London received him not with open arms, but with a chilliness that crept beneath his skin.
The aircraft had touched down just after midnight, under a dense fog that clung to the city like a secret. Heathrow was half-empty, illuminated by dim fluorescent light that rendered every face a ghost. Dante slipped through customs like smoke—silent, unseen, untouchable. The Inferni name did not move on paper. It moved in whispers.
He wore black.
A thick wool coat over his tailored suit, damp from the mist. His blond hair, usually sharp and perfect, had begun to curl at the ends from the dampness, rounding his face into an almost angelic softness.
Angels did not walk that way, however.
Angels did not glare down men in customs with eyes like sharpened glass.
He climbed into a waiting car without a word.
The city blurred past in grey and gold beyond the window—wet cobblestones, streetlamps guttering like candles, the bitter taste of old smoke in the air. London was a colder kind of cold than Naples. It didn't hit you in the face; it seeped in between your ribs and sat on your heart.
"Fianna."
He did not say the name out loud. Just tasted it, like a word not for daylight.
She'd lived her whole life here, as far as he could gather. A teacher, maybe, or some kind of artist. She existed barely at all in digital records, and when she did, only on the periphery—blurred, candid, in motion.
A ghost in someone else's life.
The photos haunted him. He'd studied them on the plane for hours.
Not because of her face—though it was lovely—but because of what they did to him.
As though he'd known her before.Dreamed her.Or maybe... remembered her.
The blood connection was sure. Fianna bore the same genes that ran in his veins—the same great-grandfather's legacy, though hers had been diluted by centuries of normal living in Ireland. Still, blood remembered blood, even when the mind did not.
They dropped him off at a hotel in Camden—ivied ancient brick, four storeys of Victorian gloom. No backup. No security team. That was how the Don had insisted.
"If you require protection," his father had said, "you don't deserve to be boss."
Dante took the key from the receptionist without a glance. The receptionist smiled uncertainly.
"Welcome to London, Mr. Valerio."
He smiled back with no return. The lie in the name was a weight in his mouth. Valerio. A shield. A mask.
Yet he did not feel a Valerio. He felt what he was:
An Inferni.
He plodded up the creaking stairs to the third floor, his boots thudding like whispers. Wood polish and dust permeated the hallway. The room was simple—a double bed, a desk, a rusted balcony that faced the rain-soaked street. He stood there for a while, coat still on, as automobiles passed by like thoughts, headlights smudging against the rain-soaked windowpane.
He did not sleep.
He sat by the window all night, arms folded, the city outside like a slow pulse. Every hour, he read the file again. Every hour, he looked at the photographs.
Fianna.
In the newer photo, she was laughing—shoulders hunched, hand across her mouth, eyes creasing from too much sun and light. Hair the shade of dark earth, splashed with golden light. Brunet, wild, windswept.
There was something uncompromisingly alive about her.
Something real.
And he begrudged that it made him feel… something.
He walked at dawn.
London slept still, barring the bakers and the buses and the odd siren in the distance. He did not know why he walked—only that the city was stifling, and he required air.
Then, as he turned the corner of a sleeping street in Bloomsbury, he saw her.
Just like that.
No thunder. No heavenly prompt. No warning.
She stood in front of the gates of a little art studio, shutting the door behind her, a satchel smeared with paint over one shoulder. She wore a long brown coat, her curls falling from beneath a knitted hat. Her eyes were darker than he had expected—deep-set and thoughtful, the kind that perceived things before they were spoken.
And for a moment… time stopped.
Dante halted across the road, not frozen in fear, but in familiarity.
It was her.
Not only from the picture.
He knew her.
Not logically. Not rationally.
His body knew her.
His bones knew her.
And it frightened him.
Fianna shifted her bag and looked up, sensing something. Her eyes swept the street, narrowed. She saw him.
Their eyes met.
Only for a moment.
But the moment remade everything.
She looked away. Stepped into the rain. Moved on.
And Dante Valerio Inferni, heir to Italy's most notorious empire, was rooted to the pavement, heart racing like shots fired, wondering…
"What the hell just happened?"