Monteverde, 2002
Alba Marino, Age 16
The Marino estate had never been so quiet.
The guards still patrolled the gates. The maids still swept the floors. The bell still chimed every hour. But none of it felt alive. Not since her father's blood had soaked into the cobblestones behind the chapel on the hill.
Enzo Marino—the Lion of Monteverde—was dead.
And he had died for her.
Alba stood alone at his grave, the wind tugging at the black veil over her face, the stone beneath her fingertips still cold.
Enzo Marino, Devoted Father. Loyal Brother. Fallen King.
Lies etched in marble.
Because the brother he died for—Gianni—was the one who had betrayed him.
And she remembered.
Not at first. The trauma had buried the truth under a fog of pain, but slowly, like blood rising through water, it came back.
The smell of gasoline.
Gianni's voice in the dark.
His hand around her wrist.
Her father's voice—shouting her name.
The gunshot.
The silence.
Enzo had found her in that abandoned vineyard and taken a bullet to the chest to get her out alive.
The bullet meant for her.
She had screamed so loud, her throat still ached from it.
And Gianni? He vanished before the sirens arrived.
---
In the weeks that followed, they wrapped her in silk and sympathy.
"Rest, Alba."
"Don't think about it."
"You need time to heal."
She didn't want time.
She wanted revenge.
---
The first letter arrived two nights after the funeral. No return address. Just a single sentence scrawled in hurried ink:
> "He wasn't the only traitor."
The second came the next day.
> "There are more. Watching. Waiting. Don't trust anyone wearing his smile."
She burned both.
Not because she didn't believe them—she did.
But because she couldn't afford to let anyone know what she was starting to suspect.
---
She sat in her father's office that evening, wrapped in his wool coat, cigar smoke still lingering in the air like the ghost of him.
Gianni's photo still hung on the wall.
She stared at it. Her uncle in younger days, standing beside Enzo, both in crisp suits, smiles tight with ambition.
She stood, crossed the room, and tore it down.
Then she whispered, "I remember what you did."
---
They thought she'd be broken.
A grieving girl with trembling hands and too many tears.
But grief had taught her something.
Power wasn't taken. It was inherited through pain, claimed through fire.
Gianni might've buried her father.
But Alba Marino would bury his legacy.
Not in shame.
In vengeance.
---