Vows of Vengeance

Chapter 7: Victor’s Game Begins

Chapter 7: Victor’s Game Begins

****Dante’s Point of View****

There’s a distinct sound a safehouse makes when it’s about to be obliterated.

It’s not the sound of footsteps or glass breaking. It’s silence—deep, crawling silence, like the world is holding its breath. Then, the low mechanical hum, just beneath your hearing range, like something preparing to snap.

I heard it too late.

We’d been analyzing the Lazarus files for hours. My fingers were numb from typing, my eyes bloodshot from blue light and fury. The list kept expanding—names, transactions, off-shore accounts, faces I recognized and faces I didn’t.

Matteo had uncovered something monstrous. And Isabelle had handed it over without asking for trust, or forgiveness, or even thanks.

She just gave it. Like it wasn’t a weapon that could start a war.

And I? I took it like a man with nothing left to lose.

Silas sat beside me, chewing a pen cap and tapping his boot against the leg of the desk. “There’s something wrong with this formatting,” he muttered, pointing at a set of files labeled “ARCHIVE 0.9.”

I leaned in. “Encrypted?”

“Worse. Fragmented. Someone cut pieces out and rerouted the signal before Matteo could finish compiling it. Looks like… proxy bait.”

Proxy bait. A trick used by elite hackers to misdirect attacks. Meaning if someone accessed the wrong string, it would trace back to us.

And then I heard it.

That silence.

That hum.

Then the window exploded.

Flames swallowed the east side of the safehouse. The blast knocked Silas and me backward, glass and shrapnel pelting us like rain. Smoke poured in, thick and acrid. The fire alarms didn’t even have time to activate.

We were under attack.

I grabbed the encrypted hard drive and shoved it into my backpack, slung it over my shoulder, and dragged Silas to his feet.

“We have to move—NOW!”

He nodded, blood trickling down the side of his face.

The fire was spreading fast, fueled by accelerants. This wasn’t a warning. It was a hit.

We burst through the stairwell just as another explosion rocked the structure. Somewhere behind us, the floor caved in.

Outside, the night was chaos. Sirens in the distance. Civilians screaming. A van screeched up the alley.

I recognized the driver. One of Isabelle’s old contacts. A wildcard named Theo.

He threw open the door. “Get in if you want to live!”

I didn’t argue.

We hit the gas.

---

Ten blocks away, I finally caught my breath.

Theo threw me a towel. “Someone tracked your IP. You tripped the Lazarus net. They knew exactly where to hit you.”

Silas leaned back, groaning. “What the hell was that?”

I stared out the window, watching smoke climb into the night sky like a signal flare.

“That,” I said, “was Victor’s first move.”

---

By sunrise, we had relocated to a safehouse I hadn’t used in over five years. It was buried beneath an old boiler factory, with a steel-reinforced door and analog locks. Nothing digital. Nothing traceable.

Silas was patched up, sipping water, mumbling curses at the ceiling.

I sat across from him with the hard drive.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I want to end this,” I replied. “But first, I need to find Isabelle.”

He looked up. “You think she’s in danger?”

I shook my head. “I think she is the danger. And I think Victor knows that too.”

Silas grunted. “So what now?”

I powered up a different laptop—one Matteo had hardwired to block wireless signals. I inserted the drive.

Files flickered onto the screen.

One name at the top: Elijah Raze.

I stared.

Victor’s son.

And then the video began to play.

It was surveillance footage, shaky and poorly lit. But I recognized the room. It was Victor’s estate—his war room.

Elijah sat at the long obsidian table. Across from him, a woman. Her face was obscured, but her voice wasn’t.

It was Isabelle.

“I want out,” she said. “You promised. I give you the files, and I disappear.”

Elijah leaned forward. “And you trust I’ll honor that?”

“You owe me,” she snapped. “I covered for you when Matteo warned you to disappear. I buried his message. I lied for you.”

My chest constricted.

Elijah looked down, jaw clenched. “I didn’t kill him.”

“But you didn’t save him either.”

The video cut.

I slammed the lid shut.

Every instinct told me to hunt Elijah down and bleed answers out of him.

But something else—something deeper—told me this was bigger than betrayal.

It was about erasure. The Lazarus Protocol wasn’t just a kill list.

It was a rewrite.

Victor wasn’t erasing enemies.

He was rewriting his legacy.

And if Isabelle was part of it…

God help us all.

---

I spent the next hours combing through the files. One led to a warehouse on the edge of the docks—registered under a shell company tied to Luca Moretti.

I went alone.

The air stank of salt, diesel, and rot. The building was old, rust streaked down its spine. Inside, silence.

