The fog had swallowed Venice whole. The canals glimmered faintly under the moonlight, ribbons of dark water winding through sleeping streets where even the ghosts had learned to tread softly. The air tasted of salt and secrets. Somewhere in that silence, Elena sat on the edge of the bed, her reflection trembling in the cracked mirror across from her.The man who looked like Adrian was gone but the echo of him lingered like perfume after someone left the room. She could still feel the weight of his presence, his eyes burning through her like questions she didn’t have the courage to answer. The gun she’d dropped lay cold on the floor, the metal catching what little light remained, a small reminder of how close she’d come to ending something she didn’t understand.She pressed her palms over her face and whispered into the stillness, “You’re not real.”But the words sounded hollow.Her chest ached with a confusion that frightened her more than fear itself. Because what terrified her wasn’t

Adrian moved with the quiet brutality of a man who had learned to turn grief into logistics. The villa by the cliffs still smelled of salt and sleepless coffee, but the house no longer felt like refuge; it was a command post, a place where decisions were made and consequences counted like coins. He had Lucas, and he had a driver who would take a bullet without asking why, and he had a list of names that tasted like old wounds. He had the Polaroid in his pocket, the chip tucked under his ribs, and the dull ache that came from knowing someone else had walked in the rooms of his past. There was no glamour in hunting; there was only the long, methodical work of connecting points until a shape emerged from the dark.He drove south with the rain thinning behind them and the land flattening into plains that smelled of wet iron and diesel. They took backroads where the satellite signature would be poor and the radios could be muted. Lucas fed him fragments of license plates that pinged in the

The city was silent in the aftermath of the blackout. No sirens. No hum of drones. Just the sound of rain dripping from broken street lamps and the faint crackle of dying circuits. Adrian stood there for what felt like hours, staring across the bridge where the Echo had stood only moments before. The figure was gone now, swallowed by the mist that crept off the canal like a living thing. But the image lingered that faint smirk, that calm, knowing look. Like he hadn’t just escaped. Like he’d won.Lucas staggered up beside him, coughing through the smoke. “She’s gone,” he rasped. “Adrian, she’s”“I know,” Adrian cut in, his voice flat, hollow. His hands were trembling, but not from the cold. The pendant he still held vibrated faintly, almost imperceptibly. There was energy pulsing through it, some residue of the overload that had wiped out the street. He wanted to throw it away, to let it sink into the filthy water below. But something stopped him.“She’s not gone,” Adrian whispered fina

The train screeched as it slowed into Gare de Lyon, steel grinding against steel like an exhausted beast. Paris loomed outside the window familiar yet hostile, its skyline washed in gray and gold under a bruised sky. The city looked older than she remembered, as if time itself had folded inward and left the ruins of their past sitting openly on its cobblestone shoulders.Elena didn’t move at first. She sat there, watching her reflection ripple against the glass, a stranger with her face staring back. It had been years since she fled this city, years since she swore never to return. Yet here she was standing once again in the shadow of everything she’d lost.When Dominic spoke, his voice was low and rough, breaking through her trance.“Are you sure about this?”“No,” she said. “But I need to know what really happened.”Dominic stood, his dark coat sweeping behind him as he grabbed their bags. The lines around his mouth were deeper now, his once-youthful defiance replaced by something h

The storm had been raging for hours.Wind tore through the broken gates of the Knight estate, flinging branches across the gravel drive like warnings from the heavens. The rain fell heavy, sharp, alive each drop striking the ground with the violence of memory.Adrian stood at the edge of the courtyard, soaked to the bone, his hair plastered against his forehead, his eyes dark and burning with the kind of fury that could crack glass. The mansion behind him stood silent, hollow, like the carcass of a thing that once knew laughter and power.He didn’t move. Not at first. Not until the past came crawling out of the shadows again Elena’s voice echoing in his head.“You think you’re running from me, Adrian. But you’re not. You’re running from what you did.”He wanted to believe she was wrong. He wanted to believe he could still rebuild something out of the ashes. But as the storm howled louder, he realized there was no rebuilding. There was only the truth. And truth never came quietly.He t