The world was burning. But not theirs. Not yet.
Two weeks had passed since Lavinia Vitale's death. Her urn sat in a stone alcove guarded by silence and shadow, while her empire stood on the edge of fracture. Mourning bled into paranoia. The world outside, however, was shifting—not with the fury of chaos, but with the precision of intent.
No one knew who was orchestrating it.
Not officially.
Not yet.
---
It began with the French.
A ripple in the southern network. A known smuggler's route in Marseille was burned to the ground, the bodies left posed in the shape of a serpent devouring its tail. A message. One only a Vitale would understand.
Flavia had been quiet these days. Too quiet. She drifted like a ghost through the villa—answering questions with nods, sitting at the long breakfast table where none of the siblings touched their espresso. Her fingers often found their way to her sister's old sketchbooks. She never opened them.
Until today.
The package arrived just after noon. Sent to Valkyrie Mode. No return address. Sealed with red wax bearing the symbol of a crown with one broken point.
Flavia didn’t speak. Just stared at it until Luca walked in.
"Are you going to open it?" Luca asked.
"Eventually," Flavia replied.
"What if it's dangerous?"
"Then it’s definitely for me."
---
The family had begun to fray.
At dinner that evening, the long table was fuller than usual—Dante at the head, Nonna Rosa on one side, Leonardo, Matteo, Nikos, Santiago, Damian, and a few of the lesser cousins seated throughout. Their usual banter had given way to cautious silence.
Giuliana barely spoke anymore.
Matteo was drunk by 7 p.m. every night.
Leonardo stared into space like the world only existed inside his skull.
"We need to tighten the French border," Santiago muttered.
"French border's fine," Nikos countered. "It's the Irish we're losing ground to."
"Losing ground?" Damian raised an eyebrow. "They just lost a warehouse. Burned to ash. No survivors."
That made everyone pause.
"Russian safehouses," Leonardo said. "Three in Italy. Taken out in the last six days."
"You think it's the Albanians?" someone asked.
Damian shook his head. "No one's taking credit."
"Then who is?" Dante asked, softly.
Silence.
Until Flavia spoke. "This isn't a war."
All eyes turned to her.
She lifted her chin slowly. "It's a message."
---
That night, she opened the package.
Inside: an old perfume bottle, heavy glass, unused. A brooch shaped like a snake coiled around a rose. And a note.
Blank.
But when she held it over the candlelight, words began to emerge, heat-activated ink whispering truth from the grave:
Protocol Vanta is live. Don’t look for me. Find the roots. -E
She gasped.
---
Leonardo received the message the same night.
His phone lit up. No number. No trace.
Just a string of code, encrypted in a way that only Silva could manage. A code they'd used as teenagers in a casino job gone sideways. He entered the cipher.
It decrypted to one line:
"Not everything burns."
He gripped the necklace still in his pocket. The one they'd recovered from the ballroom. Her necklace.
The one that hadn’t melted.
It should've.
---
Flavia stayed up till dawn. She laid out Lavinia's sketchbooks, flipped through the last pages. There—a map. A pattern in the ink. Certain cities circled. Three had already seen attacks.
Luca stood in the doorway. "What are you doing?"
"I'm not sure yet."
"You think she's alive?"
Flavia didn’t answer.
Luca stepped closer. "Because if she is… you need to tell the others."
"She wouldn't do this to us."
She pointed to a drawing of a chessboard.
"It has not finished playing yet."
---
In the underworld, fear began to spread.
Irish ports in Galway were locked down. Two gunrunners disappeared in broad daylight. A Russian money launderer slit his own throat in a Paris hotel, a snake tattoo carved onto his back post-mortem.
Who was doing this?
Nobody knew.
Nobody wanted to.
---
Damian stood by the window, watching the fog roll in. He lit a cigarette he didn’t intend to finish.
"She is right. This isn’t war," he muttered.
Leonardo looked up.
Damian exhaled smoke. "This is a message."
---
And elsewhere, far from the villa, a shadow moved through a quiet street.
Boots pressed into wet asphalt.
From behind a veil of fog, a figure emerged.
Drenched in black.
Unapologetic.
A voice like steel and smoke whispered:
"Tell them the Queen is dead. But the serpent never dies."
____________
S Pavona
YOU ARE READING
A NAME IN THE DARK
Mystery / ThrillerA Name in the Dark Some names are erased. Others are forged in silence. After six generations of sons, twin daughters were born to Italy's most feared mafia family. But their legacy was stolen. At just five years old, Lavinia and Flavia vanished-kid...