But on the floor, chalk markings. The same ones Matteo used when hiding coordinates.

I followed them to a false wall.

Inside—guns, blueprints, maps, surveillance shots…

All of me.

Every movement. Every meeting. Every face I’d trusted. Every location I’d used.

Luca had been tracking me for months.

And at the center of it all—

A photo.

Me.

Isabelle.

Kissing.

A single bullet hole through the photo.

I backed away slowly.

Whatever we had? It wasn’t just dangerous.

It was hunted.

---

I left the warehouse burning.

If Victor wanted war, I’d give him one.

But it wouldn’t be fought with files and blackmail.

It would be fought in blood.

And I’d start with Elijah Raze.

Because now, I knew the truth:

My brother didn’t die because of betrayal.

He died to bury the truth.

And the truth was…

Isabelle Raze had lied to all of us.

****Isabelle’s Point of View****

It wasn’t the explosion that reached me first—it was the silence before it.

I was three blocks away when the fire swallowed the safehouse. My feet stopped instinctively, heart seizing mid-beat as smoke curled into the air like a black omen. Every inch of me knew what it meant. Knew who had done it. And worse, who might’ve been inside.

Dante.

I stood frozen on the cracked sidewalk, torn between running back and staying hidden. My instincts screamed to move. To check. But instincts had gotten me trapped before. And this time, I had too much at stake to be reckless.

Still, I couldn’t stop the tears. They came hot and fast, cutting lines down my cheeks as I pressed a shaking hand to my mouth.

He had to be alive.

He had to.

---

I ducked into the alley, yanked out my burner phone, and dialed a scrambled channel. It rang. Once. Twice.

“Isabelle.”

Relief almost brought me to my knees.

“Dante.”

“You saw?”

“I saw.”

“Don’t come back.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” I whispered, voice catching. “But are you—?”

“Alive. Barely. Silas is with me.”

There was a pause.

“Victor knows.”

“I figured,” I said.

More silence.

Then he added, “I’m coming after them. All of them.”

I swallowed. “Start with Elijah.”

“I intend to.”

The line clicked off.

And that was the end of us—for now.

---

Later that night, I returned to the only place Victor would never look for me: the Raze family’s abandoned estate in Bellhurst Hills.

The grounds were still rotting. Weeds had overtaken the gardens. The fountain in the center courtyard had dried to a husk. But the place was familiar, and hidden deep enough within old money territory to be completely off-grid.

Inside the grand library, I found what I came for.

A hidden drawer beneath the floorboards. One Matteo told me about in a letter I’d hidden away like a sin.

Inside: a series of black notebooks. Not just files. Not just accounts.

Plans.

His plans to take down the empire from within.

I flipped through the pages, my chest tightening. Coordinates. Offshore aliases. Clean identities for witnesses who had disappeared under Raze protection. Matteo had been documenting everything.

But the last pages held something even more damning: proof that Victor had partnered with an underground think tank known as The Vault—a secret society believed to fund wars and shape governments from behind the scenes.

The Lazarus Protocol wasn’t just Victor’s project.

It was theirs.

And Isabelle Raze had been their prototype.

---

In the mirror, I no longer recognized myself. My eyes had hardened, my jaw sharpened by months of silence and survival. But beneath that… a fire I hadn’t noticed before.

Maybe Matteo had.

Maybe Dante had, too.

I replayed the moment in the hotel hallway over and over in my mind. The way he looked at me like I was the only truth left. The way I kissed him, trying to memorize him like a map.

And the way I walked away.

Because I had to.

Because if I stayed, I would have let myself need him.

And needing someone in this world meant giving them a weapon with your name on it.

---

A soft thud pulled me from my thoughts. I turned, hand already on my gun.

“Easy,” said a voice from the doorway.

Theo.

Dante’s contact. Once mine, too, before we both went our separate ways.

He stepped into the room, tossing a file onto the table.

“Tracked a transmission from Luca’s men. They’ve been targeting Raze couriers, intercepting files. They’re building a power vacuum.”

“They don’t want to kill Victor,” I said. “They want to replace him.”

Theo nodded. “And you?”

“I want to dismantle the system.”

“That’ll get you killed.”

“Maybe.”

He studied me for a long moment. “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

I didn’t have to ask who he meant.

“I did. Matteo was the only person who never treated me like a possession.”

“I meant Dante.”

I looked away. “That’s… more complicated.”

He sighed. “Well, get ready. Because you’re about to see both of them again. Luca’s making a move on Elijah. And Victor’s preparing to unleash the Red Cells.”

I stood. “Then I need to move faster.”

“Where to?”

