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Home / Mafia / Blood Bound Vows / Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

All Chapters of Blood Bound Vows: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

62 Chapters

Chapter 11

The morning light cut through the penthouse blinded in thin silver bars. It was too bright for the headache pounding behind my eyes. I was still half-asleep when my phone started to buzz — then buzzed again, and again, like a wasp trapped inside a jar. I groaned, and dragged it towards me, and blinked at the flood of notifications: news alerts, missed calls, and about fifty unread messages. For one dizzy second, I thought something terrible had happened — then I saw it. “THE CITY’S COLDEST CEO IN A SCANDAL: INTIMATE MOMENT WITH MAFIA HEIRESS SETS HIGH SOCIETY ABLAZE.” Beneath the headline was a photo. Dante’s hand was pressed to the small of my back. My lips parted mid-breath as he leaned down to whisper something in my ear during the gala’s final waltz. The flash of the cameras froze it at the worst possible second — his mouth a breath away from mine, and my eyes locked on his. It looked like a kiss. No — it looked real. My stomach twisted. Every gossip site had copied

Chapter 12

Everything felt heavier in the morning after the scandal. Every news outlet buzzed with my name, my father’s corporate name, and Dante’s. They were knitted together like a scandalous fairytale gone awry. My face was on every screen. The caption: “Heiress or Mistress?” By the time of my arrival at Dante’s penthouse dining area, he was already there. Of course he was. He had always been awake before dawn — neat, inscrutable, and a man made for crisis. Morning sunlight poured on his white shirt, wide open at the collar, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Like he hadn’t slept, but you wouldn’t know it in the still-gentle precision of his movements as he sipped the coffee. I lived still, by the doorway, with a wreck of thoughts from last night. “The press is ripping us apart,” I finally said. He stirred his coffee without gazing up. “They’re doing what they do best. Feeding.” “Feeding on my life,” I muttered, crossing my arms. “My family’s reputation is —” He interrupted, as he se

Chapter 13

The flight to Milan was brief and quiet, as I sat next to Dante it felt never-ending. He spent most of it glued to his tablet. His body was a portrait of distance and a master class in concentration. I just kept telling myself that I didn’t care that he hadn’t said a thing since we boarded. I had been telling myself a lot of bad things lately. After the airport, the car ride was even quieter. Milan slipped by in silver streaks of rain, glass storefronts and the faint aroma of espresso wafted off coffee shops. I leaned my forehead to the window, and pretended to admire its view. Dante spoke one time. It was a short interjection in Italian, taut, clipped, and authoritative. Those were the type of voices people obeyed without realizing the reason for doing so. By the time we reached the hotel, I was too tired to fight over the details. But the look the concierge gave us, we glanced back and forth between the two of us, and it was enough to make me jump off my seat. She was polite;

Chapter 14

The conference room in Milan smelled of money and arrogance — which was the sort of stuff you inhaled by having taken the exhale from a pack of cigars or been told expensive lies. Sunlight poured in through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto the table. It reflected off everything in stark relief. I was sitting between men with ambition, like cologne on their faces, and I knew their laughter was sharp, practiced, and hollow. Dante was late. He had been called into a side meeting, and I was the sole mouthpiece for the joint proposal — our proposal — at a table filled with men who believed “partnership” was just one more word for ownership. I used an even voice, accurate notes, and direct eye contact. I didn’t stumble. Dante didn’t need to steady me, I didn’t need him to. But the minute the presentation wrapped up, the atmosphere changed. The formalities dissolved into something oily. One of the investors — Lorenzo Bellanti, slick hair, predatory smile — hanged out, while the oth

Chapter 15

The rooftop restaurant had the vibe of a different world — too calm, too refined, too far removed from the chaos that followed Dante everywhere. Milan glittered beneath us. Sleek towers, winding lights, wealth and power hummed through the city like a heartbeat. Up above the night stretched endlessly, soft, deceptive. Just one candle flickered between us, its flame tiny but steady in the wind. I watched the way that light painted gold over his razor-edged cheekbones; how it danced in his eyes, with the look that told me nothing of anything. He was impossibly composed, as ever. He sipped his wine like he wasn’t the most feared man in three countries. That he didn’t come close to strangling a man, two nights ago, for touching me. I picked the glass up and left it to swirl and, I held it in my hand, the crimson wine caught the light. “You’re quiet,” I said. “That’s unusual.” “Thinking,” he replied, a low, smooth voice. “About what?” He gazed at me over the rim of his glass, dark,

