A NAME WRITTEN IN ASH
683 Words
The church ruin echoed long after she left.
Sarafina didn’t look back.
She’d tossed Dante the poisoned USB not as a warning, but as a declaration. The game had changed — and if he didn’t realize it now, he would when everything he’d built began to burn.
She returned to the safehouse soaked in fog and silence. The sky overhead cracked with lightning, but it didn’t rain. Just tension. Just the waiting.
Noemi had already lit a burner under the data lab. Code streamed across three laptops as the virus began building its own defense — a backup to the backup. A digital copy of Sarafina’s consciousness, coded into a fail-safe that would trigger if Dante tried to turn her into a weapon again.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” Noemi muttered.
“Like what?”
“Cold. Sure. Focused. But now… you’re something else.”
Sarafina didn’t respond. She was staring at the mirror above the vault door. At her reflection.
She didn’t recognize the woman there anymore.
But maybe that was the point.
---
In another part of the city...
Dante sat in silence, the USB untouched beside him.
He didn’t plug it in.
He knew better.
And yet, something about Sarafina’s threat hadn’t felt like a bluff. It had felt like prophecy.
He leaned forward and stared at the chessboard in front of him — a real one, handmade, ivory pieces — and knocked over the king with a flick of his hand.
The lion, silent as ever, etched into the board.
I made her, he thought.
But what if she was no longer his to control?
---
Back at the safehouse.
The alert pinged just after midnight.
Noemi’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Someone just tried to breach the decoy firewall. It’s coming from... Vatican internal networks.”
Sarafina turned, eyes sharpening. “Who the hell has access to that?”
“Besides the dead?” Noemi asked. “Only one man.”
Sarafina’s stomach dropped.
Archbishop Antonio Lucetti.
Her uncle.
She hadn’t seen him since her father’s funeral — since the day he kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “The devil’s not in fire, darling. He’s in secrets.”
Noemi looked at her. “What do we do?”
Sarafina stood, her fingers tightening around her holster.
“We pay him a visit.”
---
Hours later, inside the private quarters of the Roman Curia.
The scent of incense clung to everything. Velvet drapes. Mahogany crosses. Gilded mirrors that reflected nothing but judgment.
Antonio Lucetti didn’t look surprised to see her.
He was older now. Thinner. But his eyes still glinted with the same arrogant calm her father used to curse under his breath.
“Sarafina,” he said, rising. “I wondered how long it would take.”
“You tried to hack me.”
“I tried to save you.”
She scoffed. “Is that what they’re calling surveillance now?”
Antonio folded his hands behind his back. “You think your father told you everything. He didn’t.”
“He told me enough to know you’ve always stood with the wrong side.”
“No,” Antonio said softly. “I stood with order. Your father wanted chaos. He thought silence would liberate the world. But some truths must remain buried.”
She stared at him. “Like what?”
He approached, gently, like she was a skittish child. “Like the fact that you weren’t his only creation.”
The air went still.
Sarafina’s pulse faltered. “What did you say?”
Antonio leaned in.
“There is another.”
---
Meanwhile, in a steel cell beneath the Vatican.
The girl sat against the wall, head bowed, her hands chained.
Same eyes. Same hair. Same scar on her left wrist.
But not Sarafina.
She raised her head when the door opened.
A whisper fell from her lips, shaped like a name.
“Dante.”
And he stepped inside — slowly, carefully — like he was entering a cathedral built of lies.
She looked up at him.
And smiled.
- Writer
