Chapter 81: The White lies
Bianca turned over on the bed as though the silk beneath her could not contain the restlessness in her bones.
Her limbs tangled, her breath came shallow and quick, and her thoughts moved like knives precise, hungry, and unstoppable.
The moon outside painted the room in a cold, indifferent wash of light, but inside her chest a different light had begun hot, dangerous, and greedy.
My son has blue eyes, The thought pulsed through her like a promise and a threat.
Blue the color of storm-tide, of things that did not belong, blue that belonged to legends and lineage, to masters who recognized blood and wanted to own it.
Bianca could feel the contours of that want with a clarity so raw she tasted metal.
What if I use it? The question rose, simple and terrible.
Why hand a treasure to a master who would take a hundred parts and hand her back twenty?, Why eat crumbs when she could own the bakery? The image of a whole life remade, of power without begging, made a slow smile split her face. It was not a smile of tenderness, it was the prelude to betrayal.
She stood and walked to the mirror.
In the glass her reflection returned the plan, every detail sharpened like a knife. "I’m going to betray him," she whispered to the woman in the glass, and the words tasted like victory.
But the strategy was a map with several blank roads.
How to bend the power the boy’s blue eyes into her hand? How to turn an heir’s birthright into a personal crown? For that she needed answers she could only get from whispering inside other people’s trust, a tête-à-tête that could tilt the scales.
She needed her son to talk and she needed to draw volumes from him like a confession.
The idea excited and frightened her in equal measure.
She padded to the kitchen for milk, the cold tiles stinging her bare soles, when her phone buzzed against the counter.
Her fingers shook as she snatched it up.
"Hello?" she said, voice steady on the surface though a current ran beneath it.
"Bianca," the woman on the other end said, the guardian’s voice crisp and official, threaded with the brittle professionalism of those who’d learned to hide fear behind procedure. "We have discussed it as a family. We will give this trial a chance. But you will sign an agreement. Our lawyers will be present. Jackson must be safe with you. And instead of the week you requested, we will grant you five days, and remember there will be no breech of contract as it will attract severe punishment. "
Bianca’s heart had, for a second, forgotten to beat, "Five days"....
The one small miracle in a desert of readjusted plans.
She swallowed, smoothed the voice into a practiced softness and answered, "Fine, Thank you, ma’am. I will come immediately."
She ended the call and began to dance, ridiculous and sharp, a private ballet of triumph.
The apartment echoed with her laughter. She tried Larisa’s old-witch cackle first . Thin, brittle and disappointingly delicate.
Then she let the other one loose.The dark, guttural laugh she’d practiced until it felt like a second skin, the lapatasodará Vàlká laugh, cruel and delicious. That one fits, It made the air tremble.
She bathed, letting the hot water strip away lingering hesitations, and dressed with the kind of intent people mistake for confidence.
A brown skirt-suit hugged the right curves. Her lips were painted a violent, unrepentant red.
She examined herself in the mirror one last time, tasting the word power on her tongue, then left.
Garam Street folded around her like a set in a movie.
The parlor had already filled with watchful faces, lawyers with their polite implacability, guardians with weary kindness, and the small, terrified family that had decided to trust her for five days.
Bianca signed the papers with the drama of a woman accepting a coronation.
She hugged Jackson, who was all softness and trust, and whispered into his hair, "Mummy loves you. She will always be in your life."
He hugged her back like the world was a safe place.
He bid his family goodbye and with a hug, even though he knows he won’t be gone for long.
Bianca noticed he was emotional, she had to make him feel better. "What’s your favourite spot she asked him".
He told her his favorite thing was pizza, and she laughed, the sound bright and opportunistic. "A pizza date with mummy, then. It’s a date."
Twenty minutes later Mamadi’s Pizza wrapped them in warm lights and the smell of melted cheese.
Bianca ordered pizza and smoothies and settled into the small ritual of pretending normalcy.
The waiter arrived with a soft, practised smile and all the air in Bianca’s chest left her, she opened her mouth with widely in shock.
Someone who was said to be dead, now serves in a pizza restaurant? She asked herself...
It was enzo, the shadow they would believed dead, stood there in Mamadi’s apron.
For a beat time unspooled, and the entire restaurant blurred around the edges.
Her nails dug into the table.
Memory and rumor crashed together, the man who should have been buried in virenkai, the man they had cursed and erased.
If Enzo lived, then a new, darker wind was blowing through every plan she had.
She held the moment like a discovery equal parts terror and advantage and did not allow it to collapse the rest of her evening.
She smiled... She played mother. She let the boy lean against her and asked him questions like any woman would.
But under the soft exchange of pizza and loyalty, her mind already spun a tapestry, weaving Enzo’s impossible existence into new strategies: leverage, deception, threat.
******
At the Morano estate, the air had its own weight.
There was a restive statue when Alessia announced she would rest at Daisy’s apartment for two days.
"Are you aware you’re my wife?" he asked, voice low and edged with a strange, vulnerable ferocity.
He reached out and ran a hand across her hair, the kind of touch that marked possession and protection in equal measure.
