drained.
Ricardo saw the wound and pressed deeper.
“She was going to expose your father. She hid evidence before she died. I found some of it years ago, but not all. Then your little rose maid arrived, and the flowers started blooming again.”
Lena remembered the brass planter beneath Isabella’s portrait.
The soil that never dried evenly.
The strange metal plate beneath the roots.
Her eyes shifted before she could stop them.
Ricardo noticed.
He lunged.
The basement exploded into motion.
One of Ricardo’s men fired. Nico shoved Lena behind him and shot back. The bullet struck the man in the shoulder, spinning him into the wall. The second guard rushed from the side. Lena grabbed a fallen shard of wood and drove it into his wrist before he could reach Nico.
Ricardo ran for the stairs.
Not away from the villa.
Toward the foyer.
“The roses,” Lena gasped.
Nico seized her hand, and they ran.
They burst from the basement corridor into the marble hall as alarms began to wail through the estate. Guards shouted from distant rooms. Servants screamed. Somewhere outside, engines roared to life.
Ricardo reached the grand foyer first.
He dropped to his knees beneath Isabella’s portrait and tore at the brass planter. Soil spilled across the white marble. Rose stems snapped under his hands.
Nico raised his gun.
It clicked empty.
Ricardo laughed and pulled a small metal box from beneath the roots.
“At last,” he breathed.
Lena stepped forward.
Her wrists throbbed. Her shoulder ached. She was barefoot, bruised, and wearing a robe in a room full of killers.
But something inside her had changed when she saw the photograph.
She was not invisible anymore.
She was not the orphan left in the rain.
She was the girl Isabella Vulpe had risked her life to save.
“Give me the box,” Lena said.
Ricardo looked up, amused. “You still believe you matter?”
Nico moved beside her, but Lena raised one hand to stop him.
For once, he obeyed.
Lena reached into the planter and closed her fingers around the rose stem she had tied upright weeks earlier. The white thread was still there, hidden among thorns.
She pulled.
A thin blade slid free from inside the hollow brass support beneath the stem.
Ricardo’s amusement vanished.
Lena pressed the blade beneath his chin.
“The roses knew me,” she whispered.
The box slipped from Ricardo’s hands and struck the marble.
Nico opened it.
Inside lay letters wrapped in oilcloth, bank ledgers, photographs, and a small cassette tape labeled with a date.
The night Isabella died.
Ricardo sank back on his heels.
“Nico,” he said, voice trembling now, “listen to me. You do not want that truth.”
Nico lifted the tape.
For years, he had believed his mother died because his father was cruel and fate was careless. For years, he had built himself into a weapon because grief gave him nothing else to become.
Now the woman he had saved from the basement stood beside him holding his mother’s hidden blade, and the past waited in his hand.
He placed the tape into an old recorder from the study.
Static filled the foyer.
Then Isabella’s voice emerged, soft and frightened.
If you are hearing this, Nico, then I failed to run.
Nico closed his eyes.
Lena reached
