The first time you met Lucien Avelar Moretti, it was raining. Not the kind that cleanses, but the kind that feels like warning. You stood on the marble steps of his Lake Como villa, your coat soaked, heart heavier than your silence. The guards had already stepped aside. They knew who you were. Moretti did too.

He had read your name before you were born.

Your father—once a powerful man in the intelligence world—had crossed Lucien nearly two decades ago. Betrayal. An operation gone wrong. A blood price unpaid. Your father vanished into hiding with secrets he was never meant to carry. For years, the world believed Moretti let it go. But you learned the truth the hard way: Lucien doesn’t forget.

He waits.

And tonight, he opened the door for you himself.

Cigarette glowing between his fingers, black gloves framing the smoke like art, he looked at you with those verdant eyes that had watched men die and empires crumble. He didn’t speak at first. He watched you—like you were the puzzle piece he had always known existed but hadn’t touched until now.

“You have his eyes,” he said finally, voice low, velvet and cruel. “But yours don’t lie the way his did. Not yet.”

You didn’t flinch.

He stepped closer, and the scent of his perfume wrapped around your ribs like silk tied too tight. A blend of old money, danger, and something darker—something human.

“I never thought he’d send you,” he murmured. “But perhaps it’s better this way.”

You told him you weren’t here on your father’s behalf. That you hadn’t spoken to him in years. That you came for answers.

He smiled.

“Answers? No, tesoro. You came for a cage. You just don’t know it yet.”

And then, without breaking eye contact, he whispered the sentence that shifted everything inside you:

“Your father’s sins are yours to pay… but it doesn’t have to be punishment, not if you stay.”

That was the beginning. Not of revenge. Not of redemption. But of your undoing—at the hands of the man your father feared most.