Fire to fire || 18+

Chapter 1

The night I left Italy, the air was so still it felt like the world was holding its breath, waiting for me to scream. I didn't. Sartonis don’t scream; we bleed in silence and strike in the dark.

I was fifteen, and I was already a ghost in my own home.

The silver knife, the one I’d been given at five, the one I’d used to carve my name into the training dummies and, later, into the flesh of those who dared underestimate a child, sat on my velvet-lined nightstand. It was a relic of a dead dream. For five years, since the birth of the "Golden Heir," my brother Lorenzo, that knife had been gathering dust. My father had replaced my combat drills with etiquette lessons. He’d replaced my Glock with a silk fan. He’d tried to lobotomize the predator in me to make room for a bride.

He thought he could cage a wolf and call it a lapdog. He was wrong.

The deal had been simple, brokered in the dead of night in my father’s study, the scent of expensive tobacco clashing with the iron-rich tang of my own suppressed rage. “Let me go,” I’d demanded. “Give me a life where I don't have to watch that incompetent boy play with my crown, and I’ll never trouble your succession.”

My father had looked at me not as a daughter, but as a liability he was lucky to offload. He’d agreed. They were glad to see me go. A daughter who could kill was a threat to a son who could only whine.

I walked out of the villa with a single suitcase and a heart made of dry tinder. I didn't look back at the lights of Lake Como reflecting in the water. I looked forward, into the blackness of a world that didn't know my name.

The first three years were the hardest. Not because of the hunger or the cold, I’d been trained to survive on far less, but because of the silence in my head. For fifteen years, my brain had been a tactical computer, constantly scanning for exits, weighing the lethality of a room’s occupants, calculating the wind speed for a clean shot.

In Lyon, nobody was trying to kill me.

I settled into a cramped studio apartment above a bakery. The smell of yeast and burnt sugar became my new reality. I took a job at a local library, shelving books with the same precision I used to load magazines. I learned to speak French with a soft, melodic lilt that hid the sharp, staccato edges of my Italian upbringing.

I became "Nae," the quiet girl who liked black coffee and never smiled with her eyes.

But while I was learning how to be a "nobody," the world back home was being set on fire by a "somebody."

I remember the first time I saw his name in a newspaper I’d swiped from a cafe table. It wasn't the mainstream news; it was the whispered undercurrents of the European trades.

"Lombardi Succession Settled in Blood."

I stared at the grainy photo of a seven-year-old boy with eyes like frozen smoke. Rafaele Lombardi. The bastard. The son of a mistress who had somehow clawed his way into the lion’s den and walked out with the pride’s head in his hands.

I felt a physical jolt of recognition, and a searing, white-hot jealousy.

He was a bastard, a mistake, a stain on the Lombardi crest. Yet, the world was bowing to him. While I was tucked away in a dusty library, hiding my genius to appease a mediocre brother, this boy was rewriting the laws of the underworld. He was doing exactly what I had been born to do.

He was the mirror image of my own stolen fate, and I hated him for it. I followed his rise like a religious fanatic. Every time a Lombardi rival turned up dead, every time a new territory fell under his shadow, I felt the salt rubbing into my wounds. He was the ghost that haunted my "peaceful" life. Every achievement of his was a reminder of my own erasure.

By year seven of my exile, the library had been replaced by a quiet, high-end accounting firm. It turned out that the same mind that could calculate bullet trajectories was exceptionally good at finding "discrepancies" in international tax codes.

I lived in a flat in a boring suburb. I had a cat named Cinder who didn't like me very much. I had a neighbor, a sweet old woman named Madame Giroux, who tried to set me up with her grandson, a baker with flour under his fingernails and a soul as simple as a baguette.

"He is a good man, Nae," she would say, patting my hand. "Stable. Safe."

I would smile and nod, thinking about how easily I could snap the grandson's neck if he ever touched me without permission.

I was a "normal" woman. I went to the gym. I paid my taxes. I bought groceries.

But under my bed, in a locked steel box, I kept a single piece of my old life. Not the silver knife I’d left that for Lorenzo to choke on. I kept a set of high-carbon steel throwing blades I’d stolen from a collector in Marseille during my second year.

Once a week, when the moon was high and the suburb was asleep, I would go into the basement of my apartment building and throw. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The sound was the only thing that kept me sane. It reminded me that the "normal girl" was just a costume. The killer was still there, curled up in the dark, waiting for a reason to wake up.

Year ten came and went. I turned twenty-five. I had built a fortress of boredom around myself. I had a boyfriend for six months, a corporate lawyer named Julian. He was handsome in a generic way, and he talked about "risk management" as if he knew what risk actually felt like.

