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Gianni.

Names I had carried for years without allowing myself to hold them. Lives I had walked away from. People I had abandoned because I had convinced myself that leaving was the only way to save them from me.

Zeno watched my face.

Whatever he saw there softened something in his expression, though the anger remained.

And suddenly, I was somewhere else.

Years ago.

Another argument. Another ending.

Zeno standing before me with blood on his shirt and fury clenched behind his teeth while I told him I was done. That I had found another path. That God had a purpose for me that had nothing to do with the things men like us had been trained to do.

He had looked at me then as though I had died while standing in front of him. Maybe I had. Maybe that was why coming back felt so much like digging through my own grave.

“My family is safer without me,” I said firmly.

Zeno shook his head.

“No. They’re blind without you.”

My hand curled into a fist. Then slowly opened again.

“I don’t want them involved.”

“You don’t have a choice, Demi.”

“There is always a choice.”

The air between us changed. Even the guard near the hedge seemed to sense it. His head turned slightly before he deliberately looked away. Well trained. But not deaf. Zeno lowered his voice.

“If your identity is compromised, your family is in danger.” He stepped closer. “Someone found you in Rome. Someone either knows who you are or is close enough to find out. If that information reaches the wrong table, there will be a bloodbath.”

I thought of my brothers and sister. Older now in ways I couldn't possibly understand. Lives that had grown beyond me. Scars they had earned without me there to bleed beside them.

“I don’t want them involved in this.”

“Unfortunately, we’re past that, Demi.” His voice was quiet now, almost gentle. “It’s only a matter of time before this lands on their doorstep.”

I looked toward the house.

For Adriana, I had stepped back into a world I had spent years trying to forget.

For my family, I was about to open a door I had spent a decade holding shut.

18

DEMITRI

The family home had shrunk in the absence of my memory.

The walls were still high. The iron gates still carried the family crest, worked into the black metal as though it had been forged there with the house itself. Cypress trees still lined the drive in severe formation, their dark silhouettes standing like sentries on either side of the gravel.

The house rose beyond them in pale stone and dark shutters, imposing and familiar, carrying the weight of old money and newer alliances.

It hadn’t become smaller.