The city hadn’t slept since the chapel burned.
Everyone knew something had shifted.
It wasn’t just smoke in the air anymore — it was tension. Sharp. Hungry. Like the city itself was bracing for blood.
Alessia stood beneath the cracked archway of her cousin’s old safehouse, the dim candlelight casting golden shadows across her face. The letter still trembled in her hand, its words carved into her skull like the sharp edge of a blade.
Lorenzo De Luca murdered your brother, not your cousin.
The one who died on the church steps had been a decoy. Her real brother — Marco Romano — had been captured three years ago. Tortured. Buried alive under a vineyard that belonged to the De Luca estate.
She could still feel the numbness in her fingertips.
Everything inside her splintered.
She had mou