Chapter 16

The Headline. Pale and merciless, the morning light poured through the penthouse windows. My phone kept rattling on the nightstand — a wall of notifications that seemed more like alarms. I ignored it the first few times and then the sound proved impossible to drown out. When I finally reached for it, that screen was a battle-ground. Hundreds of messages, telephone calls that had been missed, alerts from every news outlet in the city. And then I spotted it — the headline screaming in every feed: “Tomorrow’s Engagement: Kane and Moretti Empire to Merge — Personally and Professionally.” My stomach dropped. Underneath the words was a picture — of a stolen moment from Milan. Dante’s hand at the small of my back as we exited the gala, our faces too close, our expressions unreadable. A flash of a camera had transformed strategy into scandal. Heart pounding, I sat up, scrolling through the avalanche of articles. Speculation. Analysis. Statements by public investors. Even a quote from

Chapter 17

The air of the auditorium smelled like old wood and ambition. It was the sort of place where voices boomed too loudly and reputations were built through fifteen-minute rounds. I was seventeen and annoyed. I was focused and determined to beat every smug private-school heir who thought winning came with their tuition. Then Dante Romano entered the building. Back then he wasn’t Dante Romano— not yet. No empire. No shadows. No legendary reputation. Just a tall, too-calm, too-confident boy dressed in a pressed uniform as his dark hair hanged into his eyes and he walked like the entire room belonged to him and he was bored of ownership. Of course, I hated him from the get-go. Our schools were rivals — his, the elite, infuriatingly polished academy that dominated every league; mine, the equally fierce but less glamorous competitor intent on toppling them. The friction between our pair of teams was longstanding. Expected. Practically encouraged. But when his eyes locked onto mine across th

Chapter 18

Mornings always started with a lie. A gentle sunrise casted shadows between the towering buildings while the city softly hummed to itself. It ritualistically ignored the impending chaos of the day. And the comforting illusion that to day would be completely ordinary. Ever since the attack on the penthouse though, “ordinary” had a new, more delicate meaning—like glass you shouldn’t breather too close to. A news alert. Another headline bearing Dante’s name. “Underground Trade War Erupts—Sources Suggest a New Power on the Profifr.” They never said his name. Not the one you would hear on the news, and not the one that got whispered in the exclusive circles I was never meant to walk into. But the phrasing was enough for most. Just another trade alert. A reminder that the world Dante crossed paths with was always on the brink of a grave shift, always risky. The unease stuck to me. The morning went on, and pretended it was normal. I showered. I made coffee. And I pretended my h

Chapter 19

I had barely taken three steps when the world behind me erupted. Not a sound at first—just a pressure, a ripple in the air like the universe inhaled sharply. Then a roar spliced the morning apart, metallic and violent. It swallowed the street in a rush of fire.The shockwave hit me before my mind even formed the word bomb. It slammed into my back like a giant hand. It lifted me off my feet. The pavement raced toward me too fast. My palms scraped hard against concrete as I crashed down, and momentum threw me onto my side. My ears rang so loudly it felt like someone stuffed them with screaming static. I didn’t know which hurts more—the burn of the air or the terror that punched straight through my ribs. For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. The world was spinning, tilting, and blurring, and my eyes stung with dust and smoke. The scent hit me next—burning metal, gasoline, and rubber melted into something acrid and poisonous. Dante’s car—his new armoured black coupe was now a roaring infer

Chapter 20

The rain had been falling for hours—sharp, slanted, relentless. It blurred the skyline into a watercolor smear of gold and gray streaks of light dissolved down the glass walls of Dante’s penthouse. I’d been listening to it from the hallway, pacing like a ghost, unable to shake the echo of the explosion, the burn of asphalt on my palms, the sound of his voice when he thought he might have lost me. The penthouse was too quiet. Too still. And Dante Romano was not a man built for stillness. I found him on the balcony. The sliding door was cracked open just enough for cold air to slip inside, tasting of wet concrete and storm metal. He stood at the edge of the glass railing like something carved out of night—shoulders tense, shirt half unbuttoned from where he’d torn at the collar earlier, rain flecked the cuffs. He had a glass of whiskey in hod hands, Untouched. He wasn’t drinking it. He just held it like a weight, like a reason to keep his hands busy instead of using them to

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