Chapter 13: The Heir

Lorenzo came the next morning before the sun had fully cleared the rooftops, dressed plainly enough that he might have passed for anyone on the street, except for the same careful, contained stillness that had marked him from the first moment Anastasia saw him in the shop. Isabella let him in without argument this time, some silent understanding already passed between them, and the three of them sat around the same kitchen table where the photograph still lay, half-covered now by the folded blue cloth. He looked at the photograph before he looked at either of them. Anastasia watched something shift behind his pale eyes—recognition, and beneath it, something graver.

“That’s the Romano garden,” he said quietly.

“You know it?”

“I’ve seen photographs of it before. Old ones, from before I was born.”

He didn’t elaborate further, and Anastasia found herself studying him with new suspicion, the careful evasions of the night before still fresh enough to sting.

“You said you’d tell me what you knew once you were certain,” she said.

“Are you certain now?”

Something crossed his face—reluctance, and beneath it, a kind of resolve that looked as if it had cost him something to arrive at. He nodded slowly.

“Anastasia Romano,” he said, and hearing her full name spoken aloud, in that voice, with that particular weight, sent something cold and strange sliding down her spine.

“You were five years old the night your family’s estate was attacked. Everyone in this city—everyone who matters in the world my family belongs to—has believed for twenty years that the entire Romano bloodline ended that night. That you died along with your parents.”

“But I didn’t.”

“No. Isabella saved you, and hid you well enough that even people who spent years looking for confirmation, one way or another, never found it.”

His gaze moved briefly to Isabella, something like respect in it.

“That’s not a small thing. What you did took extraordinary care, for twenty years, without a single mistake.”

“Until now,” Isabella said quietly.

“Until now,” Lorenzo agreed. Anastasia’s hands had curled into fists in her lap.

“Why does it matter? If everyone thought the family was gone—if there’s no one left to inherit, no business, no money, nothing—why would anyone care whether I’m alive or dead?”

Lorenzo was quiet for a moment, choosing his words the way she’d already learned he chose most things—carefully, deliberately, weighing the cost of each one before he let it leave his mouth.

“Because you’re not nothing,” he said finally.

“You’re the last living Romano. Whatever assets remain—accounts, properties, businesses legitimate and otherwise—all of it exists in a kind of legal limbo right now, unclaimed, because everyone assumed there was no one left alive to claim it. The moment it becomes known that you exist, that limbo ends. Some people will see that as an opportunity. Others—”

He stopped.

“Others will see it as a threat,” Anastasia finished.

“Yes.”

“What kind of threat?”

Lorenzo’s jaw tightened, some old weight settling behind his eyes.

“The Romano-Moretti rivalry is old, Anastasia. Older than either of us. There are people on both sides—and outside both families entirely—who have spent twenty years building a version of this city that assumes the Romano line is finished. Alliances, agreements, balances of power, all of it calibrated around your absence. If you’re alive, if you’re real, all of that becomes uncertain again. And uncertainty, in my world, tends to get people killed.”

“That’s why those men came after me.”

“I believe so, yes. Though I don’t yet know who sent them, or how much they actually know versus suspect.”

He held her gaze steadily.

“That’s the truth, as much of it as I currently have. I’m sorry it took me this long to give it to you plainly.”

Anastasia sat with it for a long moment, the photograph of her mother’s laughing face still visible at the edge of the table, the weight of an entire hidden war settling slowly onto shoulders that, three days ago, had known nothing heavier than an overdue flower order.

“You said your family,” she said slowly, something occurring to her.

“You said the world your family belongs to. What exactly is your family, Lorenzo?”

Something flickered behind his eyes—the first genuine hesitation she’d seen from him, a door he clearly hadn’t intended to open quite yet.

“The Morettis,” he said finally, quietly.

“My father is Salvatore Moretti. We are, in the same sense your family was, not entirely what we appear to be on paper.”

The name settled into the room like something dropped from a great height. Isabella’s breath caught audibly, and Anastasia turned to find her caretaker’s face gone pale, her eyes fixed on Lorenzo with an expression that mixed old fear with something else, something almost like recognition.

“Moretti,” Anastasia repeated slowly.

“You’re one of them. The rivalry you’re talking about—it’s between your family and mine.”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you here? Why did you save me last night, why are you sitting in my kitchen explaining all of this, if our families are supposed to be enemies?”

Lorenzo held her gaze, and for the first time since she’d met him, something entirely unguarded passed across his face—not the careful stillness he wore like armor, but something rawer beneath it.

“Because before the world believed your family had died,” he said quietly, “your father asked mine for a promise. That if any Romano blood survived, my family would not hunt them. That whatever remained of your family would be allowed to live in peace, whoever they became, wherever they ended up.”

His hands, resting on the table, had gone very still.

“I didn’t know, until a week ago, that promise might still matter to anyone. I intend to keep it regardless of what it costs me.”

The kitchen had gone utterly silent, the morning light slanting gold across the table, across the photograph of a woman who’d loved white roses and a war she’d never asked to be part of, and Anastasia found herself staring at the man across from her—an enemy by birth, apparently, and yet the only person in the last week who’d put himself between her and a gun without a moment’s hesitation—and understood, with a certainty that settled deep and cold into her chest, that whatever ordinary life she’d been living until this week was never coming back. She was, whether she wanted it or not, the last known Romano heir. And someone, somewhere, had already decided that fact was worth killing her for.