Semua Bab Chains of Velvet, Heart of Fire: Bab 41 - Bab 50

The sun hadn’t yet risen when the walls of the Marchesi estate began whispering secrets.Matteo stood motionless in the east corridor, his body pressed into shadow, eyes fixed on the door of Guest Suite 4B. The room hadn’t been occupied in weeks—or so everyone believed. But now, at 3:41 a.m., the sensor blinked green. Motion detected. Door opened.Anton’s voice crackled softly in his earpiece. “Movement confirmed. Entry. One figure.”“Copy,” Matteo whispered, sliding his sidearm loose from its holster.He didn’t rush.He didn’t need to.This wasn’t about catching prey.This was about letting the rat believe it had found the cheese.Vincenzo stood in the server room, observing the access logs populating in real-time. His eyes tracked the digital fingerprints with clinical precision.“The guest wing’s signal matches the burner used to leak our vault routes to Adriana’s people,” he said. “They’re still using last quarter’s ghost protocol. Sloppy.”Lucien, standing at his side, was silent

The sea was calm.For once.But inside the Marchesi estate, the air was thick with tension. The calm before a different kind of storm.Lucien stood alone in the war room, the blue-tinted security monitors flickering across his face. Outside, the estate guards doubled their patrols. Inside, the windows were reinforced, supply lines checked, every contingency prepped for a siege.But Lucien wasn’t thinking about supply lines.He was thinking about Seraphina.And the way her voice trembled—just once—when she whispered, “You’re late.”She hadn’t spoken to him since the rescue.She stayed in the guest wing—not their bedroom—and declined meals, meetings, even company.Matteo had offered to speak with her. Anton volunteered to guard her door.Lucien said no to both.“She comes to me when she’s ready,” he said.But inside, he was unraveling by the hour.Seraphina stood on the balcony of her temporary suite, the ocean stretching wide and heartless in the distance. Salt stung the air. She hadn’

It began with a letter.Neatly folded, sealed in black wax, no name on the outside.Seraphina found it slid beneath the door of her study in the east wing of the estate—where she kept records, training notes, and relics of her past she didn’t speak about. For a moment, she stared at the envelope, something ancient and cold curling around her spine.She opened it with shaking fingers.Inside was a photograph—one she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.Her mother.Smiling.Arms wrapped around Seraphina’s waist in the dressing room of a secondhand theater in Milan. That day. The final performance before the accident. The day she lost everything.But there was something different.A message scratched across the photo in a handwriting she didn’t recognize but somehow understood.“She knew they would betray you. And still, she stayed silent.”Seraphina dropped the photo.It fluttered to the hardwood floor, the corners trembling like wings.The room felt colder now.The same way it had when Luci

The silence on the line lasted just long enough to signal something was wrong.Then came the static.Then nothing at all.Vincenzo didn’t hesitate.He triggered the emergency trace beacon on Matteo’s encrypted device, fingers moving across the console faster than thought. The location pinged once—then splintered into five false echoes, each scattering in different directions across Eastern Europe.A spiderweb of deception.A digital smear.Someone had overwritten Matteo’s GPS and cloaked it in ghost protocols.Only two people Vincenzo knew could do that. One was sitting upstairs in the Marchesi estate.The other was Adriana.Lucien reached the control room within minutes.He didn’t knock. Didn’t speak.His coat was still half-open from his interrupted briefing with the Dubrovnik cell leaders. His eyes were already storm-dark, the barely-caged version of himsel

The world blurred after Adriana’s confession.The words hadn’t just cut.They carved.Seraphina moved through the estate in silence, her expression unreadable. She answered no questions. Offered no explanations. She simply walked—to the garden, the training hall, the solarium—haunted but alive.She hadn’t cried.Not because she wasn’t breaking.But because she refused to.Julian had seduced her. Sold her.And still, her body remembered how it felt to believe it was love.That betrayal clung to her skin like old perfume—sweet, ghostly, shameful.But the worst part wasn't that Julian never loved her.It was that she had wanted to believe he had.She stared at her reflection in the glass of the greenhouse window, the same greenhouse Lucien had reinforced after their relocation. Her face had hardened, her eyes darker, less open.She wasn't the girl Julian