Chapter 2 The Becoming.......

The table was a cold and sterile steel that hummed faintly under her skin, almost like it could sense the storm inside her.

The room smelled of antiseptic and old memories.

From the white tile, humming lights overhead to a small radio playing some opera from a forgotten age.

Her body, draped in paper like thin cloth, was still gaunt, still aching, still bruised from days without sunlight, food, or forgiveness.

She laid still, a phantom in preparation.

The surgeon Dr Emiliano Raye moved around her with the grace of an artist.

Not hurried, not hesitant, his hands were steady, every movement clean and deliberate.

He was older now, strands of grey in his once black hair, a deeper crease to the corners of his eyes, but his touch hadn't changed.

"Last chance," he said softly, standing over her. "You sure this is what you want?"

His voice echoed slightly in the tiled chamber, intimate and detached all at once. There was a kindness to his question, but no surprise.

He had known her since she was a girl, from bandaging skinned knees, stitching flesh from sparring accidents to resetting broken fingers she'd refused to complain about.

Now he was preparing to erase her.

Vespa didn't blink. Her eyes met his.

"I don't want to be remembered," she said. "Not as her(Vespa), not anymore."

Emiliano didn't press, he never did.

He only nodded. "Then I'll make you disappear."

It wasn't the first time she'd wanted to vanish, but this time, she was going through with it.

The night before the surgery, she hadn't slept. She'd sat curled in the same velvet cushion, watching the flicker of a candle in the dark trench, fingers tracing the old scar on her jaw.

A scar she got when she was eleven, climbing the eastern wall of the estate to prove a point to her brother.

Alessandro had dared her.

"I bet you won't," he'd said, smug.

She did. She fell halfway, split her chin open, and smiled through the blood just to spite him.

Now even that would be gone.

Every mark, every trace every laugh line her father once said reminded him of her mother.

She had asked Emiliano to take it all.

The operating room was quiet but alive with machines. No assistants, no nurses. Just the two of them.

He'd insisted on solitude.

"No one else needs to know what you're doing," he had said, "Not even me."

She appreciated that.

She hadn't told him about the fire, about the flower, about her father's dying words.

She hadn't told him that the real reason she needed this new face was not to escape, but to search, to slip past eyes trained to recognize bloodlines.

Emiliano thought she was running and that was enough.

He started with her jaw.

Bone rasping, muscles peeled then refastened.

The sound of it echoed in her skull even through sedation, like the memory of thunder.

She drifted in and out of consciousness, never fully gone nor present. She didn't want to sleep through it.

She wanted to feel it and pay for it.

An eye socket reshaped, nose cartilage broken and reset.

Cheekbones fractured, shifted like puzzle pieces into someone else's face.

The pain was exquisite, dull and bright all at once.

In her haze, she saw things.

Flashes of Alessandro laughing, wind in his curls as they rode horses along the vineyard edge.

Her father's voice, low and serious: "A Vesper's body is sacred, we carry our name in our bones."

Her own voice screaming in the fire.

She gritted her teeth or what was left of them and let it all burn inside her.

Three days passed in darkness.

When she woke, the world was gauze and painkillers.

Her face felt like it didn't belong to her, swollen, stitched, reshaped.

She could barely move her lips, and her eyes only opened to slits, everything ached and blinking felt foreign.

Emiliano sat by her bedside, silent, a book in his lap, he looked up when she stirred, but didn't speak.

Instead, he passed her a mirror.

She stared at a new face, It was still her, but also not.

The swelling obscured much, but the angles had changed.

The softness that once made her look like a spoiled heiress had been carved away. In its place.

She reached up slowly and touched her cheek, wincing.

"You look like someone the world forgot," he said gently.

Good, she thought, that was the point.

Recovery was long.

She stayed hidden beneath the city, wrapped in shadows and bandages.

Emiliano visited every day, checking the stitches, adjusting the medicine, whispering fragments of old stories to fill the silence.

He never asked about her plans. Never asked where she would go when healed.

But one afternoon, while replacing her sutures, he said, "Your father trusted me with you, he once told me that if anything happened to him, you'd be the one to carry the name."

She looked away.

"That name's dead."

Emiliano was quiet for a while.

"Names die, blood doesn't."

As the days passed, her strength returned.

She learned how to use her new face.

She practiced expressions in the mirror, every arch of a brow, every movement of the mouth.

She made new smiles, new glares, new tears, crafted identities like masks.

Cleora Vanni, that would be her new name, for now.

A woman with a clean past, just a pair of calculating eyes and the look of someone who had seen too much.

But she was still Vespa underneath.

Still the daughter of fire and blood.

Still the woman who dragged her father's body through burning halls.

She just wore a different skin now.

One night, she walked to the edge of the trench, where the tunnel met the sea.

The wind tasted like rust and salt.

She closed her eyes and whispered her old name once, just to feel it leave her lips.

"Vespa."

It vanished into the breeze.

Back in the makeshift clinic, Emiliano was packing his tools.

"You've healed well," he said.

"You'll bruise for a few more weeks, but no one will know who you were."

She nodded, her voice was stronger now.

"Thank you."

He paused. "What will you do?"

She hesitated.

"Disappear," she lied.

He didn't question it. Only walked to the door, surgical bag in hand.

"You know how to reach me," he said.

"I won't."

He offered a nod, then he left.

She stood in front of the cracked mirror, staring at her thoughts,

At first, she had wanted only to fade, to become invisible, to trace her brother's footsteps through the underworld until she found him or died trying.

But something new stirred now, a thought, a fire rekindling.

This face could walk anywhere, even into Padrino's court.

Even into the lion's den.

No one would know she was Vesper blood no one would see her coming, not until it was far too late.

The days bled into each other, she spent them moving slowly, methodically through the skeleton of her old self.

Pain dulled, but clarity sharpened, she tested her range of motion, the angles of her new cheekbones under sunlight filtered through tarp and dust.

She jogged at dawn through alley shadows. She practiced the way her voice could change warmer, sharper, even bored.

She gave herself new memories, new vices, new habits. She perfected the art of being reborn.

Her name was Cleora Vanni now, a woman with no lineage, no scent of legacy, no trace of the Vesper name in her walk.

Emiliano's last gift had been a document, fake passport, driver's ID, birth certificate all under the name Cleora Vanni.

The face matched, the backstory was solid.

Sicilian-born, orphaned, a ghost who'd spent years drifting between borders. She could vanish into any crowd now, and no one would stop her.

She was finally free.

But freedom tasted like dust.

She had nowhere to go, no one to trust. The few Vesper loyalists left were hiding or dead. Their allies had scattered like frightened mice when Padrino's wolves tore through their estate.

She had watched too much fall, she had watched Don Silvano Vesper bleed across marble floors, the weight of a century old dynasty crashing down with every drop.

She hadn't just survived, she had inherited war.