Chapter 10 - The Ghost of the MediterraneanThe peace we built over the past month was nothing more than the eerie quiet before a Category 5 hurricane.
I sat in the nursery, nursing Clara Victoria, when the glass window behind me suddenly cracked. It wasn’t a bullet. It was a single, black envelope attached to a heavy throwing knife that embedded itself deeply into the wooden frame of the crib.
My heart stopped. I shielded my baby with my body, screaming for Roman.
Within seconds, Roman and Marcus burst through the door, weapons drawn. Roman pulled me into his chest, his eyes scanning the tree line outside before ripping the black envelope from the wood. Inside was a gold coin—an ancient Roman denarius—stained with dried blood.
“What is it, Roman?” I whispered, my voice trembling as I clutched our daughter tightly.
Roman’s face turned completely white, a look of sheer horror I had never seen on him, not even when his mother had threatened his life.
“It’s a calling card,” Roman said, his voice a tight, strained whisper. “From the Syndicate of the Mediterranean. The ones who funded my father before he became a king. My father didn’t build the Kane empire alone, Bianca. He stole their gold to do it.”
Marcus stepped forward, his face grim. “Boss, the signature at the bottom... it’s not Julian. It’s Lorenzo. Your father’s older brother. The one who was supposed to inherit the original throne before he was betrayed and exiled.”
The real monster had just woken up. Lorenzo Kane wasn’t a spoiled cousin like Julian or a desperate matriarch like Vivienne. He was a ghost from the trenches, a man who had spent thirty years surviving the brutal underworld of Eastern Europe, waiting for the Kane family to weaken.
“He knows about Clara Victoria,” Roman said, his hand shaking as he burned the letter with his lighter. “He knows she holds the keys to the entire fortune. He’s coming to claim the blood debt.”
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“Let him come,” I said, standing up, my short hair catching the dim light of the nursery. “We survived Vivienne. We will survive him.”
Roman looked at me, his eyes filled with a mixture of pride and profound dread. “You don’t understand, Bianca. Vivienne was a snake. Lorenzo is a butcher.”
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