All Chapters of BLOOD AND VOWS: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

BLOOD AND VOWS---CHAPTER THIRTY-TWOTHE MONEY WAR“Cut a man’s throat and you kill him once. Cut off his money and he dies every day after.”The war had shifted. That much was clear. It was no longer about bodies, bullets, or blood sprayed across marble floors and warehouse walls. This chapter of the war moved quieter, deeper, and far more dangerous—into numbers, offshore transfers, encrypted ledgers, and the bloodless battlefield of finance where a man could lose an army without firing a single shot. Emilia had always known this war would come. It was inevitable. Men like Jace didn’t just build power through violence; they funded it, insured it, turned it into something mathematical and untraceable, as if hiding death in spreadsheets made it clean. But now that they had Bianca, now that they’d seen the names and followed the trails carved through banks, shell companies, and digital shadows, it was clear that Jace’s real kingdom wasn’t held together by fear—it was protected by money

---CHAPTER THIRTY-FOURTHE BODY THEY SEND“Sometimes they don’t take you to kill you. Sometimes they send you back to break everyone else.”The body came at dawn. Not in a casket. Not in a bag. Just laid across the hood of an abandoned delivery truck at the edge of the estate’s south entrance like an offering, or a warning, or maybe both. The guards didn’t touch it at first. They didn’t need to. One look was enough. One glance at the bent arm, the broken fingers, the chain still hooked around the left wrist. No blood. No face showing. But the silence that settled across the courtyard told everyone watching what they already knew in their bones—that it was Rosa.Emilia didn’t run.She didn’t scream.She walked out slowly, calmly, coat still half-buttoned, the wind tugging at her collar, and stared at the body like she expected it to sit up and explain itself. She stopped five feet away, eyes locked on the boots—mud-caked, one untied, the soles worn from constant movement. She knew tho

---CHAPTER THIRTY-SIXTHE KNIFE INSIDE“Some wounds heal. Some stay just sharp enough to keep you awake at night.”Rosa woke to the smell of iron and antiseptic, the faint hum of overhead lights, and the sound of someone pacing slowly—measured, quiet, like their footsteps were trying to hide the weight of everything they carried. Her body ached before she moved. Her side throbbed before she breathed. When she opened her eyes, the ceiling blurred, then sharpened, cold white tiles set into metal brackets. Not the estate. Somewhere more secure. Underground, most likely. Or hidden. That much, she could guess. She wasn’t on display. She wasn’t in recovery. She was in containment—safe, but watched.Emilia sat in the corner, a file open in her lap, though her eyes hadn’t looked at the pages for the last ten minutes. When Rosa stirred, Emilia’s gaze flicked up—not with panic, not with relief, but with something more dangerous: readiness.“You’re awake,” Emilia said, voice flat.“Barely,” Ros

---CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT THE VAULT BLEEDS“Some places remember every sin ever committed inside them. And eventually, they spit the blood back out.”It didn’t feel like a tremor. Tremors were brief, sharp, over before the body knew how to react. What happened beneath the Moretti estate was slower, deeper, and carried a hum like bone grinding against bone. The war room monitors blacked out in sections—first the security feeds, then the audio grid, then the heartbeat sensors attached to each heat signature in the vault. At first, Emilia thought the system had glitched again, another artifact of Vitale’s sabotage protocols, but then the emergency backup flickered to life in red, and she saw the words printed across the top line: CONTAINMENT BREACH: INNER SEAL COMPROMISED. Not hacked. Not bypassed. Compromised.She called Alessio without hesitation. He answered on the first ring, already moving, already breathing like someone who didn’t need to be told something was wrong. “I felt it,” h

---CHAPTER FORTYMEMORY HAS TEETH“When memory comes for you, it doesn’t ask permission. It opens your chest and digs with both hands.”They didn’t recognize Jace at first. It wasn’t the way he walked, or the way his clothes hung heavier, darker, almost wet with sweat and some substance that didn’t belong in the world above. It was his eyes. His eyes were wrong. The shape was the same. The movement was there. But the depth—the way they followed you even when he wasn’t looking at you—was different. There was something behind them now. Something ancient. Something watching through him. He didn’t blink when the red emergency lights stuttered. He didn’t flinch when the vault’s inner floor cracked again. He simply kept walking—alone at first, though the sound of more footsteps echoed just behind the curve of the stone. Not boots. Not heels. Something softer. Bare.Alessio raised his weapon slowly, tracking Jace’s steps from the corner of the corridor where he and Emilia stood in perfect s