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ENEMIES IN THE SHADOWS
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2025-05-09 17:05:50BLOOD AND VOWS
--- CHAPTER ELEVEN ENEMIES IN THE SHADOWS “The most dangerous war is the one no one admits they’re fighting.” --- They started the performance that night. Alessio slammed a glass against the wall in front of his men. Emilia stormed out of the dining hall loud enough for the guards to hear her heels echo. No words were said in private, but the message they sent in public was clear: The marriage was breaking. And they made sure everyone who needed to know saw it. --- Inside the bedroom, they didn’t speak, both deep in thought. She stood by the window. He leaned against the door. “Do you trust me to do this?” she asked quietly. “I trust you to finish what you start,” he said. “That’s not the same as trust.” “No,” he said. “It’s not.” She turned. “You’re good at this. Lies. Strategy.” His eyes met hers. “You are too.” It should’ve been a compliment. It felt like a warning. --- Three days later, a package arrived at the Moretti estate. No return address. No fingerprints. Inside: a burner phone and a single message displayed across the screen. “Meet me. Alone. No Moreetti. No Romano. No lies.” The number was clean. Emilia tracked it through a contact she trusted, but it went cold before the trace finished. She didn’t need confirmation. “It’s Vitale,” she said. Alessio frowned. “It’s bait.” “Then let him take a bite.” --- They met in an abandoned warehouse outside Brooklyn. Neutral ground. No cameras. No soldiers. Just shadow and cement and the kind of silence that felt like a countdown. Emilia walked in wearing black—leather gloves, boots, no jewelry. Nothing to trace, nothing to grab. Enzo Vitale was already there. He leaned against a pillar like he had all the time in the world. “You came alone,” he said. “Impressive.” “You knew I would.” He grinned. “Still carrying the Romano pride, I see.” Emilia didn’t react. “Why did you call me here?” “To offer you something your husband won’t.” She raised a brow. “And what’s that?” “Freedom.” --- He stepped closer. “You hate this marriage. Everyone knows it. The cracks are showing.” “They’re meant to.” “But not all of them are fake,” he said, voice dropping. “You think he trusts you?” She said nothing. “I can offer you a way out,” he continued. “Not just from him—but from all of it. The families. The blood. You could disappear.” She looked him dead in the eyes. “And what would that cost me?” “Just a little truth,” he said. “Tell me what Moretti’s planning. Give me something real.” “You think I’m here to betray him?” “I think you’re smart enough to play both sides.” She let the silence stretch. Then she leaned in. “You want truth? Here it is: I’d rather die wearing his name than live with yours in my mouth.” --- He didn’t smile this time. And that’s when she knew—he was testing her. And she’d just passed. He stepped back, straightened his jacket. “You’ll regret that,” he said. “Maybe,” she replied. “But not today.” --- Back at the estate, she told Alessio everything. He listened in silence. When she finished, he spoke without looking at her. “He’s planning a move.” “He thinks we’re weak.” “Good,” he said. “Let him think that. Let him come for us.” She crossed her arms. “And then what?” He turned toward her. There was no smile this time. No mask. “Then we remind him who built this city from blood.” --- ---
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BLOOD AND VOWS THE ENDING WE CHOSE (PART 2)
CHAPTER FIFTYTHE ENDING WE CHOSE (PART II)“The best stories don’t end when the violence stops. They end when the ones who survived finally allow themselves to live.”The days stretched longer now. In Palermo, summer was creeping in with the scent of sea salt and lemons, and Bianca had come to love how the sun hit the café windows just before 7 a.m. The light wasn’t sharp. It was golden, like honey dripping over the stone floors and warm wood tables. The walls inside were whitewashed, the old beams above exposed. On the left, near the counter, a faded frame held a single photograph: Emilia on the hood of a car, laughing, middle finger up, cigarette in her teeth. Below it, a small brass plaque read: “She chose us. So we could choose something else.”The café, Rina’s, had grown into something none of them planned. At first, it was just a front—a quiet place where four survivors could anchor themselves after tearing open the bones of the past. But then neighbors started coming. First ou
BLOOD AND VOWS THE ENDING WE CHOSE (PART 1)
