Chapter 22

The knife beneath the crown.

The room was silent except for the flick of a lighter in Damian’s hand.

A flame sparked, brief and trembling.

Just like the stillness that had settled over the Cross estate since the arrival of the message.

The lock of hair. The badge.

And the name that should stay buried. Sebastian Moretti.

Lucien’s bastard half-brother. A ghost. A myth. A weapon sharper than Lucien himself.

I stood at the head of the war room. My expression was blank. But hands? Tight at my sides. Damian, Vera, Nico, and three regional heads flanked me.

“He’s not just posturing,” Damian said, voice low. “Sebastian doesn’t bluff.”

“He doesn’t need to,” Vera added. “He has nothing to lose.”

My gaze cut. What does he want?

“Power,” Damian said. “Legacy, blood, but above all, chaos.”

He thinks I stole the crown?

“He doesn’t want to wear it. He wants to shatter it.”

I looked at them in silence. Fine, he wants to come out of the shadows? Then I’ll burn them down.

Hours later, I stood alone in the underground archive staring at the list of offshore accounts frozen by my order.

Each transaction had one name tagged beneath it.

E M.

Elena Marco. My mother. But the one at the bottom of the list was different. The encryption signature wasn’t my mother’s.

It was older and it bore the mark of Marco’s intelligence network.

I was so confused. I quickly ran a cross-trace. And what came up? It shattered my breath.

Sebastian Moretti, asset x83. Code name, knife. Handler, Elena Marco.

I suddenly lost my footing. What the hell? My mother didn’t just know Sebastian. She had recruited him. Trained him, used him, and then cut him loose.

A black ops tool cast into exile…by my one blood.

God, I whispered as cold started flooding my chest. What the hell did she do?

By midnight, the Cross estate was on lockdown. I stood on the balcony outside my chambers, wind threading through my hair like fingers from a ghost.

Damian joined me. Silence crackling between us.

“I know,” he quietly said. “About your mother and Sebastian.”

My eyes narrowed. How?

“I found the files three years ago. Before I met you. I wasn’t supposed to see it.”

Why didn’t you tell me?

“Because I was trying to protect you from a war you weren’t ready for.”

I looked at him with rage simmering beneath my skin.

Could you stop trying to protect me, Damian? Start trusting me.

He exhaled. “Then hear the rest.”

“Sebastian was Elena’s weapon. He carried out black operations for her and the council when they needed jobs too dirty for the mafia. Torture. Assassinations. Political disappearance.”

Why did she exile him?

“Because he grew unpredictable. Unhinged. He started going off script. She tried to pull him back, but he saw it as betrayal. She had him burned, cut off, abandoned, and erased.”

I stared at him. Voice soft and sharp.

“And now he’s coming for the daughter of the woman who left him in the dark.”

Yes. I nodded once.

Then we stop him before he drags me into it.

His voice dropped.

“You’re already into it.”

The next morning, a man was found hanging from the bridge outside Palermo.

One of my envoys. A card was pinned to his chest.

The next queen falls.

I didn’t flinch.

That afternoon, I walked into the council chamber like a storm dressed in silk and steel.

The room fell silent as I placed the playing card on the table before the council heads.

I want full clearance to launch a manhunt.