All Chapters of Bound by Vows and Vendetta: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

Chapter 100 — The Sleep of Queens~LORENZO~BLACK HOUSE INFIRMARY BUNKER — 4:02 A.M.Steel walls. No windows. The sound of machines humming low, like breath beneath the earth. Aria lay pale and still on the operating cot, tubes laced through her arms, her skin bruised from weeks of war, her pulse thread-thin.Lorenzo sat beside her. Silent. Emilio slept in the crook of his arm, wrapped in a dark wool blanket, his golden eyes shut for once.The room smelled like disinfectant and something older—grief, maybe. Or love worn down to the bone.The doctors had said it wasn’t poison. Not shrapnel. Not some Umbra device lodged beneath her ribs.It was exhaustion. Collapse. Internal damage from too many battles won on borrowed time.She had broken herself to keep the world from breaking him.Lorenzo looked down at the boy. He wasn’t crying. Wasn’t babbling. Just watching Aria breathe in and out, in and out, as if memorizing the rhythm in case it stopped.Lorenzo adjusted the blanket around Emil

Chapter 102 — Ghost Queen~ARIA~MYANMAR — SHAN STATE JUNGLE PERIMETER — 2:46 A.M.The leaves sweated blood.Or that’s how it looked in the moonlight. Crimson spill from the canopy above, jungle mist catching silver light as Aria moved like a phantom through the tree line, boots silent, breath even. She was alone. No comms. No signal. Just a rusted map and the knowledge that somewhere inside this cursed rainforest, one of Elias’ original engineers was still breathing.Dr. Thaksin Jirawat.Umbra's architect of synthetic mimicry. The man who helped design the deep-echo coding pattern used in Throneshard. Some said he vanished into the drug routes between Laos and Myanmar. Others whispered he was dead. Aria had followed bodies, not rumors.Now she was here.No backup. No warning to Lorenzo. No message for the Black House.She'd gone ghost.~~~~~~~~~SIX HOURS EARLIER — BLACK HOUSE INFIRMARYLorenzo stood at the bedside, Emilio asleep in his arms.Aria was gone.No note. No alert. No last

Chapter 104 — The Girl Who Knows~ARIA~UKRAINE — DNIPRO AIRFIELD — 3:14 A.M.The sirens hadn’t stopped in days. Drones overhead like vultures made of static. And in the heart of it all, inside a crumbling fire station turned safehouse, a 10-year-old girl sat cross-legged on a server rack, typing like her fingers were blessed with fury.Her name was Vika. No last name. No file.She had broken into the De Rossi communication lines two nights prior. No trace. No signature. Just one message, dropped into Lorenzo’s private frequency:"I’ve seen the other one. His name is Echo. I can help. But you have to find me before the world ends me."~~~~~~~~~~THE BLACK HOUSE — WAR ROOMLorenzo stared at the message like it was a bomb about to breathe."A trap," Inez said. "Nobody breaks into our analog net. Not without a spine full of ghosts.""She knew about Echo," Lorenzo replied. "No one outside Aria, me, and God knows."Roji leaned over the map. "Ukraine's a firestorm. If we go, we go loud."Lo

Chapter 106 – Lorenzo’s InfernoROME — VATICAN CITY — 3:06 A.M.Off-books. Off-grid. No prayer. No mercy.Lorenzo led six men down the undercatacombs of the old Vatican. Ex-Wraiths. Ghosts who had buried names long ago. Their faces were scarred by history and their silence said more than any oath ever could.Roji walked beside him. Blade in hand. Inez was in the back, watching their six. They weren’t just breaking protocol—they were declaring war on it.“Confirm target location,” Inez whispered over short-range burst comms.Lorenzo unrolled a decrypted map stolen from an Umbra dead-drop in Jerusalem. He pointed to a sealed sublevel beneath the old Papal archives.“Echo’s there,” he said. “Elias built a chamber under the bones of popes.”Roji cocked his gun. “Fitting.”~~~~~~~~~~ENTRANCE — SUBLEVEL AThe first guards were dressed in monk robes—but beneath the linen, they wore armor and carried suppressed submachine guns stamped with Umbra sigils. Their vows were silence, loyalty, and

Chapter 108 — The Great Quiet~LORENZO~ROME — UMBRA ARCHIVE CORE — 4:44 A.M.Somewhere beneath the Vatican ruins, a pulse trembled through stone. It wasn't sound. It wasn’t light. It was… absence.The Throneshard command key slid into the final terminal. Elias didn’t smile. Didn’t blink.He whispered one word:"Render."The servers responded.A silent quake rippled across the Earth. Not felt. Not heard. Only registered by the dying scream of sensors that weren’t supposed to exist anymore.~~~~~~~~~~THE BLACK HOUSE — NURSERY — SAME MOMENTLorenzo hadn’t moved in six hours.He sat in the chair by Emilio’s cot, one hand resting on the child’s ankle, feeling for signs of anything unnatural: pulse spikes, eye twitching, the soft click of code behind breath.But Emilio had been still.Until now.The lights flickered. Then failed.The air turned thick. As if something sacred had just been killed.Then—Every screen in the Black House, even the ones unplugged, blinked once.Umbra glyphs. Gl