The road to the safe house was barely visible beneath the cloak of fog that clung to the hills. Aria pressed her forehead against the car window, watching the blurred outlines of cypress trees whip by as Luca's driver wound through the narrow mountain path. She hadn't slept all night. Her mind kept circling back to one truth she still struggled to accept: her mother, the woman she had mourned as gentle, ordinary, and far removed from this bloody world, had been born into a legacy far darker and grander than Aria had ever known.
And now, here she was, on her way to the last place her mother had ever visited before vanishing from that world entirely.
The safe house wasn't what she expected. She had imagined cold stone walls and fortified gates. Instead, nestled deep in the hills, stood a quiet villa draped in ivy and time. Its terracotta roof was weathered, its windows shuttered, but there was a dignity to the place, a sense of memory woven into its walls.
