THE HAVANA EMBERS

The dream took her before dawn.

Heat slammed her chest.

“Valentina!”

She spun—too late. A hand gripped her arm, yanking her toward the hall.

“Move!”

Smoke rolled in from the far end. Shouts. Glass breaking. Somewhere, a gunshot cracked like bone splitting.

“Who—”

“Later,” Adriano snapped, shoving her ahead.

Her bare feet slapped tile already hot. The air stank—burnt sugar, diesel.

“Where’s Mama?” she gasped.

Adriano didn’t answer. His jaw was set, eyes hard, scanning corners like the walls themselves were enemies.

They burst into the main room—fire licking the ceiling, lights gone feral. The place that had been carnival-bright an hour ago was now all teeth and hunger.

A woman’s scream split the smoke. Her mother’s voice.

Valentina’s chest locked. “Mama—”

“Valentina, don’t!”

She tore free, stumbling toward the sound. Heat clawed her throat. Shapes blurred.

“Valentina!” Adriano’s shout was a hammer, but she didn’t stop—until she slammed into a wall of smoke so thick it swallowed light.

Something shoved her—hard. The hallway folded into itself, ceiling groaning. She went down, coughing, the floor a furnace.

Through the choking black, she saw him. Not Adriano.

Long-limbed. Quick, not predator-slow. He moved like the air itself cleared for him.

A hand reached through the dark.

“Take it!”

She hesitated—then his fingers closed around hers, hauling her up with a strength that smelled of seawater and old linen. The world narrowed to that grip, that pull.

And then—

A crash. Adriano’s voice cutting through, furious. “Let her go!”

The stranger didn’t look back. He shoved her toward Adriano and was gone, swallowed by smoke.

Adriano caught her hard enough to bruise. “Stay with me.”

They stumbled out into night air. She collapsed on the gravel, coughing black.

The villa behind them roared, flames clawing the sky.

Adriano crouched in front of her. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“My mother—”

“Your mother’s not here.” His voice was low, lethal. “You run toward fire again, I’ll—” He stopped. Looked away.

Her hands shook. “That man—”

“What man?” Adriano’s gaze snapped back to her.

“He pulled me out.”

“I pulled you out.”

“No.” She met his stare. “Not you.”

For a beat, they just breathed—the fire hissing behind them like it was listening.

Then Adriano’s tone dropped colder. “Forget him.”

She didn’t. Couldn’t. The taste of soot clung to her tongue, the stranger’s hand still warm on her skin.

“Valentina…”

Adriano’s mouth thinned. He took the chair beside the bed as if it were a throne, set his elbows on his knees and folded his hands. “You’ve been seeing that a lot.”

“It felt different this time,” she said. “It wasn’t you.”

His reaction was a blink too quick, a hardness she noticed immediate and involuntary. “Dreams lie. They take pieces of you and stitch them into monsters.” He spoke the line like rehearsed scripture. “Trauma repeats.”

“I remember more every time,” she said. “There were hands. A man’s hands this time. He pulled me out.”

“And you think that changes anything.” Adriano put his palm flat on the bed between them. His fingers were warm. “You remember because your head finally lets you. You won’t like what your head chooses to show. Let it be.”

There was a warning beneath the words and she tasted it like iron. “You sound...certain.”

“I know how memories work.” He watched her closely, the way physicians watched a wound. “You think you’re alone in the dark, Valentina. You’re not.”

She wanted him to say he was the one who had been there, that he had saved whatever little child she had left. Instead he said, “Let the sleeping things sleep.”

She should have pushed, demanded, asked what he knew. Instead she let the room close in around the unasked question and slid into one of the villa’s quiet routines — dressing in silks that smelled faintly of his laundry, taking her coffee black, practicing her smile.

Adriano leaves.

The sound of his voice, low and tense, drifts back down the hall. I shouldn’t move… but I had walked the corridors on the way to midday business.

The study door is cracked. Light spills through. Matteo’s voice—tight, edged—slips into the hall.