CHAPTER FOURTY-NINETHE ENDING WE CHOSE (PART I)“There is no silence without someone choosing not to speak.”The sun over Vienna didn’t rise—it revealed. The way light slips between ancient stones, over copper gutters, across rooftops that had watched two world wars and thousands of quiet betrayals, always listening, never intervening. Alessio stood on the roof of the holding house, coat zipped to his throat, hands in his pockets. Below him, the city woke without knowing what had almost happened. People poured coffee. Children cried. Streetcars hummed. Life, utterly unbothered.Behind him, the door creaked.Bianca stepped onto the roof, scarf loose around her neck, eyes red but dry. Neither of them had slept. After the Austrian vault fell, the shockwave wasn’t physical. No explosion. No electromagnetic pulse. No headline. But something lifted—something buried so deep in the collective mind that when it left, the world took a breath it didn’t know it had been holding. The other vaults
BLOOD AND VOWS WE ARCHIVE
---CHAPTER FOURTY EIGHT WE ARE THE ARCHIVE“They thought they built vaults to hold memory. But memory always needed bodies.”The air in the vault turned warm, like breath exhaled through old lungs. The stone beneath Alessio’s boots wasn’t just floor anymore—it pulsed, faintly, rhythmically, like something ancient had aligned itself with the beat of his heart. He holstered his weapon slowly. Matteo was gone—reduced to ash that didn’t smoke, didn’t drift. It just settled, like dust from a burned history book. No scream. No warning. Just the end of a man who wasn’t a man anymore.Bianca dropped to one knee beside the shattered remains of the chair. She reached down, brushed her fingertips over the remains. They were warm. Alive, somehow. Not residue from a life lost—but fragments of memory still being held.Sofia scanned the open floor beneath them. The section where Matteo had sat was no longer solid. A perfect circle of stone had retracted, revealing not a staircase or tunnel—but a v
BLOOD AND VOWS ALL THAT WE BURIED
CHAPTER FOURTY-SEVEN ALL THAT WE BURIED “The deeper you dig into the past, the more it starts digging back.” The mountains rose like broken teeth from the Austrian horizon, white-capped and indifferent. They held no memory of blood, no record of names. Snow covered every ruin eventually. But buried beneath the southern slope of what the locals called Todesspitze—Death Peak—was a structure that predated the Cold War, the Reich, the Empire before it. No markers. No flags. Just the hum beneath the ground, faint and rhythmic, like a second heartbeat waiting to be acknowledged. Alessio sat in the rear of the modified transport van as they climbed the narrow mountain path. A three-man team from Sofia’s personal network drove ahead in a decoy vehicle. They didn’t know the mission. Just that the people inside the main van carried something older than bullets and more dangerous than explosives: memory that refused to stay buried. Bianca sat across from him, gloves on, eyes locked on t
BLOOD AND VOWS THE ONES WHO WATCHED IT HAPPEN
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX THE ONES WHO WATCHED IT HAPPEN “The worst kind of witness isn’t the one who speaks after the crime. It’s the one who knew it was coming and stayed silent.” The room was colder than when they left it. That was the first thing Bianca noticed. No change in temperature on paper. No obvious shift in the thermostat. But the air had changed. Heavier. Stiller. As if the oxygen had stopped circulating the moment they found the body in the Istanbul vault. As if the vault had not sealed, but exhaled something that still lingered in their lungs. Back inside the house, their boots left faint imprints on the marble that hadn’t been there before. The dust was disturbed—not by footsteps that came in through a door, but by something that had been there already. The kind of presence that doesn’t enter from outside, but simply waits for the right silence to step forward. Sofia noticed first. Her hand twitched toward the weapon at her side. Alessio simply stopped walking. No or
BLOOD AND VOWS WHAT THE SILENCE COVERED
--- CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE WHAT THE SILENCE COVERED “Not everything buried was meant to be found. Some things were buried to keep the living from becoming worse than the dead.” The plane touched down in Istanbul just after midnight. No official manifest. No customs. No one waiting. Alessio, Bianca, Sofia, and Rosa stepped onto the tarmac wearing plain black coats, faces clean, no weapons in hand—but every one of them carried the weight of the last vault under their skin. Tomaso stayed behind to lock down the estate. Someone had to keep the fire lit in case they didn’t come back. The van waiting at the edge of the runway had no plates. A driver sat in the front seat, face hidden beneath a gray cap, no words spoken. When Alessio opened the side door, he found a folder waiting on the seat. Inside—coordinates, a skeletal map of the Old City, and a list of known “anomalies.” That was the word used. Not threats. Not traps. Anomalies. As if they weren’t heading into danger, but into som
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