Blood Before His Kisses

Blood doesn’t wash out. It stains marble floors, silk gloves, and the memory of a six-year-old girl who learned too young that the world keeps spinning even when yours stops. Giada learned that lesson kneeling in her mother’s ruined white dress, the copper scent of it thick in the air, memorizing every line of the man’s face who pulled the trigger. She remembers the sound—too loud in the quiet villa. She remembers the word he said after: Princepessa. The chandeliers above had been lit for her mother’s birthday. Now their light caught on the red spreading like a stain across silk, and Giada understood that some moments carve themselves into bone. The violins from the garden had gone silent. Only her breathing and the ringing in her ears remained. Her father didn’t mourn. He didn’t hold her. He crouched, wiped her cheek with his thumb, and pressed a leather-bound ledger and a cold, heavy pistol into her hands. “Memorize them,” he said, voice flat as a blade. “Every name owes us. And you will be to collect it.” Russia raised her in shadows and boardrooms. By seventeen she was settling debts the old men were too careful to touch. By twenty-two she owned their fear. Nights were spent memorizing ledgers, days were spent learning which smiles hid knives. She learned that power wasn’t given—it was taken, and kept with blood. So she became what he made her: Giada Vendetta Belucci Rosetti. A ghost in heels and silk who moves through Rome’s oldest families like a rumor they’re afraid to confirm. Intelligent enough to outplay men twice her age in boardrooms, ruthless enough to make them bleed in alleys. Revenge was her religion. Her scars were scripture. Her ledger was prayer. She learned to sleep with one eye open and read a man’s intent long before he spoke a word. Trust was a liability she couldn’t afford, so instinct became her guard. The city called her untouchable—and it was right. Whispers followed her through marble halls and gilded corridors: the Vendetta girl, the ruthless one with a Matilda streak, sharp as broken glass and cold as the oath she swore. She didn’t flinch at the name. She wore it like armor, letting fear clear the path where words couldn’t. Then came Luca Valentino Morrone. To the world he’s Cassius Valentino Noire—the heir, the shadow heir to a dynasty built on blood money. Cold. Calculating. Infuriatingly protective in the way of a man who’s killed to keep what’s his and never apologized for it. He doesn’t waste words. He watches, dissects, and decides. And when he decides you’re his, he becomes a wall between you and everything that wants to break you. The kind of man who could make her forget, for a stolen hour, that her hands were stained. He moves like silence in a room full of noise. His enemies call it luck that he’s still alive. Giada knows it’s precision. There are no wasted motions with him, no hesitation when the line is drawn. Loyalty, to him, is a vow written in blood and kept without question. What he didn’t know was that she knew his real name from the start—Cassius Valentino Noire, the favorite son, the brother of her mother’s killer. Now the ledger burns a hole in her pocket. Every night she dreams of the shot that killed her mother. Every day she wakes up wanting the man who shares his blood. The contradiction eats at her—hatred and need tangled together until she can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. If she kills Silvio, she keeps her vow. If she spares him for Cassius, she betrays her mother’s memory and starts a war that could burn both their families to ash. One choice will end the vendetta. The other will end her. And in the city where loyalty is bought with bullets, choosing love might be the only sin worth dying for.