Page 73 of Brutal Vows

“Go ahead and tell her,mother,” I growl. “Tell her the truth. That you had an affair with Salvatore once you suspected that father couldn’t have children. Tell her how you passed us off as his thinking he wouldn’t know any better.”

“He didn’t,” she hisses, her voice low and venomous, as her beautiful face contorts with anger. Her features twist, eyes narrowing and lips pulling into a thin line, transforming her expression into something harsh and severe.

A fleeting grin dances across my lips, and a soft chuckle slips past.

“Oh, he knew, Mother, he just never told you.” Antonia’s head whips toward me in shock.

“What?” she demands, her voice laced with disbelief. I maintain my gaze on our mother, steady and unyielding.

“Father lost the ability to have children when he was just a teenager,” I reveal, the words hanging in the air between us. “It happened during a skiing accident when he was sixteen.”

Mother’s eyes narrow. “You’re lying,” she sputters, her disbelief palpable.

“No,” I assure her. “I am not. Father raised us as hisown, despite knowing about your affair. He never treated us like anything other than his blood and now, to keep your sordid secret, you had your own daughter murder her biological father.”

The horror on my sister’s face at my words is a snapshot of abject terror, a chilling testament to the darkness our mother plunged her headlong into without a safety rope. Her dark eyes open wide in panic, their depths gleaming with unshed tears at the realization of what she has done.

I want to comfort her. To tell her it is just a bad dream, and we will wake up soon. But reality has reared its ugly head and there is no going back now. She is neck deep in this blood-soaked world where trust is limited, and knives are stored in each other’s backs.

“No—” Her hand comes to her mouth, wide eyes dancing between our mother and me. Her skin pales, low jaw trembling. “You wouldn’t?—”

Mother lets out an exasperated sigh. “Grow up, Antonia.” She rolls her eyes. “This is how it works in our world. We must do what is best for us. For our name. Not the name my parents forced me into.”

“And that is what this is all about, isn’t it, Savia?”

The words cut through the thick tension, and I swing my gaze toward my wife. Moments ago, her eyes shimmered with fear; now they burned with an iron mix of anger and unyielding resolve. Her dark eyes lock on my mother, each glance heavy with accusation, while the deep lines of her frown carve harsh shadows over her beautiful features. “TheGeryonis the reason you began all of this, isn’t it? Your parents deliberately chose Aurelio because, even as our old society crumbled, they still clung to the sanctity of bloodlines—didn’t they?”

I can barely process her words, the raw edge in her tonemaking my heart thunder. What the fuck is my wife getting at? Yes, my mother has revived the vestiges of the secret society, but her lineage never belonged to that elite circle. I have pored over the ledgers time and again, scrutinizing each line, or so I thought.

“Why don’t you tell them, Savia?” my wife goads, her words laced with scorn. She tips her chin, her voice rising, snapping like the crack of a whip. “Reveal who you really are. Explain who your family really is and how you wound up in the clutches of those who raised you as if you were their own.”

My mother remains quiet. She stands rooted to the spot as if paralyzed by shock. Her face drains of color, and her eyes grow wide in disbelief as she fixes her gaze on Gia as if she can’t believe that she knows her secret.

“Come now,” Gia presses on with a mocking smile playing at the corner of her mouth. “Tell us just how long you’ve been scheming. They all assume you’re merely a hapless casualty of fate, but we both know you pulled the strings. Isn’t that right, Savia Vinci?”

Vinci.

The name echoes in the room. I haven’t heard it in ages, not since the violent years of the civil war when my father came to power. He was barely a teenager. The Vinci family had once been among my grandfather’s most trusted allies, loyal servants to the Da Luca’s for generations.

Then everything changed. They betrayed us, murdered my grandmother in cold blood, and ignited the deadliest war in our city’s criminal history, right here on the blood-soaked streets of Rome. The unforgiving pavements bore the crimson stains of our people; innocent lives were shredded in the chaos. The final straw came when my grandfather broke the rules of our forefathers.

In a bold move unprecedented amongDons, he declared a ceasefire, a temporary truce. When the traitors finally laid down their arms at his table, he executed them all, sparing no one. He even took the final, soul-crushing step of ending the lives of their children to ensure that the cycle of vengeance would never haunt us again.

But there was one misstep, an echo of mercy—or perhaps regret—in all that brutality. My father had spoken often of the one who had slipped away. A tiny girl, spared from the severest fate, had vanished into the murky shadows because he couldn’t summon the strength to end her life as he did her brothers’. He dismissed the potential threat her presence posed, convinced she was harmless.

Now, as I listened to Gia’s words ricocheting off the walls of our fractured family, I can’t shake the searing sting of betrayal. Every revelation, every remembered injustice, pulses like a fresh wound beneath layers of old scars.

My mother is the last surviving Vinci.

“You don’t know anything,” my mother jeers, her voice a whisper as she shakes free from whatever kept her silent before. Her eyes flash with a mix of anger and desperation. “None of you understand the torment of being married to that monster. To be forced to stand beside him day after day, to share his bed night after night, enduring it all in silence. Salvatore knew who I was. He caught me snooping one night and trailed me.”

“So you used him,” Antonia’s voice trembles as she speaks, her breath catching in her throat. “You used him to plant the seed of killing our grandfather and then orchestrated our father’s downfall.”

“Aurelio wasn’t your father!” my mother retorts, her voice cracking with an unexpected fervor.

“To us, he was,” Antonia screams back, her eyes blazingwith a mix of betrayal and sorrow. “And you made me believe that he and my brother were monsters. Why? Was it so I could take over, only for you to plan to kill me, too?”

Our mother shakes her head frantically, her expression a mix of horror and disbelief. “No, Toni,” she whispers, her voice tinged with a desperate plea. “I placed you here to claim what is rightfully yours. It’s why I began grooming you from such a young age. This was always my plan—to make you the most powerful ruler in all of Italy.”

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