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My throat tightened. Ayla came to stand beside us. Her usual smile was gone, leaving something quieter and more honest in its place.

“You look beautiful, Adriana.”

Beautiful was too generous a word for the woman staring back at me. Alive was enough.

Demitri stepped into the room. He came closer, stopping a few steps away. His eyes moved once over my face, then my hair. His head tilted slightly, as though he were seeing me for the first time.

“You look different.”

“I believe that was the point.”

His mouth softened faintly. “Yes, I suppose it was.”

Bianca began packing her things with a satisfied little smile. “Well. That was almost romantic. Terrible timing, naturally, but we work with what we have.”

“Bianca,” Ayla warned, though she was smiling.

“What? I’m a hairdresser. It’s my sacred duty to notice tension and make it worse.”

Demitri looked toward the ceiling as if praying for patience.

I gave a half-hearted laughed. The sound rose in me softly, fragile and alive.

For one evening, inside a guarded villa with danger waiting somewhere beyond the walls, I had been allowed to change one small thing about myself. It was only hair.

But when Demitri looked at me again, careful and silent, I felt something stubborn take root beneath the fear.

Hope.

It was small. Foolish. But mine.

17

DEMITRI

Something about being under Zeno’s roof felt like coming home.

Not because he had forgiven me. We still had a long way to go before I could pretend the past between us had been settled. But there was something familiar in the house, something that spoke a language I had spent years trying to forget.

I understood locks. Guards. Cameras hidden beneath ivy and behind stone walls. I understood the quiet vigilance of men who noticed everything and said nothing. Men who didn’t reach for their weapons unless they intended to use them.

I had spent ten years convincing myself I no longer belonged to that world. Then I walked through Zeno’s front door and understood every word of it. That was the trouble with belonging. It didn’t care whether you wanted it. It didn’t ask permission. It simply waited for you to stop running long enough to recognise it, then claimed you all over again.

We had been here for two days, and in that time, Ayla and Adriana had become fast friends. They were almost inseparable, talking over coffee, sharing quiet jokes, and somehow making this strange house feel less like a fortress and more like a home.

Zeno and I had filled in some of the gaps between us, too. Slowly. Carefully. We rarely touched the past. Especially when he mentioned my family. Those conversations ended quickly enough. Some wounds didn’t need reopening just because the scars were still there.

I found the chapel at the end of a narrow passage, exactly where Zeno had told me it would be, tucked behind the library. Apparently, he had built the house from the ground up and decided a chapel was necessary for those times when getting to a church wasn’t practical. It was small, quiet, and unexpectedly beautiful, with dark wood, stone walls, and enough solitude to make the rest of the house feel miles away.

I didn’t remember Zeno being particularly religious. Then again, I had known him a long time ago. People changed. Maybe that was Ayla’s influence. Or maybe there were parts of Zeno I had never known existed.

Either way, I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. I stood just inside the doorway, but I didn’t cross myself. For a moment, I simply stared at the first pew.

My knees should have bent automatically. They didn’t.

Instead, I walked forward and stopped, my gaze lifting to the crucifix above the altar.

For ten years, I had entered rooms like this and known exactly what to do with my hands. I knew when to kneel and when to stand. When to bow my head. When to speak and when silence was the only answer. I knew the rhythm of prayer so well it had once lived in my body without thought. I knew the shape of faith. But tonight, I couldn’t find the substance of it.