Nobody slept that night.
Elena had stopped expecting to, somewhere around Chapter Eleven, the exhaustion becoming its own strange kind of steady state, a fatigue so complete it had looped back around into something almost like clarity. She sat at the penthouse's kitchen island at two in the morning with Marcus Vale's journal open in front of her, Adrian across from her doing the same, both of them reading in silence because neither had the energy left to narrate what they found.
Giulia slept in the guest room down the hall, a security guard stationed outside her door, finally still after a day that had aged her years in hours. Luca had gone back to his own apartment an hour ago, promising to return by morning, his face still carrying the particular shock of a man who kept discovering he
