BLOOD AND VOWS
--- CHAPTER NINE FIRST FIRE “Hate burns clean. Want burns longer.” --- The first real fight didn’t happen during a strategy meeting, or a tense dinner, or some calculated standoff in the hallway. It happened in the armory. The room was below ground—metal-lined, low-lit, and silent as a crypt. Emilia wandered in unannounced, curious about the restricted sections Alessio had kept locked since her arrival. He was already there. Loading a Beretta, sleeves rolled to his forearms, focus narrowed like he was prepping for war. “Looking for something?” he asked without looking at her. “I thought this was my house too,” she said, crossing the threshold. He clicked the magazine into place. “It’s not a museum. You don’t walk in here uninvited.” “Yet here I am.” He finally looked at her. “I don’t like surprises.” “Good,” she said. “I’m full of them.” --- She walked the aisles slowly, studying the layout. Rows of guns, knives, and crates. Labels in coded ink. Not for show—this was inventory meant to kill. “You catalog all this by memory?” she asked. “I know every weapon in this room,” he said. “And who’s authorized to touch them.” “You think I’m going to steal a gun?” “I think you’re going to test me. And I’m reminding you that you’ll lose.” She turned on him. “Why do you think everything is a power play?” “Because in this world, it is.” “Then maybe the world needs to burn.” He stepped toward her. Close. Too close. “Careful, wife,” he said softly. “You’re not fireproof.” --- The tension snapped like a trigger. “I didn’t come down here to fight,” she said. “Then why are you here?” “To understand what kind of man I married.” He paused, expression unreadable. “And?” “You don’t scare me.” “You should be afraid of someone.” “I was,” she said. “Then he died in a car bombing, and now I’m just angry.” Silence fell between them like glass shattering. “I didn’t kill your father,” Alessio said finally. “But I didn’t stop it either.” Emilia’s breath hitched. He didn’t look away. “You want truth? There it is.” --- She walked past him, not to retreat—but to grab a pistol from the nearest table. He tensed. She cleared the chamber, spun it once, and handed it to him, grip first. “If you wanted me dead, you would’ve done it already,” she said. He took the gun but didn’t lower it right away. Then he placed it gently on the table. “You’re not weak,” he said. “Neither are you,” she replied. “But you’re used to people bowing. I don’t bend.” His gaze flicked to her mouth. “I noticed.” "glad you did" she responded with a hitched tone . The heat in the room shifted—hate cracking under something sharper, something blazing, something fierce, something extraordinary. Want. --- She turned to go, but he caught her wrist. Not hard. Just enough. She froze. “I don’t like being played,” he said. “Then stop pretending this marriage is just politics.” He smirked, "is that so wifey?" "Don't call me that motherfucker". she responded with a harsh tone. In a Matter of few seconds, be exhaled in a bit to calm herself down. Their eyes locked. And then—fire. He kissed her. Rough, fast, sharp like a blade drawn too quick. She pulled back just enough to breathe. “This doesn’t mean I trust you.” “I don’t want your trust,” he said. He kissed her again. And this time, she kissed him back, matching his energy. ---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
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
---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
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
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
--- 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