All Chapters of BOUND TO THE BLOOD KING: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The night was heavy with silence, yet Bianca could not sleep. Matteo’s words still clung to her skin like invisible chains: “Because you were the only thing left I couldn’t buy until now.”She lay restless by the window, the gardens bathed in silver moonlight below, her fingers curling and uncurling in her lap as if clutching a secret she hadn’t yet discovered. His presence lingered in the room even after the door had closed.The fangs of trust. She had felt them. And she hated herself for it.But in the quiet hours before dawn, Bianca decided that answers mattered more than her fear.“Patrol changes at two,” Bianca whispered to herself, counting Luca’s words from past inspections. She had studied them like scripture, watching their rhythms, their blind spots. Now she intended to test them.Wrapping herself in a thin shawl, she slipped from her room. The villa’s corridors stretched long and hushed, the air thick with the scent of polish and smoke. Her steps were silent on the marble f

“Where is she?”Matteo’s voice shattered the quiet of the corridor like a gunshot.Giovanni De Luca, the man he had entrusted with Bianca’s protection, stood pale and shaken, his shirt collar torn as if he had been strangled by his own failure. “Don Vitale… I swear on my life, I never left her door. One second I heard her moving, the next ” He swallowed, hard. “She was gone.”Matteo’s eyes narrowed to slits, cold and unyielding. He pushed past Giovanni, storming toward Bianca’s room, his stride fast and predatory. When he flung open the door, a silence hung heavy, as though the walls themselves were guilty.The curtains billowed from the open balcony. The lamp lay shattered, the sheets crumpled in disarray. On the cold stone of the courtyard below, guards clustered around something small, glinting under the morning light.Matteo descended like a shadow. The men parted instantly as he crouched and lifted it between his fingers. A bracelet silver, delicate, snapped in half. Bianca’s. Th

The night after her rescue bled into dawn without Matteo leaving her side. He hadn’t moved from the chair beside her bed. When Bianca’s eyes finally opened, light knifed into the room, slanting across the carved ceiling and pooling in the hollows of her face. She stirred against the pillows, slow, like a woman clawing her way back from the edge of death.“You stayed,” she whispered, voice still fragile.Matteo leaned forward, forearms braced against his knees, gaze pinned to hers. “I told you I would.”There was no venom, no game, no demand in his tone. Just a simple truth that unsettled her more than any threat could.He had killed for her. Bled for her. Stayed when every other man in her life had vanished into shadows. And that terrified her more than the knife that had grazed her skin in that warehouse.Bianca’s body healed quickly, the shallow cuts closing, the bruises fading but something else had shifted. The fire that had once burned reckless and unrestrained had narrowed into

The Romano estate glittered under chandeliers and velvet drapes, but beneath the splendor, venom was already at work. Isabella moved like a shadow through her own halls velvet dress trailing, mask of grace concealing the serpent underneath. She had grown restless since Matteo announced Bianca’s impending marriage. A stranger a mere outsider dared to hold the place Isabella had long believed was hers.So she struck with her weapon of choice: manipulation.The maid, sweet-faced Emilia, was young, naïve, desperate to please, and terrified of losing her position. Isabella cornered her in the linen room, her smile soft, her voice honeyed poison.“You want to keep working here,?” Isabella’s jeweled fingers brushed a folded napkin, her nails like claws disguised in rubies. “Then you’ll do something very small for me. No one will know. And if you don’t… accidents happen to silly little girls who refuse me.”Emilia’s voice trembled. “Wh-what must I do, Signora?”Isabella leaned close, perfume

“Raffaele’s been meeting behind your back.”Luca’s words broke the midnight stillness like a pane of glass. Matteo stood by the window of his study, the curtains open to the moonlit courtyard, his jaw sharp with sleeplessness.“Where?” Matteo asked without turning.“In the east wing. Quiet dinners, quiet whispers. He’s been building numbers, Matteo. Half the soldiers in the port district swear loyalty to him now. If he moves, it’ll split the family in two.”Finally, Matteo faced him. There was no shock in his expression, only the cold inevitability of a man who’d been expecting the knife in his back.“He won’t move,” Matteo said. “Not unless he thinks he can win.”“And right now,” Luca replied grimly, “he thinks he can.”Matteo’s mind sharpened like a blade. He could feel the empire he’d built shifting beneath his feet, the weight of betrayal settling like iron.“Then we take the fight to him,” Matteo said, his voice cutting to the air. “Before he has the chance to strike.”Luca frown