جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 40

Leona's POV My heels struck against the marble, too loud in the suffocating silence that followed the council’s bloodbath. I didn’t look back; I couldn’t. The crack of gunfire still rang in my skull, the sight of two men collapsing into their own blood imprinted behind my eyelids. And Valentina...Valentina on her knees, mascara streaked down her face, begging while Dante stood over her with a gun to her forehead.I pressed a hand against my chest as I slipped down the corridor. My pulse was wild, my breath uneven. I hated the sight of him like that. I hated that he had the power to unmake people with a single nod, a single bullet.But what I hated more was the way something inside me tightened with a sick, secret pride.I shook my head as if I could fling the thought away. No. He was a monster. A man like that could never...“Running away won’t change what you saw.”I froze. His voice was low, deliberate, too close. I turned slowly, and there he was...Dante, leaning in the shadows of

Leona’s POVThe silence after everything felt louder than the gunfire.I sat there, blood still warm on my palms from pressing against Dante’s wound, the smell of smoke and iron heavy in the air. My body was trembling, but my mind… my mind wouldn’t stop replaying the voices I’d heard when I was blindfolded.Rinaldi.They kept saying that name like it meant something.The Rinaldi heiress. The job. The war.It was like fragments of a puzzle being dumped in my lap without the picture to guide me. I knew the name, of course. Everyone in our world knew the name Rinaldi. But to me, it was just another powerful family that had vanished in blood and ashes years ago.I pressed my hand against my temple, trying to make sense of it. It was absurd. I wasn’t an heiress of anything. I wasn’t born into power. I wasn’t raised in wealth or prestige. Maybe they truly got the wrong person. I was Leona Moretti. An ordinary woman who’d lost her parents too young, left to stumble through life with only Luc

Leona’s POVThe walls of the bedroom closed in on me the moment the door slammed shut behind me. My chest heaved, and I pressed my back against the wood as though it could hold me together while the truth ripped me apart.Seraphina Rinaldi.The name echoed in my skull like a curse I never asked for. I slid down to the floor, my palms trembling as I buried my face in them. Hot, angry tears streamed through the cracks between my fingers.All my life I thought I was Leona Moretti. A nurse. An orphan. A survivor. A girl who had built herself out of scraps of grief and stubbornness. But now...now I was supposed to believe I was the last blood of a dynasty massacred before I could even remember them?My memories, the few scattered fragments I had of childhood, flashed across my mind. A woman with kind hands singing me to sleep. The scent of lemon soap on clothes hung in a garden-like backyard. A laugh, deep and rumbling, when I would reach out for arms that always felt too strong, too safe.

Leona’s POVThe room was quiet, but my body wasn’t.Every nerve still hummed, overstimulated, like a violin string plucked too hard and left trembling. His touch lingered like fire in my skin, and yet all I felt was the coldness that followed it. I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, my chest rising and falling too quickly, as though my body hadn’t caught up to my mind.Beside me, Dante slept. His breaths were steady, deep, powerful as if the weight of what had just happened was nothing. As if he hadn’t just ripped me open with his hunger and left me hollow inside.I turned my head to look at him. Even in sleep, he looked like a man carved out of granite and steel ... Beautiful, unmovable, untouchable. A man the world feared. My husband. My captor. My… destroyer.A bitter laugh almost escaped me, but it died in my throat. I couldn’t risk waking him. Not now. Not when my thoughts were finally clear enough to stitch themselves together.I should have known. All along, I should have

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 sputtered, sank to a shudder, came back, then stuttered again, once, twice and died. The generator kicked and the lights stayed black. Old instincts rose, cold and precise. check the feed, lock the gates, arm the men.I was already on my feet. The house was a different place in the dark; corridors that had been corridors of comfort became tunnels into the unknown. My men moved like phantoms, soft feet and low curses, but there was a wrongness under their efficiency, a tremor that said we were late.The first sound that made every hair on my skin stand on end was the gunshot.It came from the east wing. Not a crash or a shout ... a single, clean report that echoed and fell. For a second I di