Chapter 82 Memory Does Not Return On Its Own

• ETHAN
• The night dissolved over Rome like spilled ink, slow, thick, covering everything with that fatalistic glow that only this city can offer when it decides to show itself as the beautiful ruin it is. In the main hall, the lights were barely an amber glow on the marble walls, pulsing, flickering almost in rhythm with my own breathing, as if even the electricity knew I was losing patience or sanity—or both at once—and that faint flicker made the shadows stretch into the corners like expectant creatures waiting for my fall.
• I was seated in front of the long table where the new reports lay, classified papers that seemed to breathe like sleeping animals, yet I did not read them. I could not. I knew that every line could contain words that would destroy me in ways neither Alessia, nor Camila, nor all the demons we invented between us could ever manage. I could find a line as simple as Zoe was found dead, or worse, Dante claimed her first, and that possibility turned every inch of paper into a direct threat to my own balance.