The sun fell heavy over Naples like a velvet shroud, drowning the city's jagged edges in molten gold. The air was thick with the scent of sea salt, hot pavement, and smoke from a nearby Vespa repair shop. But Amara didn't see Naples.
She saw Port Harcourt.
The memory came unbidden. Rain pounding the zinc rooftops. Oil flames licking the sky. Her grandfather's study—airless, dark, cluttered with war relics and oil maps. He never smiled. Only watched her with those eyes. Black and sharp, like wet volcanic stone. Eyes that had seen too much.
They called him *The Vulture of Port Harcourt*.
He'd come from nothing, clawed his way through the mud and politics of the Niger Delta, orchestrated betrayals that turned ministers into corpses and pirates into millionaires. By the time the oil wars reached their crescendo in the late '70s, his name had become legend—one whispered at checkpoints and in barracks, a name that made even soldiers step aside.
But betrayal cut deep. A rival clan, backed by foreign oil giants, had set him up for assassination. Instead of dying, he disappeared.
It was said he fled through the creeks in a stolen oil barge. That he paid a witch to hide his spirit in a brass anklet. That he killed a governor and stole his passport. The stories blurred—but one truth remained: he surfaced in Italy five years later, under the name Giovanni Nero.
Italy was burning in its own way then. Mafia wars, heroin routes, a state collapsing under corruption. He flourished in the fire.
He married a Sicilian woman from the ruined House of Belladonna—a family that had once ruled Palermo's docks but was now a footnote in Carabinieri reports. Together, they forged something new: *The House of Diri-Owei*.
African strategy, Italian bloodlust.
Over decades, they became a ghost family. Not as loud as the Camorra, not as flashy as the Cosa Nostra. But precise. Surgical. They controlled luxury pipelines—smuggling diamonds through Calabar to Capri, laundering money through Lagos art galleries, exchanging stolen Renaissance art for arms in Ilorin.
Her father, Diri-Owei II, was both heir and enforcer. Cold. Impeccably dressed. More feared than loved. Her mother, Alessandra Belladonna, had once been a Milan runway model. She traded fashion for funerals the day Amara's uncle was gunned down outside a Geneva bank.
Amara was born in Milan, but raised like a nomad. A year in Port Harcourt, a term in Lagos, summers in Rome. Languages mixed in her mouth like wine and blood. Pidgin. Igbo. Italian. English. Yoruba.
But it was her brother, Ekene, who carried the heart of the family.
He had her grandfather's fire, their mother's charm. They said he could make a man confess with a joke. She remembered him teaching her how to aim a pistol by the age of ten, laughing when she hit the bullseye.
Ekene was assassinated on a winter night in Turin. By rivals. Or insiders. Or both.
The peace talks came months later. Insult wrapped in diplomacy. They asked for Amara to be the envoy.
"She's just the right amount of dangerous," Diri-Owei had said. "And beautiful enough to be underestimated."
She wanted to kill him for that.
---
Now, in Naples, she stood at the balcony of the Palazzo Inverno, the neutral grounds for the meeting with the Albanian contingent. The sea stretched wide and silent below. Her dress was Ijaw silk, dyed the color of dusk. Her hair braided in coils like a queen from the bronze kingdoms. Her heels, Louboutin. Her knife, sheathed at her thigh.
She was both offering and weapon.
Behind her, Matteo—her cousin and shadow—watched the door. He had their grandfather's build and none of his patience.
"You sure about this, Ama? These people don't want peace. They want a body count."
Amara didn't answer. She touched the bronze anklet on her left ankle.
Her grandfather's spirit, if the stories were true.
"I'm not here for peace," she said finally. Her voice like cold oil on water.
"I'm here for truth."
And somewhere in the cavernous hall behind that door, truth waited—with blood on its breath and a smile shaped like betrayal.