SERAFINA’S POV
Florence.
The word alone felt like a pressure point pressing at the back of my skull, a whisper from the past threading through time.
I stared at the sketch again, tracing the edges of the villa drawn in my mother’s delicate hand. It was a two-story stone house, shrouded in trees, with a curved arch over the entryway and a cracked chimney. It looked like something out of a dream. But the coordinates scribbled in the corner were real.
“Sebastian never mentioned this place,” I murmured.
Alonzo leaned over my shoulder. “It was probably too dangerous. If she kept it hidden, he wouldn’t have wanted to expose it.”
“And yet she wanted me to find it,” I whispered, voice sharp with the edge of realization. “Why else hide it in the one place only I’d ever look?”
The teddy bear.
