Leya departed in silence from her mother's flat. The Roman streets slumbered half-awake, the sky bruised by the heaviness of a sun yet to rise. Her boots created soft reverberations on the pavement as she walked—no direction, no destination.

She needed to think.

To breathe.

Her father had given his life to protect something. Someone. A woman, a fund, a secret so explosive that it had pushed a man like Samuel Blackwood, a man with the power to kill with words, to fake his own death and ...