All Chapters of Blood Bound Vows: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

The dining room was designed for intimidation. Crystal chandeliers angled onto dark mahogany walls, and a table long enough to hold twenty glowed like polished blood beneath the candles. My father sat at the head of the table, his glass of Barolo untouched, his silence hefty. I’d grown up in this house, in this family, in the shadow cast by its power, but tonight, the air was like a noose. “You’ll marry him.” In the silence, another voice, that of my father, rose at last. “The families will gather at the wedding. The contracts are already drafted.” My stomach turned cold. Bring together the families. To put it politely, sell your daughter as currency. I knelt, hands on linen, nails biting through my palm beneath the table. “No.” His eyes dropped to mine, black and merciless. “This is no negotiation, Isidora.” He spoke my full name—I hated that. It meant the decision had been etched in stone. “He’s a Vescari,” I responded with a knife-edge glassy voice. “You want to bind me to a

The applause still hummed in my ears long after the ballroom was closed. The kiss — the damn kiss — had been murmuring in hushed tones, in glasses clinking, in light from camera flashes. To the world, it was proof. To me, it was a mistake. Because I couldn’t get over the thought. Dante brought me upstairs when the party would cease altogether, hand heavy on my small back if you want to call it that, as if he still managed to control my behavior. His smile was serrated edges, a predator comfortable with the anarchy he had constructed. When the suite’s door shut behind us, I wheeled around on him. “What the hell was that?” He tossed off his jacket and tossed it up at a chair with infuriating ease. “A kiss, Bella. Don’t let me know it was your first.” “You had no right—” “No right?” He laughed, low and dangerous. “We’re engaged. Publicly. Officially. You wanted to see a performance, and I produced it. Or would you rather Matteo have kissed you tonight?” The name hit like a sl

The sound of it came first — wrong and delicate and entirely foreign in the stillness of Dante Romano’s penthouse. A scrape of metal against glass, tiny and precise. The faintest click of a lock. My skin prickled before my brain directed it to a logical conclusion. I’d been standing with my back to the window, glancing upon the burn of the city like a constellation of small betrayals, when Dante rose from his desk. He heard it as a hunter hears wind rustle. “Get down.” There was no room for any argument with the command. I wasn’t moving until his body moved me. He was all motion and intention — pulling me low, tossing the entire width of him across my shoulders like armor. Glass flew off near us, glimmering rain. Hot, terrifying bullets tattooed the marble where my head had been a moment before. Dante’s thigh hit me over and over, his forearm pressed over my shoulders. His chest was a great home above my own, a tough, living roof; his heart pounded under my cheek like a ca