Page 74 of Blood Vows
Why?
Why kill those you loved? It made no sense then and made even less now. But the truth was that I even questioned our own reactions that night. I questioned what we found. We hadn’t listened, we had simply acted. We hadn’t asked, we had simply given in to our darkness. One that had latched on and consumed us the moment my father took his last dying breath. And now, decades later, we were forced to face our actions and question them, making me wonder…Was Vas doing the same?
Or was he too busy playing captor?
For days, we had searched every corner of the city for Nessa, tearing it apart piece by piece. Every alley, every abandoned warehouse, every whisper of movement was chased down until our men were running on fumes. And yet, we had nothing.
Not even a trace.
Hunting for a dead man had its challenges, and Vasileios had always been a master of vanishing. There was no paper trail, no record, no presence that the living could trace. He had become exactly what he was… Something unholy that slipped between the cracks of the world.
A shadow among shadows.
The question that haunted me was simple, and yet impossible. Where, within those shadows, was he hiding her…our Moirai Theía.He could have taken her anywhere. One of the countless derelict buildings scattered throughout every corner of the world. A crypt, a ruin, a forgotten house no one remembered standing. The possibilities were endless, and each one carved another piece of patience away.
Which meant, for now, we were forced to bend to his will. To let him call the shots.And I fucking hated it!
But I knew what he wanted. The dagger. The seat at the table. The right to rule our father’s sector. It was a title that should have been his by birthright, being the eldest of us. But he hadforfeited it the moment we found him standing over our father’s broken body, our mother already reduced to ash.
I could still see it when I closed my eyes.
Her ashes had been scattered across the marble floor of our family home. And lying among them, untouched by the fire, had been her necklace. The one she never took off. The family heirloom, blood-red stone encased in crystal. Even when we were starving, when the walls around us crumbled and we had nothing left, our father never allowed her to sell it. It had been more than jewelry. It was a bond, a symbol of the bloodline itself.
To find it there, amidst the ruin…It had been proof enough.
Our mother was gone, and our brother had been the one to take her from us. That day shattered something inside me that never healed. Because we didn’t just lose our parents…we lost him too. A brother. A bond. A piece of ourselves. Triplets, bound not only by blood but by something deeper. Something I used to believe could never be broken.
Vas had been the strongest of us, the most disciplined, the most loyal. He had always stood closest to our mother, the favored son, the one she saw as her legacy. Father loved us all equally, but Vasileios… he idolized him. He was his shadow, his apprentice, his heir. And it made what happened all the more unthinkable.
Even now, I struggled to understand it. But I’d had years of going back to that night. Back to the moment when Tal and I entered that room, the air thick with smoke and blood. I could barely comprehend what I was seeing. Vas stood there with the dagger in his hand, his face twisted in something that wasn’t human. His eyes had gone black, veins crawling up his neck like roots. The darkness had already claimed him.
Whatever had taken hold of him wasn’t our brother anymore. His mind was gone, his voice unrecognizable. What looked backat us was rage given form, the purest manifestation of the curse we had all been born to carry.
We had no choice… At least that was what we had told ourselves. A guilt-ridden mantra to last us decades. One that, despite trying, didn’t have the power to eradicate the memory of Tal as he held him down. Didn’t have the power to eliminate the memory of me grabbing the dagger before I drove it through his chest, praying to every god I knew that it would be enough.
Then we buried him in our family crypt.
And we never once went back.
The betrayal lived on, festering in the hollow places time couldn’t touch. The years dulled nothing. If anything, they sharpened it. I took our father’s place, the seat at the table, and Tal accepted it without protest. But that silence between us, the one where Vas used to be,it never stopped echoing.
And now that same brother had her.
Vanessa.
The woman destined to be ours.
And no matter how much I wanted to believe in fate, I couldn’t help but feel that this time, it had turned against us. We had barely slept. Every passing hour gnawed at the edges of our sanity. The silence was filled with too many thoughts of what he could be doing to her.
Our one fragile hope, and it was a stretch, had come from Tal. He was the first to say it aloud, the one to voice the possibility we both secretly clung to. That perhaps, as much as she was ours, she might also be his. It was the only way she could still be alive or unharmed. But that realization came with its own torment, because we knew better than anyone what it meant to find your Moirai Theía.
The way it rewrote you from the inside out. Once you’d tasted that bond, once it had marked you, the very thought of letting it go became unthinkable. So, it would ensure her safety, yes…but the cost of that safety was a different kind of destruction altogether.
If she truly was his fated, then love would change him. Maybe it already had. And though it might stop him from striking, it would only twist his vengeance into something new. Decades of rage would shift. Not end…but evolve.
Because love doesn’t erase a monster. It only gives him something new to fight for. Now, that fight had a name.
Nessa.
