Chapter 65 Where What We Keep Silent Burns

• ZOE
• I woke up again in Naples, but not from a dream— from a badly buried memory. The city seemed less hostile with each passing day, though every corner held a story I didn’t remember, a scent that burned my senses, or a sound ripped from a distant nightmare. Dante’s house wasn’t a luxurious mansion nor as sophisticated as Ethan’s, but it had that air of ancient, elegant danger that seemed to always surround him. Stone walls, tall windows, a terrace overlooking a rusted, silent port. Nothing here was familiar to me and yet... I didn’t feel entirely imprisoned either.
• Verona had been clear: “Ethan doesn’t know you’re here, and it has to stay that way.” I understood. We still didn’t know what he had planted in my mind, and each day I felt something settling inside me. Like a piece turning, fitting into a broken puzzle. Sometimes I dreamed of blood, other times of laughter. And other times… of Dante—not as he was now, but as he had been before I forgot him—or at least that’s what I believed. Before I denied him. A man who held me as if there was no war.