Elena’s breath broke.
Luca raised his gun toward the screen, uselessly.
Adrian smiled. “Luciano. You look old.”
Luca’s voice was ice. “You look alive. A disappointment.”
“Still dramatic.” Adrian’s gaze shifted. “Elena.”
She did not speak.
His smile softened, and somehow that was worse. “My love.”
Maya felt Elena flinch.
Then Adrian looked directly at her.
“Maya.”
Her name in his mouth felt like a hand around her throat.
“I know you have been told many stories tonight,” he said. “Most of them are true. Truth becomes useful when cut into pieces.”
Maya forced herself to speak. “What do you want?”
Adrian tilted his head. “To meet my daughter.”
“You sent men to shoot up a restaurant.”
“I sent men to retrieve property.”
“I’m not property.”
“No,” he said gently. “You are inheritance.”
Luca stepped closer to the screen. “Come near her and I’ll bury you.”
Adrian laughed. “You had seventeen years.”
Maya looked at Luca. The words struck him, but he did not look away.
Adrian continued, “Here is what they did not tell you, Maya. The ledger your mother stole was never simply a list of crimes. It was a map. Accounts, vaults, names, bloodlines. Enough power to destroy the Black Table—or control it.”
“Why put it in me?”
“Because your mother believed love made a better lock than steel.”
Elena whispered, “Stop.”
Adrian ignored her. “But she could not complete the lock alone. She needed my blood. My line. That is what made you valuable.”
Maya’s stomach turned.
“And now?” she asked.
“Now you are old enough.”
“For what?”
Adrian smiled.
Behind him, somewhere unseen, bells began to ring.
“For succession.”
The screens went black.
A second later, every light in the penthouse died.
This darkness was different from the restaurant’s. Heavier. Knowing.
Outside, helicopters rose between the towers, their searchlights slicing through the storm.
Luca grabbed Maya’s arm. “We leave now.”
This time, Maya did not argue.
Enzo hauled Matteo up from the floor despite his groan of pain. Elena snatched a leather case from beneath a bookshelf, and Luca led them through a hidden panel behind the fireplace into a narrow passage.
As they ran, Maya felt everything inside her splitting apart.
Her mother was alive.
Her father was a monster.
Luca Moretti, the man she had called trash, had been guarding the edges of her life like a shadow.
And she—Maya Vale, waitress, debtor, nobody—had been carrying a secret powerful men were willing to kill for.
The passage opened into a private stairwell. They descended fast. Alarms wailed above them. Somewhere far overhead, something exploded, shaking dust from the walls.