Wicked Vow and Ruthless

Prologue The Beautiful Sins

The rain in the Vesperine District did not cleanse. It merely washed the fresh blood into the subterranean drains, leaving behind the suffocating, metallic stench of impending violence.

Roman Luvaris stood in the sprawling, manicured gardens of the Moretti estate, letting the freezing downpour beat against the heavy black silk of his umbrella.

He was an apex predator attending a banquet of rotting meat.

Through the towering, floor-to-ceiling windows of the grand ballroom, the golden, ambient light of the chandelier spilled across the wet slate of the patio.

Inside, a hundred syndicate elites laughed, clinking crystal flutes of vintage champagne, entirely oblivious to the fact that they were dancing on the edge of their own graves.

Enrico Moretti was a dying king.

Roman watched the older man through the rain-streaked glass, his midnight eyes cold, detached, and entirely devoid of mercy.

Enrico was surrounded by sycophants—Jorath Nethra chief among them—vultures patiently waiting for the old man’s heart to give out so they could pick the remaining meat from the syndicate’s bones.

The Moretti empire was decaying from the inside out, hollowed by greed and gross incompetence.

Roman took a slow, measured drag from his cigar, the burning cherry glowing like a localized demon in the pitch black. The smoke curled around his sharp, aristocratic jaw, mingling with the biting chill of the ocean air.

He had come here tonight to finalize the calculus of a massacre.

Vosk stood three paces behind him in the shadows, an immovable monolith of violence waiting for a single nod.

The Luvaris strike teams were already positioned in the outer perimeter, their suppressed weapons locked and loaded.

The plan was absolute. When the clock struck midnight, Roman would give the order.

They would sever the biometric grid, breach the ballroom, and slaughter every Moretti loyalist in the room.

He would absorb the northern transit routes, claim the shipping docks, and burn this gaudy, golden mansion to ash.

It was logical. It was necessary.

Roman exhaled a thick plume of grey smoke, his finger hovering over the encrypted comms unit hidden in the lining of his bespoke charcoal suit.

But then, the crowd inside the ballroom parted.

The movement was subtle, a natural shifting of bodies moving toward the mahogany bar, but it cleared a direct line of sight to the sweeping, spiraling marble staircase. Roman’s finger froze on the comms unit.

She was sitting on the fourth step from the top, half-hidden in the heavy, velvet shadows of the upper landing, entirely divorced from the chaotic revelry below.

Sienna.

She was only sixteen, far too young to be officially presented to the wolves of the underworld, but she was already bleeding a dangerous, magnetic fire.

She wasn't wearing a fragile, pastel dress meant for a child.

She wore a simple, deep midnight-blue gown that cascaded over her knees, her bare feet tucked beneath her.

She held a thick, leather-bound book in her lap, but she wasn't reading.

She was watching.

Roman’s eyes narrowed, a sudden, violent shift in his atmospheric pressure instantly dropping the temperature in the garden.

He watched the way her dark eyes tracked the movements of her father’s Capos.

He saw the microscopic tightening of her jaw when Jorath Nethra laughed too loudly, the subtle, instinctual tightening of her posture.

She didn't look at the room with the naive, hollow innocence of a syndicate daughter. She looked at them with a sharp, inherited pragmatism. She saw the rot. She knew exactly what kind of monsters were drinking her father’s wine.

Dolls are hollow, fragile things, Roman thought, the words a dark, sudden realization echoing in the cavernous expanse of his mind. But you... you are flesh and blood and fire.

A violent, unhinged tremor seized the ironclad control of his chest. The cigar smoke suddenly tasted like ash on his tongue.

He couldn't look away. The golden light of the ballroom caught the rich, dark waves of her hair, the defiant, stubborn jut of her chin.

She was a solitary spark sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, completely unaware of the apocalyptic gravity she had just triggered in the man standing in the dark.

If he gave the order tonight, she would die in the crossfire. The vultures would scramble in the chaos, and someone—perhaps Jorath, perhaps a stray bullet—would extinguish that fire before she ever had the chance to burn.

Roman dropped the imported cigar onto the wet slate, crushing the glowing cherry beneath the heavy, punishing heel of his leather shoe.

"Don Luvaris," Vosk murmured, his gravelly voice barely audible over the torrential rain. He stepped forward, his hand resting on the matte-black grip of his holstered weapon. "It is three minutes to midnight. Strike Team Alpha is holding for the green light."

Roman didn't move. He stood perfectly still, his eyes locked on the girl sitting on the stairs.

As if sensing the predatory weight of his stare through the storm and the thick, bulletproof glass, Sienna suddenly turned her head.

Her dark eyes swept the rain-lashed patio.

She couldn't see him in the pitch-black shadows, but her breath hitched, her fingers digging fiercely into the cover of her book.

She felt the monster in the dark.

A dark, wicked thrill shot straight through Roman’s veins, calcifying into a terrifying, immovable obsession that would dictate the rest of his life.

The massacre was no longer an option. He couldn't simply conquer the Moretti empire anymore.

He had to own it. He had to build a cage so flawless, so absolute, that when he finally snapped the door shut, she would never be able to leave him.

"Stand down," Roman commanded, his voice a smooth, lethal scrape of ice.

Vosk paused, a rare flicker of confusion breaking his stoic facade. "Sir? The perimeter is vulnerable. If we don't strike tonight—"

"I said stand down, Vosk," Roman repeated, finally tearing his gaze away from the glass to look at his enforcer. The pitch-black, dilated voids of his eyes were swirling with a dark, terrifying madness. "We are not burning the estate tonight."

"Understood," Vosk replied, slowly removing his hand from his weapon. "What is the new objective?"

Roman looked back through the rain, watching as Sienna stood up from the marble stairs, a fleeting, beautiful ghost disappearing into the upper corridors of the decaying mansion. He reached into his pocket, his calloused fingers tracing the cold metal of a single, loose bullet.

"We wait," Roman whispered to the storm, a chilling, apocalyptic promise vibrating in the freezing air. "Let the vultures weaken the king. Let them grow confident and fat. We are going to watch her, Vosk. Every breath, every shadow, every single day."

He turned his back on the golden light of the ballroom, stepping into the absolute pitch-black of the labyrinthine gardens.

The war wasn't canceled; the timeline had just been violently rewritten.

He had exactly two years until her eighteenth birthday, and Roman Luvaris was a man who engineered his own fate.

He was going to trap the devil's daughter, and heaven help anyone who stood in his way.