THE BLOOD OATH OF THE MAFIA KING

POV: Elena

"Get up. He wants to see you now." I did not move fast enough, so the man in the black coat grabbed my arm and pulled me off the couch before I even had my shoes on. My coffee mug hit the floor and cracked in half, and I remember staring at the two pieces instead of at him, like the mug mattered more than whatever was happening to my own life in that moment. "Who wants to see me?" I asked, even though some cold part of me already knew the answer before I finished the question. "You'll find out." Outside, two black cars sat with their engines running, headlights cutting through the dark like the whole street had stopped breathing to watch. My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text from my brother. Three words. I'm so sorry. My stomach dropped straight through the floor of that car before it had even pulled away from the curb. I thought about Nico's face last week, pale and shaking at my kitchen table, saying he owed a little money to some guy from the docks, nothing I needed to worry about. I should have known nothing was ever that small in this city. Not when the docks belonged to the Morettis. Not when my own last name already carried a weight I had spent my whole life trying to set down. I remember pressing my forehead against the cold window of the car, watching the streetlights blur past, and thinking about all the years I had spent making myself smaller so nobody would ever connect me to the Rossi name that ruined dinner parties two neighborhoods over. I had changed the way I introduced myself. I had let people assume I was somebody else's cousin. None of it had mattered in the end. Blood always finds you, no matter how far you run from it or how quietly you try to live. The mansion looked like something out of an old movie, iron gates, stone lions, windows glowing gold against the night sky like the house itself was watching me arrive. I had grown up two neighborhoods away from this place and had never once been allowed near it. My mother used to grab my hand and cross the street whenever we walked too close, like the gates might reach out and swallow us whole if we lingered. Inside, the air smelled like cigars and money, thick enough that I could taste it at the back of my throat. Men in dark suits lined the hallway like statues, watching me without a single word, their eyes following me the way you'd watch something you already knew you were going to have to clean up later. At the end of the hall, a set of double doors opened, and my whole body went still before I even saw who was waiting for me. The man behind the desk was younger than I expected. Broad shoulders, dark eyes, a jaw so sharp it looked carved out of stone rather than grown from skin and bone. He did not stand when I walked in, and something about that small, deliberate stillness told me more about him than any introduction could have. "Sit down," he said. "I'd rather stand." Something flickered behind his eyes, not anger exactly, more like surprise that someone had actually told him no inside his own house. "Suit yourself. You know why you're here?" "No," I lied. "Your brother owes my family two hundred thousand dollars. He does not have two hundred thousand dollars. What he has is a sister." My heart slammed against my ribs so hard I was sure he could hear it from where he stood. "You're joking." "Do I look like I'm joking?" He didn't. Not even a little. "So what, you're going to kill me instead?" I said, forcing my voice to stay steady even though my hands were shaking at my sides where I hoped he couldn't see them. "I don't kill women." He finally stood, and I had to fight the urge to step back toward the door. He was taller than he looked sitting down, and he moved like every step was already decided long before he took it, like hesitation had been trained out of him at birth. "But I could kill your brother. Slowly. Or you marry me, the debt disappears, and Nico gets to keep breathing. Your choice." "That's not a choice." "No," he agreed. "It isn't." My mind raced through every possible door out of that room and found every single one of them locked. I thought about my mother, gone three years now, who would have known exactly what to say to a man like this and exactly how much of it to believe. I thought about Nico, twenty two years old and terrified somewhere in this city, waiting for a phone call that would tell him whether he lived or died because of a debt he never should have made. "What's your name?" I finally asked, mostly to buy myself another second to think. "Dante Moretti." The name landed in my stomach like a stone dropped down a well, and I felt myself go cold from the inside out. Moretti. The same family my father supposedly betrayed. The same family that, according to every whispered story in my old neighborhood, had never forgiven the Rossi name for what happened eleven years ago, long before I understood any of it. "You know who I am," I said quietly. "You know my last name." His jaw tightened in a way that made the scar above his eyebrow catch the light. For one second something darker crossed his face, something that looked almost like grief wearing anger as a mask, and I found myself wondering, absurdly, what had put it there. "I know exactly who you are," he said. "That's the whole point." I felt the floor tilt beneath me. "What does that mean?" He walked closer, close enough that I could see the thin white scar above his eyebrow clearly now, close enough to smell cedar and smoke clinging to his jacket like it belonged there. "It means," he said, his voice low and even, "that tomorrow night, you become my wife. And you'd better pray you're worth the price your family already paid."

POV: Dante

I had not slept. I stood in front of the mirror in my father's old study, buttoning a black shirt with hands that would not stay steady, and told myself it did not matter that they were shaking. This was not a wedding. This was a transaction wearing a wedding's clothes, and I had learned a long time ago not to confuse the two. My father, Vincenzo Moretti, sat in the leather chair by the fireplace, watching me the way he watched everything, like a man counting money he had not spent yet and already knew the total of. "You understand what tonight is," he said. It was not a question. My father had never once in his life asked me a question he did not already know the answer to. "I understand." "Say it back to me." My fingers stopped on the last button. I had heard this demand my whole life, from the time I was seven years old and learning to shake a man's hand hard enough for it to mean something. Say it back to me. As if words only became real once he heard them out