It was black and thick as the weight in her chest and had bled through the page. Elena De Luca was seated at a battered desk in the backroom of an abandoned Corsican boathouse, a steady hand landing the first name: Luciana Romano.
Outside, the sea slapped angrily against the rocky shore, but she paid little attention. The windows were shut tight, and the only illumination came from a crooked desk lamp humming faintly above her. Shadows clung to the room's corners, and she embraced them. She had turned into a kind of shadow herself.
It had been a year since Isla Caruso had died in the fire. A year since she saw her life turn to ash and betrayal. Her reflection was no longer her own — softer in some places, sharper in others. The surgeons had been so methodical. Dario had arranged the best. Even the scar on her brow, the one Matteo had once kissed good night before sleep, was gone.
"Elena," Dario's voice cut through the silence, low, gravelly. He was leaning against the doorframe, a cigarette in his lips that went unstubbed. "You haven't slept."
"I'm not tired," she said, not raising her eyes.
You will be," he said, inhaling. "Obsession doesn't give a fuck about exhaustion. It simply waits to hollow you out."
Elena's pen scuffed the next name: Alessandro Greco. The head of security for the Romano family. The man who broke through the estate's defensive systems the night her world fell apart. "I'm not going to stop until they are accountable for what they've done."
Dario output smoke, eye dark. "You still think it was Matteo?"
Elena's jaw tightened. "I saw the ring, Dario. A Romano crest. The same one he used to wear. It had been on the hand of the man who shot Nico in the back."
"He was grieving, too."
"No," she said sharply and stood up. "He was calculating. Cold. I could see it in his eyes when he held my hand days before the engagement. He already knew something. And he didn't warn me."
Dario threw ash on the floor. "Grief makes ghosts out of people. And ghosts don't speak. You're one of them yourself now, aren't you?"
She looked back at the desk, the knot rising in her throat rising. In fact, she hardly remembered what her voice used to sound like before it got honed by loss.
"I do not want to hear his excuses. I have to burn everything he planted," she told me. Her hand traced down to the next name: Francesco Romano.
"Dismantling the entire Romano syndicate is easy?" Dario asked.
"No," she said quietly. "But I don't want it to be easy. I just need it to hurt."
She stuck the list to the corkboard tacked to the wall — twelve names, all circled in red. Idled beneath them, photos newspaper clippings maps filled the gaps like a warped tapestry of war. In the far corner, set apart from the others, was a black-and-white surveillance still: Matteo, in a dark suit, standing outside the ruins of the Caruso estate, his face grim, his jaw clenched. Heart in one hand, a single white rose in other.
Elena turned, before the image could start to unravel her.
"Do you remember what you told me the night we faked your death?" Dario asked softly.
She shook her head.
He reached forward, put a hand on her shoulder⏤father-like, not possessive. "You told us, 'Make it believable. 'Make them bury me so deep that no one ever comes looking.' "
Elena swallowed the lump in her throat. "And you did."
"Then believe me when I tell you—revenge takes different forms. It doesn't bring peace. It simply gives your pain another face."
"I don't want peace," she said quietly. "I want answers."
Dario studied her for a long moment. "Then let me help. Not merely as the man who rescued you. But as someone who lost family that night, too."
She nodded, and the soundlessness between them was heavy with shared grief.
That night, Elena stood on the cliff's edge behind the boathouse, the wind cutting through her coat. Below, the dark waters roiled as did the rage within her. She took a lighter out of her pocket and flicked it open, watching the flame dance.
From her coat, she pulled the last thing she'd been clutching — Matteo's handkerchief, stained with soot and dried blood. She just hadn't been able to throw it away. Not yet. Not until they had finished the list.
She dropped it into the wind. The flame ignited on contact, burning orange against the night sky, then vanished into the sea.
The girl who had once loved him had been buried in that fire.
Dario called after her from the doorway. "We got a name. One of the men who tapped the estate's internal security feed the night of the attack. He's in Palermo now. Still working for the Romanos."
Elena turned, steel in her voice. "Then we start there."
When they went back inside, Dario gave her a burner phone. "One more thing. You're going to want to hear this.'"
She unlocked it. A green-tinged video ran on a screen: Matteo, leaving a church in Naples. He looked thinner, sharper. Beside him was Luciana, in black, head down as though mourning.
A reporter's voice interrupted the clip: "Matteo Romano, heir of the Romano family, seen for the first time in weeks, attending a private mass for the late Isla Caruso."
Elena's lips curled. "They mourn the girl they murdered."
But just when the video concluded, Dario took out a second phone and swiped to a different file. "This was sent anonymously. From someone who is inside the Romano circle."
Elena saw the new video. It was Matteo's office. It is grainy, low-quality surveillance. He was alone. A whiskey glass in hand. He went to a drawer and took something from it — a photograph. Her. Isla. Two years ago, on the Amalfi coast, hair wild in the wind, eyes laughing.
He stared at it for a long moment, then pressed the frame to his lips.
He then slammed it into the wall.
The screen went black.
Elena's pulse raced. She gripped the phone tighter.
"What does it mean?" Dario asked quietly.
She didn't answer.
Because in the first text message in a year, doubt seeped in like smoke through a crack in the door.
And that was more hazardous than hate.