Lucas Moretti did not sleep that night. He sat in the dimmed medical room of his own mansion, hooked to oxygen he hated more than the men who once tried to kill him.
CHAPTER ONE: THE BREATH THAT SHOULD NOT HAVE EXISTED
Lucas Moretti did not sleep that night.
He sat in the dimmed medical room of his own mansion, hooked to oxygen he hated more than the men who once tried to kill him. The machines whispered around him like nervous servants. Outside the door, armed guards stood in silence, pretending they were not afraid.
But Lucas was not looking at them.
He was thinking about the girl.
Lily.
A child who should not have known how death sounded in a throat.
A child who should not have had the reflex to save him.
Across the room, his closest advisor, Vincent Hale, adjusted his cufflinks with calm precision.
“You’re alive because of luck,” Vincent said. “Not because of her.”
Lucas didn’t answer.
His mind replayed it again and again: small hands, trembling inhaler, the moment air returned like it had been summoned by innocence itself.
“No,” Lucas finally said. “Luck doesn’t know how to press the right dose.”
Vincent’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“That girl is a liability. She saw you vulnerable.”
Lucas turned his head slowly.
“And yet she is the only reason I am breathing.”
A pause.
Then Vincent smiled—just slightly.
“Then perhaps we should find out who taught her to save monsters.”
That same night, Lily slept in her mother’s small servant room at the edge of the estate.
Her mother, Anna Carter, sat beside her bed fully dressed, shaking slightly—not from fear, but recognition.
She had seen Lucas Moretti before.
Not as a dying man.
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But as a name on a document she once signed in a courtroom she was not supposed to enter.
And behind that signature… was blood.