I broke up with him because I couldn't stand the way he looked at me, with a soft, protective pity. He thought I was a fragile thing that needed his guidance. He had no idea that while he was sleeping, I was sitting in the dark, watching the news of Rafaele Lombardi’s latest conquest in Sicily.

Rafaele was no longer a boy. He was a myth. They called him the Phoenix. He’d consolidated the Lombardi power with a cold, surgical efficiency that made my father look like an amateur.

I hated him with a passion that was almost intimate. I hated that he succeeded where I was forced to fail. I hated that his name was whispered with terror while mine was forgotten. Every time I saw a picture of him, always from a distance, always looking bored and untouchable, I wanted to reach through the screen and tear the arrogance off his face.

I was a legitimate daughter of a Great House, reduced to auditing spreadsheets. He was a bastard who had turned his illegitimacy into a throne.

The unfairness of it was a poison I drank every day.

Year fourteen.

I was twenty-nine. My life was a masterpiece of stability. I had been promoted to Senior Auditor. I had a retirement plan. I had a favorite brand of artisanal tea.

I was standing in my kitchen, staring at a wilted basil plant on the windowsill, wondering if this was it. If I would just continue to grow old in this quiet, grey world until I became Madame Giroux, offering advice to girls who were hiding their own monsters.

Then, the burner phone rang.

I hadn't touched it in a decade. It sat in the back of my junk drawer, a plastic relic of a life I’d renounced. I didn't even know if the battery would still hold a charge.

But it vibrated with a frantic, buzzing energy that seemed to rattle the very foundations of my apartment.

I stared at it for three full rings. My heart, which had beat at a steady, boring rhythm for fourteen years, suddenly kicked into a high-octane roar.

I picked it up.

"Speak," I said, my Italian rusted but sharp.

"Naesa." It was my father. His voice was different, thinner, threaded with a desperation that made my skin crawl. "The Russians... they’ve breached the perimeter. Brindisi is gone. Lorenzo... is out of his depth."

I let out a short, sharp laugh. "Is that the emergency, Father? That your 'sole heir' can't play the game he was born to win?"

"It’s not just Lorenzo," he hissed. "They are targeting everyone. The Sartoni name will be erased within the month if we don't act. You are the only one with the mind for this, Naesa. You were always the smarter one. The sharper one."

"Fourteen years too late for the compliments, Don Sartoni," I spat. "Why should I care? I have a life here. I have a cat. I have a job that doesn't involve cleaning blood off the marble."

"Because if we fall, they will find you," he whispered. "The Russians don't care about your 'quiet life.' They will find the daughter of the Sartoni and they will make an example of you. Come back. Not for us. For your own survival."

I looked at the basil plant. I looked at the boring, safe walls of my kitchen.

I realized, in that moment, that I had been waiting for this call every single day for fourteen years. I hadn't built a life; I’d built a waiting room.

"I'll be at the airport in three hours," I said. "And if I come back and find out you lied to me just to get your 'ornament' back, I will finish what the Russians started."

I hung up.

I didn't pack much. I didn't need the tea or the spreadsheets. I went to the steel box under my bed. I took out the throwing blades and strapped them to my thighs. I put on my old leather jacket, the one that still smelled, faintly, of gunpowder and home.

I looked at Cinder. "The neighbor will feed you," I muttered.

I walked out of the apartment without a backward glance.

The airport was a blur of neon lights and tired travelers. I stood in the terminal, watching the departure board. Milan. I felt a strange, cold clarity settling over me. The "Nae" who liked black coffee was dying. The Princess of the Sartoni was being born again, and she was hungry.

As I walked toward the gate, I caught my reflection in a duty-free window. I looked tired. I looked like a woman who had been struggling in a big city. My hair was a bit frizzy, my skin lacked the glow of the Mediterranean sun, and my clothes were cheap.

But my appearance was the last of my concerns.

Because I knew who was waiting for me in Italy. I knew the Russians were there, and I knew the "Bastard of Lombardi" would be lurking in the shadows of the chaos.

Rafaele Lombardi had spent fourteen years building an empire while I was building a facade.

I handed my boarding pass to the attendant. She smiled at me, a pitying, polite smile for the "poor girl" traveling alone.

"Have a safe flight, Miss," she said.

I didn't smile back. I stepped onto the jet bridge, the scent of jet fuel filling my lungs like a drug.

I'm coming for my crown, Lorenzo, I thought, the old fire finally catching in my chest.

The plane took off, banking south toward the mountains and the blood. Behind me, Lyon faded into a collection of insignificant lights. Ahead of me lay the only world I ever truly belonged in, a world of silver knives and velvet cages.

The fourteen-year vacation was over. It was time to go to work.

~•~