Semua Bab Chains of Velvet, Heart of Fire: Bab 31 - Bab 33

The ambush hadn’t left a scratch on Lucien’s body.But it had opened a wound in his mind.He sat alone in the eastern gallery, light from the window striping across his cheekbones like pale scars. The gallery was quiet, hung with ancestral portraits that stared down with frozen judgment.Lucien ignored them.In front of him: a projected image from the attack site — frozen, blurred, then slowly enhanced by Matteo’s surveillance team.A single man. Slender build. Wavy dark hair.A hundred yards from the ridge, angled just enough away from the main cameras to obscure his face.But not enough.Lucien’s fingers clenched.The silhouette was older now, broader in the shoulders, but the stance… the tilt of the head… the arrogance in posture…It was unmistakable.Cristiano.The bastard wasn’t just alive.He’d been watching.From the shadows. From the side of the mountain. Not leading the ambush—but calculating its outcome.The implication was worse than Lucien had expected.Cristiano had plann

The air above the Cosenza compound smelled of rust, old oil, and something bitter—like burned coffee and cordite.Lucien stood in the open troop vehicle as it rolled through the last of the gravel path. A drone buzzed overhead, one of four, tracking the angles of entry, monitoring thermal signals.Matteo crouched over the mobile monitor inside, scanning live feeds.“No movement inside the primary corridor,” Matteo muttered. “But someone was here last night. The main gate sensor tripped for seventeen seconds. Then silence.”Lucien said nothing.His eyes stayed fixed on the compound.An old petroleum storage facility, it stretched out like a concrete corpse — long storage domes, collapsed piping, sun-eaten signage. The place should’ve been demolished a decade ago.Instead, it had become bait.Or so Cristiano wanted him to believe.But Lucien wasn’t here to play his brother’s game.He was here to finish it.“Three minutes out,” Matteo said into his comm. “Teams Alpha and Bravo in positio