VOWS WRITTEN IN BLOOD

CHAPTER 4

RAFAEL'S POV

The ballroom was elegant enough to be breathtaking — if you didn't look past the structured smiles and the expensive clothes to what was actually underneath them.

Everyone here believed they'd come to honor my brother.

I planted myself at the top of the staircase and watched the room slowly unravel below me, guests packed close enough that conversation blurred into one continuous wave of sound. I wasn't listening for grief. I was waiting for one thing.

A mistake.

Someone saying too much. Someone reacting a beat too late, or too fast. Someone glancing over their shoulder when no one had asked them to. Every handshake, every managed laugh, every practiced hug was another piece I filed away.

My security team moved through the crowd dressed as guests and staff, not there to intimidate anyone — just to watch, the same way I was.

The room filled steadily. Old classmates rediscovering each other. Business colleagues introducing partners they'd clearly never met before tonight. A handful of reporters angling for a shot of someone important standing near someone tragic. Calm. Warm. Exactly distracting enough to make a lesser man drop his guard.

I couldn't afford to be that man tonight.

Every smile I returned was measured. Every conversation deliberate. Every face committed to memory, because somewhere in that crowd stood the person who knew what had actually happened to my brother. They'd walked into my house believing it was a memorial.

They had no idea they'd just walked into the one room they couldn't hide in.

Then I saw her.

Elena De Luca. Leonardo's daughter — a name my research knew far better than the woman herself, since she rarely stayed in the country long enough to be recognized, and had never once seemed interested in being noticed. Red hair, blue eyes, twenty-seven, composed in a way that read as practiced rather than natural. She had no known connection to my brother. Her father, on the other hand, sat at the top of my list.

Which meant her presence here was not a coincidence. Nothing at this party was.

She stood at the bar, champagne glass loose between her fingers, laughing politely at something the bartender said, eyes moving over the crowd in a way that looked casual and wasn't. Long red gown, perfectly matched to the evening. She could have passed for any other guest in the room.

Then our eyes met, and I watched her composure flicker for exactly half a second before she smoothed it back into a pleasant smile.

She knew exactly who I was.

I crossed the room toward her, unhurried. By the time I reached her, she'd already rebuilt whatever she'd let slip — calm, collected, like she'd been waiting all night for precisely this moment.

"Good evening," she said, effortless. "I'm Jessica."

Jessica.

A beautiful lie, delivered without a single crack in it.

I already knew exactly who she was, so I let her have the fiction. "It's quite a pleasure meeting you, Jessica," I said, offering my hand.

She took it. Her grip was steady — too steady. Rehearsed.

"It's strange that we've never met, Jessica," I said, letting a little arrogance color it.

"I tend to keep a low profile."

"Jessica what?"

"Jessica Marina."

"Doesn't ring a bell. I suppose there's a first for everything."

We traded the kind of hollow small talk expected of two strangers at a formal gathering — both of us choosing every word carefully, both of us pretending this was a first meeting. It was almost funny. She was playing a role. So was I.

After a while, I glanced toward the corridor leading off the ballroom toward my study.

"This isn't the best place to talk," I said, casual. "Come with me."

Hesitation crossed her face for exactly a second before another smile buried it. "Sure."

We walked together in silence. I signaled to one of my staff that we weren't to be disturbed, and with every step, the music from the ballroom thinned out behind us, the laughter growing more distant, until I found myself wondering which one of us was actually leading the other into a trap.

The moment my study door closed behind us, the party disappeared completely.

She scanned the room at a measured pace, fingertips trailing over the spines of books on the shelf, before turning back to me with a polite smile.

"You've been watching me all evening. I hope there's nothing on my face."

"There isn't."

"Then why the staring?" she asked. "There are plenty of people downstairs."

"You stood out."

"Is that a compliment?"

"Take it however you'd like."

She smiled again, but I noticed how carefully she was watching me now, weighing every word before I'd finished saying it.

"So," she said, easy, "what exactly do you do for work?"

There it was. The first real question.

I leaned back against my desk. "I work."

She laughed. "Well, that's clear enough."

"What do you think I do?"

"I don't know why I'm asking."

"Is that the only reason?"

She didn't answer that one.

"Where are you from?"

"Here."

"Born and raised?"

"Mostly."

She nodded slowly, clearly unsatisfied. "What about your family?"

"What about them?"

She paused for just a fraction of a second before asking the question she'd clearly been building toward the whole conversation. "Are any of them here tonight? Father, mother, a sibling?"

I held her gaze. "No."

"Oh."

"Why the interest?"

"I'm just making conversation."

"Are you?"

She laughed again, quieter this time. "I've heard your family is rather influential."

"People hear a lot of things."

"So the rumors are true?"

"Which rumors?"

She only smiled. "You're quite hard to talk to."

"So I've heard."

Silence settled between us for a moment before she broke it.

"What about you," I said. "You told me your name was Jessica."

"I did."

"What brings you here?"

"I received an invitation."

"That tells me how you got in the door. Not why you came."

She smiled and said nothing at all.

Interesting. She guarded her secrets with the same precision I guarded mine. Neither of us was here for conversation — we were both waiting for the other to slip first, and neither of us intended to be the one who did.

I stepped closer, leaned in, and let my voice drop low enough that only she could hear it.

"You've messed with the wrong man."

I lifted two fingers. My men were already moving before she registered what the gesture meant, hands closing around her arms, guiding her toward the back door as her voice climbed, sharp and panicked.

"What is happening — what is this—"

Her words faded with the rest of her down the corridor, and I stood alone in my study, listening to the party continue downstairs as if nothing in the house had just changed at all.