Page 72 of Blood Vows
Vasileios.
Our brother…Alive.
I didn’t quite know how to feel about that, so instead I focused on the worry I felt for Nessa. Fuck how we missed her. We hadn’t eaten or slept since she was taken. We were going out of our fucking minds, questioning where he could have taken her. Ever since my brother and I had discovered that Vasileios was still alive, it had forced us to face some hard truths about our past. We had also done everything within our power to find clues to where he could have been hiding all these years. Yet it was like chasing a ghost through shadows that refused to give up their secrets.
For decades, we had believed him gone. Dead. Buried. And perhaps, a part of me had wanted it that way. But now I saw the truth for what it was. My brother hadn’t died and had somehow survived his injuries. And well, he had quite possibly become something else entirely if he were able to manipulate Nessa’s dreams the way he had.
If I had known, I would have been searching for him long before this, though I doubted it would have mattered. Vas had always been three steps ahead of us, even when I still considered him as a brother I looked up to. He had always been cunning, yes, but not unpredictable like he was now. Nor had he been a creature of vengeance wrapped in shadows and darkness.
Of course, it wasn’t hard to understand his motives. The moment the witch’s involvement came to light, I knew whose hand had guided her. He had used her as a tool, a pawn to bring Nessa to him. The plan had been meticulous, cruelly brilliant, and it had worked.
For now, he had her.
And the thought of it made everything within me twist painfully.
There was so much we hadn’t told her, so much of our family’s sordid past that we had buried under decades of silence. No doubt, Vas had already told her his version of events, and I dreaded to think what lies he had spun from the truth. Of what she now thought of us, knowing that Tal and I had been the ones responsible for trying to end his life.
But what she didn’t know was that the night we had acted against our brother, was that he was no longer the person we recognized. No longer the brother we once knew. Whatever humanity he’d had obviously been consumed by the sickness that had grown inside our parents, festering like rot beneath the surface. The same darkness that we had wanted to believe could be subdued.
In fact, it was one of the reasons we had been away from home at the time, trying to discover a way to calm the darkness growing within our father. One our mother had convinced us had been getting out of hand in the weeks we had been away, begging for our return. She had also told us of how our father’scurse had started to affect Vas. We had both reached out to him whilst on our travels and tried to reason with his fragile mind.
Gods, we had tried.
But you cannot reason with a man who sees ghosts where there are none, who remembers things that never happened, who blames the world for wounds that he inflicted upon himself. He saw betrayal in every kindness, conspiracy in every shadow.
And then one day, reason simply left him completely.
I still remember that day with unrelenting clarity, the moment Tal and I entered our father’s office and found him standing there, his hands and face stained crimson. The silence had been deafening, the air thick with iron and despair. Our father had fallen, our mother nowhere to be found, and Vas had turned to us with eyes that were no longer human.
That was the day our family broke apart. The day Vas died in all but name. And now, decades later, it seemed he wasn’t finished with us. He had risen from the ashes of our bloodline, more powerful, more dangerous, and hell-bent on revenge.
Our greatest fear wasn’t simply that he wanted retribution, it was how far he was willing to go to get it. And whether Nessa, our sweet, brave Nessa, would be caught in the crossfire.
Neither of us could stop thinking about her. The thought of her alone with him made my chest ache with fury and dread. What state would she be in when we found her,if we found her at all?
Would he have hurt her, broken her in some cruel attempt to make her submit? Or would he have remembered the simple things, food, warmth, water? I didn’t know how long he had been cut off from the world, how long he had lived outside the reach of humanity, but I could only hope it hadn’t been long enough for him to forget what it meant to keep someone alive.
We knew that the nightmares that tormented her had been his doing, his shadows clawing into her dreams to lure heraway. And yet, he had also been the one to save her from that warehouse and that fuck, Avellino, killing every last one of the fuckers!
That was Vas all over. He would have set fire to the world just so he could be the one to pull you from the flames. Making me wonder if he had been in league with Avellino to kidnap our fated, so he could then swoop in and play survivor. A sure way of getting Nessa to trust him.
Fuck, but it was infuriating!
I didn’t know what thought was worse, Vas playing the villain or the hero. And that, more than anything, terrified me, as neither one was ideal.
There wasn’t a single fucking thing about this that could be called ideal. Our brother was alive, and now he wanted to strip us of everything that ever mattered, to claim it all as his own. The dagger was one thing. That we could fight for. But Nessa… ourMoirai Theía… she was something else entirely. Taking her would be the cruelest revenge of all.
Hence why we were here now.
The rain came down in relentless sheets by the time we reached the gates of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Once built as a sanctuary of beauty for the dead, it now stood like a city of ghosts. Its marble angels blackened with age, its mausoleums towering like forgotten palaces. The iron gates rose high, their scrollwork ornate and rusted by more than a century of sorrow. Beyond them, the noise of New York fell away entirely, swallowed by the hush of rain and stone. Only silence lived here…Silence, and memory.
We passed beneath the archway, our boots sinking into the sodden earth as the cracked paths wound between monuments carved in another age. Names that had long since faded, lives reduced to whispers. This was our family’s ground, our bloodcarved into its history as deeply as the chisel marks in its tombs. The resting place of monsters.
The mausoleum stood at the heart of it, an old cathedral of stone and sorrow that had long been forgotten by the living. Its spire was cracked, its marble weathered to grey, apart from the crest carved above its doors. The sigil of our house still glinted faintly under the moonlight.
The place where it had all begun. And where, it seemed, it would end.
Tal walked beside me, his jaw tight, his shoulders coiled in that way that meant he was ready for a fight. He had been quiet most of the way here, lost in his own thoughts, no doubt. It wasn’t until the rain turned to mist that he finally spoke.
