All Chapters of BLOOD AND VOWS: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

BLOOD AND VOWS---CHAPTER TWENTY-TWOHIS FIRST KILL“A man doesn’t become a monster. He just finds out what was already in him.”He was thirteen the first time someone handed him a gun.It was a summer night in Palermo. The kind of heat that clings to the bones. Alessio Moretti stood in the back of a butcher shop that doubled as a safehouse, blood on the floors, sweat on his neck, the sound of meat hooks swinging faint in the dark. Don Salvatore was there. So was his father. And in the middle of the room, tied to a chair, was a man with a bag over his head and a bruise blooming around his eye.The smell wasn’t just sweat and salt and fear.It was guilt.“Who is he?” Alessio had asked, heart fast, voice calm.His father didn’t answer.Salvatore did.“He stole from the family. Gave our routes to the Giordano clan. Three dead. One of them was your cousin Luca’s godfather.”Alessio looked at the man in the chair. He wasn’t moving.He wasn’t pleading.He was just breathing hard through th

BLOOD AND VOWS---CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURTHE REUNION“Not every homecoming feels like safety. Some feel like war waiting to finish what it started.”The warehouse was cold, the kind of cold that lived in the walls and came from concrete floors that hadn’t felt sun in decades, and yet Emilia stood in it without flinching, without folding her arms or adjusting her coat, her posture straight, deliberate, as though stillness itself might protect her from what was about to happen. She had arrived without warning, without entourage, without the usual shadow that followed her, and yet her presence filled the hallway like smoke after a slow burn, unavoidable and thick with meaning. The overhead light buzzed quietly, flickering once, and then there he was—Alessio—coming down the corridor like a shadow stepping into substance, his shoulders squared, his eyes sharper than she remembered, and his silence loud enough to make her heartbeat feel like an echo in a church built for vengeance.They didn’

BLOOD AND VOWS---CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXTHE FIRST STRIKE!!“The first shot is never about death. It’s about domination.”The night air was thick with silence—not the kind born of peace, but the sort that hangs just before a storm, pressing against the chest like a breath held too long. The Moretti soldiers moved through the alleyways with mechanical precision, shadows among shadows, faces calm, fingers resting loosely near triggers. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. Every man in the unit knew what this night meant—what this operation would set in motion. It was the first strike, the first cut to bleed out the war that had been boiling beneath the skin of the city for too long.At the center of the formation was Emilia, dressed in black from boots to gloves, her hair tied back, her eyes locked on the warehouse across the street. Pier 9. The pulse of Vitale’s underground armory. On the surface, it looked abandoned—a rusted chain on the gate, cracked windows, half-lit floodlights fli

BLOOD AND VOWS --- CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT THE FUNERAL “Grief is quiet, but it hears everything.” The funeral was held just before sunrise, not out of sentiment but strategy, not for serenity but security. In the world they ruled and survived in, time was never just time—it was warning, it was signal, it was calculated silence wrapped around movements that could get you killed. A burial at dawn meant fewer eyes, fewer risks, fewer chances for someone to slip a knife between ribs while pretending to offer condolences. Luca Moretti was going into the ground before the city even realized he was dead, and that was precisely how Alessio wanted it. There were no white flowers, no open invitations, no family press. The list of mourners was handpicked by Alessio himself and cross-verified by Emilia three separate times, because they both knew grief wasn’t the only thing that would show up in a suit today. Most came in silence, others in subtle shame, a few with lingering glances that begge

BLOOD AND VOWS---CHAPTER THIRTYTHE SISTER’S TRUTH“There are wounds deeper than betrayal. They’re called silence.”Bianca hadn’t spoken more than two words between the rail yard and the estate, not in the car, not in the elevator, not as Alessio sat beside her with his hands clenched so tightly they looked like they were holding back an earthquake. Her head rested against the window, her eyes half-closed, not from sleep, but from restraint. Like she was calculating every second, every syllable, every breath she would need to explain the kind of truth that rots through walls when finally let loose. When they arrived, the estate was locked down tighter than it had ever been—no guards posted outside, no visible weapons, no signs of movement. Everything and everyone was inside, waiting, watching, bracing. Because no one expected her return. And no one believed this would end with relief.They took her to the glass room on the second floor, the one originally designed for council meetin