(Isabella’s POV)
The safe house was a tomb, filled with the ghosts of a life that wasn't mine. Dust sheets covered the heavy, ornate furniture, and the air was thick with the stale, stagnant scent of time. The brutal, adrenaline-fueled escape from Bianchi’s gala felt a world away, but the true horror of the night was just beginning to settle in my bones, a cold, creeping dread that no locked door could keep out.
Sleep was an impossibility. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw it: my father’s Botticelli, a masterpiece of sorrowful beauty, hanging on the wall of the man who had murdered him. It was a trophy. My father’s life, his legacy, reduced to a spoil of war. The narrative I had carried for a decade—the shame of a father who was a traitor, a man who had made a deal with a monster and pa
