All Chapters of bride of vengeance : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

The chant didn't stop. It went on and on, low and steady, thirty thousand voices moving together in the dark, my name rising off that field like smoke off a fire that refused to burn out.I stood frozen at the wall. Impossible, I kept thinking. Nobody should know who I really am. Nobody.And yet.Alejandro's hand tightened around mine. When I looked at him, his eyes had gone hard, the gold in them burning brighter than it had a moment ago. He wasn't looking at the army anymore. He was looking at me, and there was a decision already forming behind his eyes, the kind I wasn't going to be able to argue him out of."We're leaving the wall," he said."Alejandro—""Now, Valeria."I opened my mouth to fight him on it, out of habit more than sense, but Mateo was already moving, already calling for the guard formation to close in around us. Duarte lowered the spyglass and fell into step on my other side without being told. Nobody on that wall was going to let this become a debate.We moved fas

Valeria's POVRed ink spread across the parchment.Not ink. Blood. Fresh blood, still glistening wet under the candlelight, moving across the page like something with its own will, its own purpose, refusing to simply soak into the parchment the way blood should.The room watched in horror.Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Every commander who'd been shouting orders only moments earlier now stood frozen, staring at the scroll one of the guards had carried in, the same scroll that had apparently been found tied to an arrow shot straight through the war room's outer window while we were all still recovering from the burned message on the wall.Letter by letter, word by word, a sentence formed across the page, the blood crawling into shapes with slow, deliberate patience, as though whoever controlled it wanted every single person in that room to watch it happen, to understand exactly what kind of power they were dealing with.YOU HAVE THREE DAYS.My stomach twisted. Three days. Three days until

Valeria's POVKnock. Knock. Knock.The sound echoed through the corridor. Slow. Deliberate. Almost human in its rhythm. Not the frantic pounding of someone trapped and desperate to get out. Patient. Measured. The kind of knock that expects an answer eventually and doesn't mind waiting for it, however long that wait might take.I stood there in the cold, staring at the ancient iron door, my breath fogging in front of my face. The runes carved into its surface seemed to shift slightly whenever I tried to look at them directly, the same way the markings on that silver-bound book had shifted in the hidden chamber weeks ago. My eyes ached from trying.Every guard around us drew a weapon at once. Steel scraped free of sheaths in a chorus that filled the narrow corridor, the sound bouncing off stone walls that hadn't heard this much noise in centuries. Mateo positioned himself near the door, his stance wide and ready, his knuckles pale where he gripped his blade. Even he couldn't hide the un

*Valeria's POV*Nobody moved. Nobody breathed.I stared at the locket, my whole body locked in place, my mind refusing to process what my eyes kept insisting was true.My mother's locket.The same one buried with Isabella. I remembered that day clearly, one of the sharpest memories I still carried from childhood — standing beside a small, plain grave, Ricardo's hand resting on my shoulder, watching as the priest closed the coffin lid over my mother's body. I'd stood close enough to see the locket resting against her chest one final time before the lid came down, the silver catching the last light of that gray afternoon, the small engraved pattern along its edge worn smooth from years of her fingers tracing it absently while she thought.I had personally watched it placed in the coffin. I had personally watched the coffin lowered into the ground, watched dirt shoveled over it, watched Ricardo lay a single white flower on the fresh mound afterward while I stood too numb to cry properly,

Ricardo's POVFar beyond the kingdom's borders, past the mountains no map bothered to name, I sat inside a hidden fortress carved into rock older than any human memory.Gone was the kind smile I wore every morning at breakfast. Gone was the loving uncle who taught a little girl how to hold a sword and how to braid her own hair when there was no mother left to do it for her. Gone, too, was the grieving brother who lit a candle every year on the same terrible date and wept like the wound had happened yesterday.I was someone else entirely down here. I always have been.Cold. Patient. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with weapons and everything to do with what I already know and no one else does.The crystal mirror in front of me showed the west study, small and clear as if I stood in the room myself. It showed Valeria beside Alejandro, her face pale, her whole body trembling with a truth she hadn't chosen to learn. I watched without blinking. Without breathing, almost. There wa