There was a hush to the room, the kind that knew too much.
Amara stood before the mirror in the old Palermo villa, framed in gold, fractured by time. Her reflection split as the sun dipped behind the lace curtains — two Amaras: one bathed in soft light, the other shadowed. She often felt like both.
In her hands, she held a faded envelope — edges worn, sealed with a wax emblem of a vulture clutching twin machetes. It had arrived that morning, unsigned. But she knew the handwriting. She'd known it since childhood.
Her grandfather's hand.
They called him The Vulture of Port Harcourt, and not just because he circled above chaos — but because he fed off it.
He had ruled the oil-bloated underbelly of the Niger Delta in the 1970s with a silence more terrifying than screams. Where others threatened, he whispered. Where others bargained, he bled. He orchestrated sabotage and salvation with equal ease. Then, when the warlords turned on him — jealous of his reach, of his mind — he disappeared.
Or so they thought.
The truth: he had slipped into Europe like smoke through a broken pipe, clutching cash, secrets, and the kind of vengeance that never dies. Italy gave him a new name. A Sicilian bride from a fallen mafia clan gave him cover. And from Milan to Naples, he forged a dynasty that combined Ijaw cunning with Italian precision.
Diri-Owei.
The House of Diri-Owei didn't need to scream to be feared.
They wore Ferragamo and stitched Ankara into their linings. They drank aged grappa with suya. They operated from galleries, from ports, from churches. They moved diamonds inside gospel tapes. They made corpses vanish with the same discretion as old wine.
And Amara… was their last daughter.
Born under a lunar eclipse in Milan. Raised between the rains of Port Harcourt, the heat of Lagos, and the glass facades of Palermo. Her lullabies were in three tongues — Ijaw, Yoruba, and Sicilian curses. She learned to walk between worlds without ever belonging.
But it was her brother, Ekene, who was meant to inherit it all. The heir. The golden boy with a serpent's smile. Until a rival family put five bullets in his chest and left him crumpled like a prophecy gone wrong.
Now they sent her as a peace offering.
A veiled insult. A move so bold it reeked of bait.
Yet the family said yes. They always said yes to strategy. Amara was not just a daughter. She was insurance, temptation, eyes behind enemy lines.
She traced the vulture emblem with her fingertip, breath trembling.
"Why now?" she whispered to no one.
Behind her, the old butler cleared his throat softly. "They're ready for you, signorina."
Amara straightened. Clad in a black silk blouse, its neckline sharp like a blade, and trousers the color of night after a funeral. Her earrings were antique ivory from Bayelsa. Her perfume? Something her grandmother had made from cassia and gunpowder.
She did not walk. She glided. Like smoke. Like legacy. Like the granddaughter of a vulture who learned to perch in cathedrals and slaughterhouses alike.
As she descended the staircase, her phone buzzed once.
A message.
From an unknown number.
Just one line:
"They killed Ekene because he knew."
Amara didn't blink.
Didn't stop.
But something shifted.
A reckoning, deep in her belly.
Whatever this mission was…
It had just become personal.