“To find someone who knows where the Lazarus origin servers are housed. If I can shut them down—really shut them down—I can bring it all crashing down.”

“And what if Dante finds you first?”

I gave a faint smile. “Then I’ll finally have to tell him the truth.”

---

Back in the dark, I climbed into the old Raze vault hidden behind the fireplace. It smelled of mildew and regret.

I opened the secured box in the center.

Inside: the original Lazarus schematic. Hand-drawn. Coded in Matteo’s cipher.

I scanned it until I found a word that made my blood run cold:

EXODUS.

I hadn’t seen that term since I was thirteen, when Victor locked me in a room for three days and forced me to memorize contingency scenarios for nuclear-level betrayals.

Exodus meant total reset.

Victor had a failsafe.

If we got too close, he’d destroy it all.

And I had just handed Dante the matches.

I closed the lid and backed away.

This wasn’t just a war anymore.

This was the apocalypse disguised as revenge.

And I was running out of time.

****Third-Person Point of View****

Night in the city had always held its own kind of chaos—brilliant lights cloaking brutal crimes, masked elegance hiding corruption. But tonight, that chaos wasn’t just on the streets. It was in boardrooms, in hidden bunkers, and behind encrypted screens. The Lazarus Protocol had been activated. And with it, every devil in a suit and tie now had his finger on the detonator.

Victor Raze stood before the glass wall of his penthouse. A heavy storm pounded against the windowpane, as if the heavens themselves sought to break in. His reflection stared back—composed, immaculate, yet fraying at the edges.

Elijah entered without knocking. The air between them always carried an undercurrent—resentment, envy, and something else neither could quite name.

“She’s resurfaced,” Elijah said. “She contacted Theo.”

Victor’s lips barely moved. “Dante?”

“Still breathing. Burned half the safehouse down, but he got out.”

Victor exhaled slowly, as if disappointed by predictability. “Then it’s time we finish this.”

He turned and crossed to his desk, where a biometric panel slid open at his touch. Inside rested a device known only to his inner circle: a simple black cube.

“Code it for final override,” he ordered.

Elijah blinked. “Now? But we haven’t completed Phase III.”

“We won’t get to Phase III if they shut us down. Isabelle is moving faster than expected. And Dante’s made it personal. That makes him unpredictable.”

Victor placed the cube in Elijah’s hands.

“Take it to the vault. Only when I say so.”

Elijah’s jaw tightened. “And if I don’t?”

Victor leaned in, voice icy. “Then you’ll be the first name on the new list.”

For a moment, father and son stared each other down. One forged in fire. The other in fear.

Then Elijah turned and left.

Victor watched him go, whispering under his breath.

“Blood will answer blood.”

---

Across the city, Luca Moretti was not in a suit or flanked by guards. He sat in a dark chapel, alone, a single candle burning beside him.

Before him rested the photo of Isabelle and Dante—crumpled now, water-stained, edges burned.

He’d stared at it for an hour.

Not because of the kiss.

But because of the look in Isabelle’s eyes.

She looked free.

He hadn’t seen that in her since they were seventeen and she’d run from a gala to dance barefoot in the streets with strangers.

“Isabelle,” he murmured. “You chose the wrong side.”

A shadow moved near the altar.

“It’s done,” a voice said. “We intercepted the courier. Phase One of your plan worked. Victor’s distracted.”

Luca stood, smoothing his sleeves. “Good. Continue with Phase Two. Frame Elijah. Let Victor believe his own blood is undermining him.”

“And Isabelle?”

Luca hesitated.

Then: “Bring her in. Alive.”

---

Somewhere in the hills outside the city, in a secluded government fallout bunker turned hacker’s den, a third player moved across the board. Her name was Eva Monroe, and she had no allegiance to Victor, Dante, or Luca.

She was Lazarus’ original architect.

And she was tired of watching men wage wars with her creation.

Her fingers flew across the keyboard, bypassing security protocols she’d written herself five years ago. Her face glowed in the light of the monitors—calculating, fierce.

A video feed of Isabelle played in one window.

A second displayed Dante.

A third… Elijah.

She clicked into a secure chat and typed:

TO: [REDACTED]

SUBJECT: They’ve all taken the bait. Begin divergence.

Her phone buzzed. A new message.

“Do they know you’re alive?”

She typed back.

“No. And they can’t. Not until the end.”

She closed her eyes and leaned back.

Lazarus wasn’t about death.

It was about resurrection.

And resurrection always came at a price.

---

The game was accelerating.

Each player made their move.

Each piece slid into place.

And in the heart of it all, Isabelle, Dante, and Luca drifted toward an inevitable collision.

Not because they wanted war.

But because peace was no longer an option.