Wicked Vows (Sovereign Brotherhood Trilogy #2)

Chapter 1

One

I watch silently as Adrian and Vanya’s limo pulls away from the house. It is good to see my friend happy again. When we attended Royal Elite, he was the carefree one. For years, he wrote letter after letter to the strange girl he’d never met. One he never exchanged real names with.

We thought he’d found his happily ever after with Ada when he married her. But looks can be deceiving. Just like with my chīsana senkō hanabi . We’ve been engaged since she was sixteen but promised to one another since long before we were a thought in our mothers’ wombs. It is a business arrangement. A way for my family to make further strides into the legitimate business community in New Orleans.

It is also a blood debt owed by her father to mine.

Evaline LaMontagne.

Utsukushī bakuchiku.

Her parents described her as sweet, caring, and, more importantly, malleable. She isn’t the little sparkler I thought her to be. No, Evaline is a beautiful firecracker with a fiery tongue and molten gold eyes. For three years, she’s been running from me. I’ve given chase, just enough to keep her on her toes. I’ve always known where she is…until six months ago, when she disappeared from my radar.

“Are you ready to go back to the hotel?” Vitali asks, a hand coming down on my shoulder. “If another rich asshole throws his socialite daughter at me, I might not leave here without slitting someone’s throat.”

I laugh.

Vitali is well known in the States. A prominent king on his Italian-American throne. Ever since his uncle usurped his father’s position as Don in Italy, he’s been building his empire in Florida. Vitali refuses to go back to the place where he was born. His home where his mother and sister still reside under the dictatorship of Angelo De Luca.

In all fairness, if he were to go back, he would be immediately executed, so I can see why he hesitates. However, he isn’t alone any longer. He has Adrian and me to watch his back and go to war with him. Only, he doesn’t want to. But one day he will, and we will be there every step of the way.

“Yeah.” I give a tired sigh and roll my neck. I’m exhausted. Vitali and I have been doing double the workload so Adrian could stay home with Vanya while she was healing from her ordeal with Ada. It took weeks to track down all the Albanians that still lurked within our borders. It was a rat infestation we never realized was a problem. “Let’s get?—”

A woman’s laugh catches my attention. It’s light and airy. Carefree. My gaze follows the sound until it lands on the target. Her back is turned to me. All I see is short blond hair that has obviously been bleached. She is wearing the white and black uniform of the catering company Adrian used for the reception. The woman is bent over a small table of champagne glasses, gathering them up to put on a large pallet for transport with one of her coworkers.

Vitali follows my gaze just as the woman turns to set the pallet aside.

She looks up, something catching her attention. It is then that I get a look at her face.

It’s her.

My beautiful firecracker.

Her golden eyes widen almost comically when she sees me, her mouth dropping open slightly with a gasp. We are trapped in this moment together, each one simply staring at the other, the rest of the world fading away as we take each other in.

I can see the fear rising in her gaze like a river of gold and spreading through her like a wildfire. She knows what this means. I’ve found her and she will be mine.

Evaline jerks up from where she is bent over, inadvertently smashing into her coworker, who is setting down a pallet of glasses. The pallet falls to the ground, and glass erupts everywhere. Guests turn their eyes to the spectacle, pointing and staring.

My firecracker doesn’t stop to help pick up the remnants of wineglasses or even to see if her coworker is all right.

Instead, she runs without looking back.

“Is that who I think it is?” Vitali asks, amused. I nod. “Are you going to just let her get away?”

A smirk plays across my lips. “She’s not going anywhere,” I tell him. “The only place she’ll be going is back to the tower she ran from.”

Soon utsukushī bakuchiku , soon.