VOWS WRITTEN IN BLOOD

CHAPTER 3

RAFAEL'S POV

I gasped awake, drenched in sweat like I'd been the one fighting for air.

The room sat dark and cold, the city glowing faintly through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I tangled myself deeper into the sheets, my heartbeat uneven, the dream still bleeding into the room around me. My brother's hands bound. His eyes locked on mine while dark water filled his lungs and stole every sound he tried to make. And me — just standing there. Close enough to watch. Close enough to do nothing.

"No."

The word came out of me broken. I planted my feet on the freezing floor and crossed to the window, staring out at a city that never once looked back at me. It was just a dream. It was always just a dream.

I pulled my phone from my pocket and stared at his contact like I hadn't done this a hundred times already. My thumb hovered over the call button even though I already knew how it ended.

Voicemail. Again.

These dreams weren't random. They were instinct, screaming that every hour I spent not knowing was an hour closer to something I couldn't undo. Cristiano and I shared a face, a name, a bloodline — nothing else. My enemies were legion, patient, always waiting for a mistake worth exploiting. I wanted that fear. I'd built my life on it.

My brother never had. He knew exactly what I did and refused to let it touch him. No conference-table threats, no gunfights, no bringing a knife to a war I fought with fully loaded silence. He built something clean. Something quiet.

Which meant none of this made sense.

If someone had taken him, it wasn't because of anything he'd done.

It was because of me.

***

By morning I had the investigator on the phone. "I need him here. Now — not within the hour."

He arrived to find my desk buried under a year's worth of evidence — photographs, security logs, every name that had ever crossed mine under hostile terms.

"You've got your hands full," he said.

"I'm running out of time." I slid a folder toward him. "My brother's been missing a year."

He read the first page in silence, then looked up. "Tell me what I need to know."

"There's nothing to tell. He's peaceful. He has no enemies."

"Everyone has enemies."

"No." I held his stare. "I do."

Cristiano barely attended meetings. Made no threats, kept no debts, took no revenge. He built his own life at his own pace, far from mine.

"So why take him?"

"To get to me." Saying it out loud made it worse. My rivals wouldn't dare come at me directly — they'd bleed out long before they got close enough. But Cristiano was the one person I'd trade everything to protect, and they knew it.

I handed him a list. Heads of rival families. Former allies turned enemies. Traitors who'd survived my judgment longer than they should have. Men whose empires I'd personally dismantled. Every name carried history. Every history carried motive.

"Investigate all of them. Where they've been, who they've spoken to, every transaction and conversation, legal or not. If one of them so much as shifts weight, I want to know why."

"And if no one's guilty?"

I met his eyes. "Then the list keeps growing."

He closed the file. "This will take time."

"I don't have a choice."

I'd already done my own digging. My brother had last been seen heading for Mexico.

"Find him," I said. "You'd better."

Because if my enemies had touched my brother to send me a message, they'd just declared a war none of them would live long enough to regret.

***

A week disappeared into dead ends.

When the investigator came back, he dropped a thicker file on my desk. "We've gone through everyone."

Financial records, travel histories, family ties — every name examined and cross-examined. Most had nothing in common. All of them had motive.

Except one, who had more.

He slid a photo across the desk. I recognized the face before he said the name.

Leonardo De Luca. My rival. A man whose path had crossed my brother's more than once.

"What do we actually know?"

"Almost nothing. But the hotel your brother checked into in Mexico has been located."

"We leave tonight."

***

The flight felt endless and silent. I spent it turning over small, useless memories of my brother, unsettled by how few recent ones I actually had. If he'd said something important before he vanished, I couldn't remember it. That frightened me more than anything else so far.

We landed already exhausted and spent the next day tearing through the hotel's records. Nothing, for hours. Then — his name, right there in the check-in log. My pulse spiked before I'd even finished reading it.

There was no checkout record.

"What does that mean?" I asked, though some part of me already knew.

"It means there's no record of how he left."

The room shrank around me. Every possibility that crossed my mind was worse than the one before it.

We searched for days. Staff remembered almost nothing. The security footage had been overwritten. No luggage, no witnesses, no trace — like my brother had simply stopped existing the moment he walked through those doors.

We flew home with more questions than we'd left with.

***

I spent days in my office with the walls covered in evidence — photographs, timestamps, a year of my brother's absence pinned up like a crime scene that refused to make sense. I stood in the center of it, certain I was missing something. Something crucial. Something close.

Then it hit me.

I needed all of them in one room.

Not an interrogation. Not an accusation.

A gathering.

A memorial, one year since my brother was declared dead — nothing sketchy about a man honoring his twin. They'd come to pay their respects. They'd talk. They'd watch each other the way people like us always do.

And while they thought they were there to remember him, I'd be watching every glance, every hesitation, every conversation dropped too quickly when I got close.

Someone in that room already knew what happened to my brother.

I intended to find out exactly who — even if it meant standing across a room from his killer and smiling like I hadn't already chosen how they'd die.