All Chapters of BLOOD AND VOWS: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

---CHAPTER FORTY-ONETHE CHOICE THAT BROKE THE BLOOD“It’s not the first shot that breaks you. It’s the silence after, when everything that’s left has to live with it.”The gunshot didn’t echo. It was absorbed—swallowed by the stone and the dark and the history pressing in from every wall of the vault. Alessio kept his arm steady, jaw locked, as Jace dropped like a puppet cut from the strings. The bullet tore into his chest and he crumpled, but he didn’t scream. He just exhaled, as if he’d been waiting for that exact moment all his life. The air in the vault shifted—not as it would from a death, but like the structure itself had registered something more significant than blood. Not fear. Not chaos. Choice. And with choice came consequence.The hum began again, louder this time, not confined to a wall or chamber or machine but rising from the floor, from the broken veins of the vault’s foundation. Stone vibrated beneath Alessio’s boots. Red light flickered once, then dimmed, then disa

--- CHAPTER FORTY-THREE THE PRICE OF SILENCE “Peace doesn’t come free. It comes with whatever you were too afraid to face during the war.” The vault was sealed. But the war didn’t end. Not really. The tremors beneath the estate had stopped. The air pressure no longer cracked the plaster in the ceilings. The blood stopped crawling up from the cracks. But something inside the survivors kept moving, kept trembling, as if the thing they buried didn’t die—it simply moved into them. That was the kind of silence the vault left behind. Not empty. Charged. Like static before a storm. Bianca hadn’t spoken in two days. She hadn’t eaten in one. Since Emilia’s sacrifice, she’d spent nearly every hour inside the old chapel, staring at the brass plaque mounted under the flame where Emilia’s name now sat—etched, final, shallow and yet heavier than all the stone in the room. She didn’t cry. She didn’t kneel. She just stood there, candle after candle melting down beside her. When the staff tri

--- 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

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 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