THE FABULOUS DOCTOR LUNA HE THREW AWAY?

CHAPTER 8

SERA

The old house.

They found the old house.

The phone shook in my hand so bad the image blurred. But I didn't need to see it clearly. I knew that house. I knew every broken wall, every charred beam, every inch of blackened earth where my childhood used to stand.

I hadn't been back there since I was twelve. Since the night my world turned to ash and I became an orphan standing on a sidewalk in her pajamas, watching firefighters arrive too late.

And now the Zanettis were there. Standing in the bones of my family's grave. Touching things that didn't belong to them. Digging through the rubble of a life they helped destroy.

Wait.

My breath caught. A cold realization crept up my spine like fingers made of ice.

Did they help destroy it?

I never knew who killed my family. The police called it an electrical fire. An accident. Case closed. But I always knew that was a lie. Fires don't start in three rooms at once. Fires don't lock doors from the outside. Fires don't leave bullet casings in the garden that a twelve year old girl finds weeks later when she sneaks back to the ruins to look for her brother's teddy bear.

I never found the bear. But I found the casings. Three of them, half buried in the dirt near the back door.

I kept them. For years, I kept them in a small box under my bed. Then, when I became Sera Valentini, I buried the box in a storage unit and tried to forget.

I never forgot.

"Sera." Dimitri's voice was close. Too close. "What is the old house?"

I looked up at him. His grey eyes were sharp, scanning my face, reading me the way he always could. That was the thing about Dimitri. He could read everyone. He saw through lies and masks like they were made of glass.

Everyone except himself. He never saw what he was becoming until it was too late.

"My family's house," I said, and my voice sounded dead even to my own ears. "Where I grew up. Before the fire."

His jaw tightened. "In Russia?"

"Outside of Moscow. A small village. Nobody goes there. Nobody even remembers it exists." I swallowed hard. "My father built it himself. Before I was born. Before he became what he became."

Dimitri took the phone from my trembling hand gently. He looked at the photo again, then at the message. His nostrils flared.

"They're baiting you," he said. "They want you to panic and go there."

"It's working," I whispered.

"You're not going."

My head snapped up. "Excuse me?"

"If those documents exist, the Zanettis are hoping you'll lead them straight to whatever your father hid. They'll follow you. Use you. And when they have what they want, they'll kill you."

I knew he was right. I hated that he was right. Hating Dimitri for being right was practically a hobby at this point.

"But if they already found the house," I said slowly, "why do they need me?"

Dimitri paused. I could see the gears turning behind his eyes. "Because they haven't found what they're looking for. Not yet. The message is a bluff. They want you scared enough to come running."

"My father said the walls remember," I murmured, more to myself than to him. "What if he meant it literally? What if something is hidden inside the walls?"

Dimitri looked at me. "Do you remember anything else he said?"

I closed my eyes. The memory was fragile, like holding smoke. My father's face was blurry now, faded by time and grief. But his voice. I could still hear his voice. Low, rough, smelling like tobacco and pine.

"He came into my room," I said, my eyes still closed. "The night before it happened. He sat on my bed and woke me up. I was annoyed because it was late and I had school the next day."

My throat tightened. God, I was annoyed at him. My father came to say goodbye and I was annoyed because I had a math test in the morning.

"He said, 'If anything happens to me, moya luna, go to the old house. The walls remember what people forget.' I told him nothing was going to happen and to let me sleep."

I opened my eyes. They were wet. I blinked the tears back because I refused to cry in front of Dimitri Volkov. I had used up all my tears on him already. He didn't get any more.

"He knew," Dimitri said quietly. "He knew they were coming."

"Yes."

"And he sent you to your friend's house that night on purpose."

My chest cracked. Not broke. Cracked. Because I had thought about this a thousand times. A million. Why did my father insist I sleep at Mila's house that night? Why was he so firm about it when he usually let me do whatever I wanted?

Because he knew. He knew and he saved me. He saved me and let everyone else die.

Or maybe he thought he could save them all. Maybe his plan failed. Maybe he ran out of time.

I would never know. And that was the worst part.

"There's something else," I said, wiping my eyes quickly. "Something I never told anyone."

Dimitri waited.

"The bullet casings I found in the garden weeks after the fire." I looked at him. "They weren't Russian made."

His eyebrows pulled together. "What?"

"They were Italian."

The silence that followed was so thick I could feel it pressing against my skin. Dimitri's face went through three expressions in two seconds. Confusion. Realization. Rage.

"The Zanettis," he breathed.

"I didn't know that then," I said. "I was twelve. I didn't know what Italian ammunition looked like. I only figured it out years later, in medical school, when I started researching ballistics because I couldn't let it go."

Dimitri's hands were shaking. Not from fear. From the kind of anger that started quiet and ended in bloodshed.

"They killed your family," he said, and it wasn't a question.

"I think so."

"And now they're back for whatever your father was protecting."

I nodded.

Dimitri looked at me, and something shifted between us. Not forgiveness. Not love. Something older. Something deeper. The kind of understanding that only exists between two people who have both lost everything and know exactly what it costs.

"We go to the house," he said.

"You just said I shouldn't go."

"That was before I knew the Zanettis murdered your family." His grey eyes were hard as steel. "Now we go. Together. And we find whatever your father hid before they do."

My heart was pounding. My wolf was pacing. Every logical part of my brain was screaming that this was a trap.

But my father's voice was louder.

The walls remember what people forget.

"Okay," I said. "Together."

The word felt strange on my tongue. Foreign. I hadn't said it to Dimitri in two years.

Viktor appeared in the doorway, his face pale. He looked at Dimitri, then at me, then back at Dimitri.

"We have a problem," he said.

"Another one?" Dimitri's voice was tight.

Viktor stepped aside and someone walked in behind him. A woman. Tall, blonde, beautiful in the cold and perfect way that made other women feel small. She was wearing a red dress and heels that clicked against the floor like a countdown.

I knew her.

I knew her because she was the reason I signed those divorce papers.

Katya. Dimitri's mistress.

She looked at me with wide eyes, then at Dimitri, then smiled.

"Darling," she said sweetly, placing her hand on her stomach. "I came to tell you the good news. We're having a baby."