"Shanhai international airport, private jet hanger.
The private jet landed with a whisper at a secure hangar in Shanghai's international airport, far from the eyes of the press and public. The De Luca insignia shimmered faintly on the aircraft's wing under the morning fog,a silver crest no one dared to question. A black sedan was already waiting, headlights glowing in the mist like watching eyes. The door hissed open.
Vittoria De Luca stepped into China for the first time in ten years. She moved like a ghost: silent, deliberate, cloaked in a long coat of midnight violet that brushed the wet tarmac. Her dark hair was pinned in a low twist beneath a silk scarf. Her violet-tinted sunglasses covered the truth in her eyes eyes that should never have existed.
No cameras clicked. No crowd gathered. But she felt the weight of eyes all the same.
Her grandfather, Don Matteo De Luca, exited behind her, flanked by three suited men and a Chinese interpreter. Despite his age, he walked like a general straight-backed and ice-eyed. He didn't look at her, and she didn't expect him to.
"Everything is arranged," he said, slipping into the car. "They're expecting you at the estate."
Vittoria followed without a word. Her hand gripped the handle of her violin case with mechanical precision. Not because she intended to play but because it was the only thing that still felt like hers.
The ride from the airport to the Xue family estate was smooth, silent, and unbearable. Shanghai rose around them in glimmering silence glass towers reflected the gray morning sky, cold and unreachable. It was the city of her mother's bloodline. A place where she had once played as a child. Now, it felt like a foreign battlefield.
She remembered little of the drive. Her eyes stared forward, but her mind wandered back to a marble floor soaked in blood. The sound of a gunshot. Her father's final breath. And her mother's voice flat and cruel whispering: If you hadn't been there, he'd still be alive.
---
The estate gates creaked open, revealing a grand courtyard flanked with white columns and perfectly trimmed sakura trees. House staff lined up to greet them, heads bowed in practiced respect. Vittoria exited the car like a storm in disguise,graceful, beautiful, deadly.
She entered the house without waiting. The walls were familiar, yet wrong. Her shoes tapped across the marble floor that once echoed with laughter. She passed a grand piano she hadn't touched since she was eight.
Then came the dining room.
Her mother, Li Xue, stood waiting in an ivory qipao, still graceful, still untouchable. She looked up when Vittoria entered, and for a moment, something raw flickered behind her eyes guilt, maybe. Or grief.
"Vittoria," she said. "You've grown."
Vittoria's eyes flicked over her. "You haven't."
Then there was Sofia. Her twin sister. She sat quietly at the far end of the table, in a cream dress, her long black hair spilling over one shoulder. She looked soft, composed, like porcelain that had never been cracked.
Sofia's gaze met Vittoria's and turned cold.
"You could have written," she said. "Once. In ten years."
Vittoria lowered her sunglasses. Her violet eyes shimmered in the light.
"I was in a cage, Sofia. While you were learning to braid your hair and pick birthday cakes, I was memorizing how to take beatings and stay conscious."
Sofia's lips thinned. "Don't be dramatic."
Vittoria gave a smile without warmth. "That's the one thing I've never had the luxury of being."
Their mother stepped between them. "Enough. This is not the place."
"No," Vittoria said, stepping past them. "This house hasn't been 'the place' since he died."
---
Her room was untouched. As if frozen in time.
She opened the door and was greeted by her childhood ,her books, her drawings, her favorite scarf still hanging where she left it. No one had moved anything. Not out of love but because no one had dared enter.
The only thing missing was the scent of safety.
She walked to the vanity and opened the violin case. Inside, her instrument waited polished, perfect, silent. Underneath it, taped to the bottom of the case, was a photo of her and her father.
Bloodstained. Folded. Still whole.
She touched the edge of the photo, then closed her eyes and rested her fingers on the violin's strings. A single note hummed out long, trembling, full of ache.
Her only voice.
---
Downstairs, her grandfather poured himself a drink.
"She will not return to Italy," he said to Li Xue.
Her mother tensed. "She belongs there."
"She belongs where she can become human again."
"She's built an empire."
"Yes," Matteo said coldly. "Across five continents. But she laughs at nothing. She feels nothing. I built a machine, not a girl. If I don't fix that now, we'll lose her completely."
"And she'll agree to this?"
"She doesn't need to."
---
That night, Vittoria received her new schedule school enrollment documents. A timetable. A dress code.
She stared at the papers until her vision blurred.
"Friends," her grandfather had scrawled in his own hand at the bottom. "You will make them. You will fail, and fall in love, and make mistakes. You are not a statue. Not anymore."
Vittoria folded the papers and walked to the balcony.
Shanghai glowed beneath her like a dream she couldn't enter.
She whispered the only truth she knew:
"I don't belong here."
But somewhere, in the shadows of the city, someone else already knew she had arrived.
And they were waiting.