The questions screamed through my mind louder than the voices around me. Grief surged like a tide, but beneath it, something hotter and darker rose.
Vengeance.
I pushed past the gathering crowd, ignoring the hands trying to hold me back and the pleas for me to rest and breathe. My feet hit the cobblestone with wild purpose, the blanket billowing behind me like wings torn from an angel.
Tears streamed down my face, but my jaw had set with steel.
Whoever had done this would pay.
The hunt for justice had begun.
And I would stop at nothing to deliver it.
Chapter 5
Alina
The chill of the night had sunk deep into my bones, seeping beneath the blanket clutched around my naked body as I staggered toward the gardens, each step unsteady. I was hollow, shivering—not just from the cold but from the horror of what I’d just witnessed.
Tomaso was dead.
Murdered.
And I had felt his blood spill across my skin like a final, cruel benediction.
The night seemed to tighten around me, a suffocating shroud that swallowed sound and breath alike. Everything had grown too still—unnaturally still. It was as if the very air grieved with me or held its breath, waiting for something worse.
Where was she?
Where had the woman gone?
The one who had ended him with one swift, brutal stroke and vanished like a ghost into the dark.
I stumbled into the fields that encircled Count Costa’s estate, my bare feet biting into the cold, uneven earth. The grass hissed softly in the breeze, but the hush was broken only by distant murmurs—voices floating through the trees like lost spirits.
But no figure emerged.
No shadow moved.
Just emptiness.
I turned back, failure pressing down like a stone on my chest. From the distance, I could see the barn glowing with torchlight, now overrun. People buzzed around the scene like flies to a feast, their glittering masks grotesque in the dim glow. The party had spilled into something darker—fascination born from death.
“He was such a good fellow,” one woman wept nearby, her words blurred and watery in my ears.
“The kindest lad I ever knew,” another added through a choked sob.
Their grief sounded distant, even though they stood only a few meters away.
I broke.
Tears spilled over, unstoppable. My body racked with sobs I hadn’t allowed myself to feel inside the barn. Tomaso was a good man. Too good. And if I were honest, far too good for me.
Still wrapped in the blanket, I turned away from the crowd and continued my search, slipping toward a nearby copse of trees.
The night had teeth here.
The air felt charged and tense, like something was watching, as if the shadows themselves held breath, waiting to strike. My steps quickened, my bare feet thudding softly against the dirt path surrounding the barn. My heart pounded, each beat a cry for revenge.
