The air in the lighthouse ruins had grown cold, but it was the silence that felt lethal. Giulia stared at the black screen where her own face—or a cruel, distorted version of it—had just promised to dismantle her life. She looked at her hands, the same hands that had made espresso, scrubbed floors, and eventually held the lever that broke an empire. Were they truly her hands? Or were they merely the hands of the "bait" while the "hook" waited in the deep?
“Lucia,” Giulia whispered, the name feeling like a shard of glass in her throat. “She called herself Lucia.”
Matteo didn’t move. He was staring at the gun he had placed on the table, his mind clearly racing through every security breach, every unexplained shadow, and every moment of the last six months. “Separated at birth,” he murmured
