Rain fell like a curtain across the estate road, each drop hissing as headlights cut through the night.
For Isabella the world had narrowed to the grip of the steering wheel and the scrap of paper burning in her pocket, her mother's handwriting, her mother's voice, a promise and a threat all at once.
She had come to her father's villa to demand answers.
Antonio Romano's estate loomed as it always had: marble, iron, power.
Guards parted at her approach because a Romano daughter did not knock when she arrived. Inside, the house smelled of old money and the faint trace of jasmine her mother used to wear.
It was a smell that pulled at places Isabella had tried to harden.
She found her father in his private office, the same room where she had sat as a child on his knee, the same chair where once he'd smiled and told her stories.
Now he was a different man: older, lines at his temples, a hardness in his gaze that had nothing to do with time.
