CHIARA
I woke to silence.
Not the silence of peace, but the kind that wrapped around me like a heavy blanket, pressing down, suffocating. My lashes fluttered open slowly, as though weighed with stones, and the world swam in hazy fragments of light and shadow. For a moment I had no bearings, no sense of time, no sense of where I was. Only the overwhelming disorientation that clung to me like a fog.
The ceiling above me came into focus first. High, white and familiar. A slow turn of my head told me what my sluggish mind couldn’t yet process. I was in my room. The one Massimo had given me here in his godforsaken mansion. The sheets were tucked around me with neat precision, their scent faintly infused with lavender and something sharper beneath it...antiseptic.
And then memory slammed int
