Chiara’s Pov
The drive from the Italian border to the coast of Greece was a blur of fear and determination. I had done something Giovanni would have forbidden, something Domenico would never forgive. I had slipped past my sons’ security detail in Bari, refusing to be relegated to the role of the anxious, useful mother who waits by the phone. My sons were obsessed with the logistics of this war, the ships, the assets, the power vacuum. They saw Isabella as the key, the political entity. I saw my daughter, terrified and in labor, taken by a viper.
My driver, an old family retainer whose loyalty ran deeper than the Romano name, had brought me here to Thessaloniki, to the temporary headquarters Vladimir Volkov had established. The building, all cold steel and razor-wire efficiency, felt like