“She’ll find out.”

“Not yet,” Adriano said. The words were flat. “She’ll find out on her own if we keep pressing. She’s dangerous when she knows too much.”

Matteo scoffed. “Dangerous how? For you, for us? Or for herself?”

“For all of us.” Adriano’s laugh was a dry sound. “Especially for herself. You’re certain the photograph was a leak and not someone trying to bait her?”

“Adriano, this isn’t something you can bury—”

“It stays buried until I say otherwise.”

A long silence. My pulse hammers.

Matteo: “And if she keeps digging?”

“She’ll find out.” Adriano’s words landed like a hammer. “And when she does, either she blames them or she blames me. Either way, the board shifts.”

“But…She’ll find out,”

he said again, and that repetition settled like frost in the air.

A chair scrapes. The door shuts harder than it needs to. I back into the shadows before they come out. My breath is loud in my ears.

Valentina’s fingers dug into the column until her nails ached.

Once the voices faded she stood there a moment longer — a statue at the seam of two rooms — and let the cold in. She could have walked away. She could have let the distance remain. But the word photograph had landed like a stone. It rang against her skull. Someone had mentioned a picture. Someone in this house had been looking into Havana.

By midday, Valentina couldn’t shake it off. The fire. The man. The words last night.

She moved with a purpose that felt like guilt and curiosity braided together and made her clumsy..

Soon found herself in Adriano’s private sitting room—he’s out, Matteo too.

Holding a drawer behind a portrait of an ancestor that smirked in oils, it opened with a soft slide. She is careful, deliberate. Then—there it is.

The photograph

A small, faded photograph.

It was folded between two bills, old enough to fray, She almost put it back without looking but the paper hummed like something alive.

She unfolded it.

My heart stops.

It’s me. Younger—fifteen? Sixteen? Standing on a Havana street in the sun. Beside me, smiling faintly, is the man from my dream.

Same eyes. Same build. The heat in my chest turns cold. A man crouched behind her, face half-hidden but jaw strong and eyes the kind of dark that the moon envies; he held her shoulder with a possessive gentleness that made her lungs forget how to breathe.

He had a tattoo at the base of his thumb,

and smelled, in her mind, like sea and old linen, the same phantom scent from the dream.

She flipped the photograph over with shaking fingers. And behind it was written..

He was there before the fire.

A date scrawled beneath the sentence — 2009 — and there, beneath the ink, an initial she knew as well as she knew her own pulse: a looping M.

The walls seem closer as Valentina clutched the photo like it’s proof that she is not losing her mind.

That night the villa hummed in a way she had learned to read. The staff had two faces — the practiced one for day and the private for night.

The front door slams. Footsteps—his stride, fast, controlled. I shove the photo into my pocket.

He appears in the doorway. “You’re in here.” Not a question.

“Just looking for a book.” I move toward the shelf. My heartbeat feels like it’s punching my ribs.

His eyes skim the room, too fast. “Matteo’s here. We’re leaving soon.”

Leaving—just like that. No time for questions. He always controls the clock.

Suddenly he blurted,

“You found something,” without looking up.

“You knew about Havana,” she said replied. The photograph felt like a coal under her ribs. “Not my Havana. Your...the other place. I heard you and Matteo arguing about a picture.”

Adriano stopped pouring. The glass remained empty in his hand. He looked at her then — not with the predator’s focus that had terrified others into compliance, but with a caution that made something in her root and sink. “I did not say Havana. I said La Rosa.”

She blinked. “La Rosa?”

He swallowed the word. “A place. A name. A fire.”

“You said not to press it,” she said. “Why?”

“Because the fires we tend are not the ones that burn our enemies.” He made a flat smile. “They are the ones that burn our houses, our children, our mistakes.”

Adriano was already walking away.

On the table where he’d been sitting, a folded scrap of paper waited. Her name, written in block letters.

She opened it. Four words stared back at her in ink that bled at the edges:

DON’T TRUST HIM.