Alessia smiled, the gentle lie of reassurance. "I’m aware," she said. "And I will be safe, Luca, I promise."
Luca shook his head disagreeing "You’re the most wanted woman in my world. You will not go without my men."
"Luca," she said, lifting a hand to his face. Her tone was soft but had iron behind it. "I will be fine. This is just a private girls’ thing."
He exhaled like a man forcing back a sea. "If the sun sets today and you’re not in my sight, I will rage this city bloody and fire, the bed will be cold without you, the room will scream you absence, as i can’t do without you not for a whole night ." It was a threat meant half for the world, half for the man inside him who could not imagine losing her.
He turned to Daisy, pinning the woman with a look that meant trust and command at once. "I trust you. Protect my queen. She is all I have left. Take care of yourself too."
Alessia watched his face The cares, the tenderness, the trembling edge and the truth lodged into her.
His care felt like gravity, inevitable and absolute.
So this is what real love looked like, she thought, and the thought steadied and terrified her.
Luca pecked her forehead, trying to make light of the storm. "Come back before I miss you," he murmured, and she laughed, but it was a laugh that hid a small, ferocious sorrow.
Alessia reflects on luca’s words when he said "You are the most wanted...little did he know that what she told him was a casual girl’s errand was in fact a dangerous incision into enemy territory.
Alessia and Daisy moved like shadows, and what they wore matched their intentions.
***
Forty minutes later, they parked with calculated distance and walked the rest, gate - boots beating a private rhythm against the pavement.
Daisy signaled a guard , a Woman with Seraphina’s crest stitched into his sleeve pretending to bear a letter for the boss.
The man came forward, trust and routine forming his face into a practical instrument.
Alessia’s hand was faster than the guard’s assumption.
She caught her in a lock practiced in the margins of a thousand fights, twisted him, and, with efficiency that held no cruelty, bound him.
The man’s eyes slammed wide with outrage and bewilderment as he realized he had been outplayed.
She stripped her of her uniform, she was only on her black sleeve top and a black trouser.
These were the tools they needed more than anything else.
Daisy slipped into the other guard’s attire like a woman becoming armour.
There was a moment, quick as a breath, when both of them looked at each other and saw the clear, brutal calculus. lie, infiltrate, find the box.
They walked in, heads bowed, shoulders squared and moved through the entryways with the practiced ease of men who belonged there.
The false authority made doors open and mouths fall silent.
They reached the inner chambers, the place where Seraphina kept the things she wanted most hidden beneath velvet and iron.
Seraphina was there, a storm in heels and silk.
She paced, impatient fury leaving her like smoke.
Her guards clustered, flustered at the same mystery Seraphina carried on like a fever.
"What is in that common little box you men can’t open with your huge muscles?" she snapped, lips thinning. "I will be so disappointed if the last set of men can’t open this box by tomorrow."
Her voice echoed, and then she stormed away down the corridor.
The corridors closed their breath and the chamber dimmed.
Night seemed to gather in the corners, swallowing the last scraps of light.
Daisy stepped forward and pressed her palm to a door that had mocked the guards for its secrets.
Something in the fabric of the guard outfit, the scent of the man it belonged to, the shape of the cut, the imprint of some old authority answered the lock.
The mechanism sighed, The door yielded.
Alessia tried the same trick, pressing her hand to the wood, but the door did not respond. She frowned.
The uniform Alessia wore belonged to the guard in the car.
That should have been enough to open any door his men were permitted into. Why then did it resist her touch?
Daisy’s voice was small, a question and an answer all at once. "This uniform belonged to Romeo," she said. "It must be keyed to him. He was Seraphina’s manager, he may have had privileges." and as she tried it with the finger print on it. The door creak open.
Daisy and Alessia we’re surprise and happy as well.
They stepped into the room and began to search. Wardrobe after wardrobe velvet, cedar, lacquered wood surrendered their contents-gowns that had smelled of perfumed summers, boxes of letters bound with thread, jewelry in velvet pouches that held other people’s promises.
The room felt like a mouth full of secrets, and they were there to force its teeth open.
Alessia’s fingers were precise. Daisy moved through piles of cloth with a tenderness that made the scene feel sacrilegious.
The box they sought was not obvious, it was a cunning little box, hidden in a false bottom of a drawer, Alessia would have given up if not for Daisy’s persistence.
"Keep searching we may soon find it Alessia"... She whispered to her.
And then Alessia saw a photograph.
It wasn’t a small picture. It was a proclamation caught in silver-negative.
Seraphina in white silk long wedding dress, breathless at the altar, and Romeo beside her, the smile of a man who believed in beginnings.
The caption was in a small inked note at the corner , it reads "four years ago, I married the love of my life".
Alessia’s hand froze over the photograph. Her mouth left without sound, a small circle that echoed like a bell, her breath hitched. She nudged closer to daisy, the light catching her face like an expose. "Daisy, please come and take a look at this," she said her voice was small and stunned.
’What’s that?, Daisy asked as she stooped searching and approached Alessia.
She had to stop because some discoveries demanded the silence that followed and weigh like thunder...