The silence in the room was too perfect—like a held breath before something breaks.
The locket trembled in her hand, its open hinge whispering against her skin. She couldn't tear her gaze away from the photo.
The woman's eyes, though frozen in monochrome, carried something raw—something intimate, like a secret that refused to die.
And that child.
The boy's small fingers were curled around a silver cross, identical to Luca's—the same one that gleamed now whenever moonlight touched his throat.
Her chest constricted.
No, It couldn't be.
She wanted to believe it was some relic from the old Morano vaults, some ancestral keepsake but the photograph looked too modern.
The woman's dress, the faint outline of a phone camera reflection—it couldn't be older than a decade.
Alessia's fingers trembled.
Her husband had many secrets.
That was part of loving Luca Morano—the danger, the mystery, the exquisite ache of knowing she would never truly possess every part of him.
