Luciano De Luca didn’t believe in coincidence.

He believed in control. In calculation.

And Serena Vale, with her ink-stained fingers and fire-glazed words, didn’t fit into his system. She unsettled him. Not with defiance—but with how carefully she didn’t fight. As if she was always three steps ahead of him.

So he did what he always did with unknowns.

He ordered his men to dig.

Two days later, a file landed on his desk.

Serena Vale. 24. Literature graduate. No criminal record. No police record. No scandals. No lovers. No enemies.

Too clean. Too careful.

Then came the name at the bottom of the report: E. S. Vale.

She didn’t just write books. She published them. Self-funded. Anonymous interviews. Tight privacy contracts with her editor. No face ever revealed.

Luciano skimmed the titles.

Whispers in Crimson. The Quiet Killer. Love in a Locked Room.

His fingers stopped on a highlighted excerpt—taken from her last novel:

“He thought chaining her would make her beg. But she didn’t beg. She built maps in her mind. She found cracks in the floor. She watched the men who held the keys and smiled like their queen.”

He read it again. Slower.

It wasn’t fiction.

It was a blueprint.

Luciano leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowing.

Serena wasn’t just clever.

She was trained in a different way. Trained to hide in plain sight, to write codes into stories, to mask vengeance behind metaphors.

She was writing him now.

But he had a question burning in the back of his mind: Had she written others before?

Enemies?

Men like him?

That night, he watched her from the study doorway as she sat curled in the corner of the couch, scribbling something into her leather notebook, hair tied messily, lips mouthing words she didn’t speak out loud.

She looked innocent.

She looked fragile.

But she was neither.

“Who did you write about before me?” he asked, breaking the silence.

She glanced up, surprised—but not shaken. “No one you’d know.”

He stepped closer. “Try me.”

Serena shut the notebook gently. Her voice was calm. “All my stories end the same way. With the man thinking he was in control… until he wasn’t.”

Luciano smiled—but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Then let’s see how well you write under pressure, wife.”

He turned and left, but not before she saw it.

The file.

Her file—on his desk.

And that’s when Serena knew.

The real game had begun.