared around the corner.Then I looked back at the pensione.Leona had been here, that much was real. But why?Was she passing through?Was she hiding?Was someone helping her? Or had she
Leona’s POVThe first thing I noticed about Verona was the silence. Not the absence of sound. There was plenty of it.Cars whispered over wet roads. Somewhere in the distance, a bell tolled through the night. People laughed beneath umbrellas, their voices carried away by the cold wind. A train groaned behind me as it pulled away from the station, leaving a trail of steam and the metallic smell of rain but beneath all of it was something quieter.Something that felt like it was waiting.I stood on the platform with my small bag hanging from my shoulder, the leather-bound book pressed against my chest.Verona.I had said the name so many times in my head that it had almost stopped sounding real. Now I was standing inside it.My birthplace.The place my mother had written about, the place my father had apparently tried to protect. The place where my family had begun…And where, according to the words hidden inside that book, everything would eventually end.I looked around. There was not
Leona's POV My knees weakened. Reality burned, searing through me, leaving me with more questions than answers. I wanted to scream at him, claw the smug calm off his face, demand why he thought I could handle this.Because beneath that ruthless mask of his, I caught it. Just for a second. The flick
Leona’s POV It's been over two months now but I can't forget that night.The night I left, the world didn’t end...it just went silent.No sirens. No footsteps. No shouting in the hall. Only my heartbeat, pounding too fast for a body that hadn’t run far enough yet.I didn’t look back. If I did, I
Dante's POV The dark hit me like a hand to the chest, not the mere absence of light but the thick, watching kind of dark that presses against your skin and whispers of things you can’t control. For weeks I’d been living in a half-shadow, but that night the shadow moved.The chandelier over my desk
Dante's POV Luca appeared, disheveled but sharp-eyed, pulling on his jacket as he approached. “What happened?”“She’s gone.”His face stilled. That unshakable calm of his faltered, if only for a breath. Then he was moving. “Cameras. Guards. Every exit. We’ll find her.”I followed, but the mansion’s







