Vows Written in Blood

Mya

Dad has been nervously tapping his fingers against his coffee mug for a week straight. He never fidgets. Since Mom died when I was ten, steadiness has been his religion. Now his pen skitters, his foot drums and he’s permanently distracted.

So when he says he’s going to the office late “to handle some reconciliations,” I follow him.

He doesn’t take the highway into Midtown where his office is. He cuts south, through neighborhoods where the buildings turn from glass to brick, where the streetlights thin out and graffiti thickens.

My heart’s pounding double time when he pulls into a lot that looks like it rents to gangsters. Chain-link fence, razor wire glittering in the light from the one working streetlamp, surrounding a squat rectangle of a warehouse with corrugated sides.

My hands are sweating on the steering wheel despite having the AC turned up to maximum. I turn it off. If I get caught, I want to hear it happening.

He gets out and walks toward the black rectangle of the door. Shoulders rounded, briefcase hugged to his ribs. What the hell is my straitlaced accountant father doing in a place like this?

I wait long enough to count thirty heartbeats. Then I follow, the latex soles of my shoes whispering on gravel.

I’m wearing stupidly expensive sneakers. The kind of thing I’d never normally splurge on, but dad got them for me when I graduated my Business Degree with a First Class distinction six months ago.

I remember the way he cried in the fourth row and shook the dean’s hand afterwards. I wore them proudly when we ate waffles at a diner and he said, “You’re the best thing I ever did, kiddo.”

When the dark door swallows him, I pick up my pace. It’s pitch dark inside, but I can see a light glowing at the end of the corridor and I head in that direction.

I know this is foolish, but if I see he’s in danger, I’ll back away and call 911. Maybe this is some weird hobby and he’s role-playing.

That thought evaporates when I see him kneeling on raw concrete, hands interlaced behind his head. He’s crying without making a sound at first, these silent body-shakes that look like he’s freezing from the bones outward. Then a small sound tears out of him. A high, thin wail that makes the hairs on my arms rise.

Another man stands in front of him, and everything in me tightens around the sight like a fist. He’s holding a gun to my father’s head.

Good sense abandons me and I scream at the sight. It tears out of me, jagged and panicked, and ricochets off metal shelving.

The man with the gun looks up, and for a second, the warehouse disappears and all I can see are his eyes. Ice-cold, glacial blue, the kind of blue I imagine you’d see if you slip through the ice on a semi-frozen lake, just before the water closes over your head.

Then arms wrap around me from behind, banding my torso, lifting my feet clear of the ground like I’m a child.

“What do you want me to do with her, boss?” a voice grumbles into my hair.

The gunman doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t swing the barrel. He doesn’t even lower it. He just looks at me, head tipping a fraction like I’ve just been marked in red ink on his inner radar.

“Put her down,” he says, calm as winter.

The arms hesitate, then loosen. Dad tries to lurch up, but the gun kisses his temple harder and he freezes.

“Who is she?” the gunman asks.

His voice is low and even. It doesn’t scrape, doesn’t boom. It’s measured. The kind of voice that decides when other voices stop forever.

“I’m-” My throat is dry. “I’m his daughter.” I spit the word because the alternative is choking on it. “The daughter of the man you’re about to murder.”

Dad makes a sound like someone stepped on his heart. “Mya,” he sobs. “Sweetheart, no, no, baby, why are you here?”

The blue eyes leave me long enough to slice back to dad. “Your father knows the consequences of stealing from Dante Cardello, and he did it anyway. Now he has to pay for that stupidity.”

I blink. The words don’t make sense stacked like that. Stealing. Consequences. Dante Cardello. I know the last one the way you know the shape of a city skyline from postcards. A rumor of a man, a whisper with a pulse, a headline no one prints.

But the first two? They don’t attach to my father’s face. My father is an accountant. He keeps receipts. He labels spice jars. He cried at Paddington 2, for fuck’s sake.

“Stole what?” I demand. “You have the wrong man. He balances people’s books. He doesn’t work with… people like you.”

Dante’s mouth curves into a dangerous smile. “Someone doesn’t know her daddy as well as she things she does. Your father balanced my books and in the process helped himself to five-point-six million dollars of my money, spread across three shell companies he thought I was too stupid to notice.”

Dante doesn’t look at me when he says it. He looks at my father. “Creative of him. I appreciate creativity. There was even some finesse. Just not quite enough to fool me.”

Dad is sobbing properly now. “I-I was going to put it back. I swear to God, Mr. Cardello, I was-”

“God isn’t on retainer here,” the man says mildly. The gun doesn’t waver.

The blue eyes come back to me slowly, like a camera refocusing. He’s tall and muscular. Not gym-bro big, something leaner and deadlier. Something built for tailored suits and violence.

He’s wearing a navy suit which was obviously tailored to fit him perfectly. The collar of his white shirt is open. No tie. His hair is dark, almost black, a sharp contrast to those icy eyes.

He studies me like he’s tracing a blueprint only he can read.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Twenty-four.” The answer snaps out. I don’t mean to give it. My mouth betrays me because my brain is flailing and my body is trying out obedience as a last resort.

“Please,” Dad whispers. He’s rocking now, eyes squeezed shut, mouth a little O. “Please, Dante. My daughter… she-she doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“Evidently,” Dante says. He finally lowers the gun.

Dante’s gaze tracks from Dad to me and I can feel him weighing something.

“What are you going to do?” I ask Dante. He’s the only one whose answer matters. “Shoot him in front of me? Is that something you’d get off on?”

Those blue eyes remain steady on me. There’s no flare of offense, just assessment. “No,” he says. “It’s not a kink. It’s a simple necessity.”

“The consequences,” I say, and the word scrapes my throat, “For stealing from… what, from you? From your… company?”

“Family,” he corrects, mildly again, like we’re talking about an amendment in a contract.

“You followed him,” he says. “The choices you made have dragged you into this.”

I hate that it’s true. I also hate that if I hadn’t followed him, I’d be asleep by now with a face mask on and a podcast murmuring in my ear, and my father would be a corpse cooling on a concrete floor.

“Please,” I say. The word tastes like pennies. I don’t say kill me instead. I’m not that kind of brave. I don’t say I’ll do anything, because the way he’s looking at me makes anything suddenly seem enormous, a canyon I could fall into and never climb out of.

Dante doesn’t answer immediately. He holsters the gun. The absence of it pointing at anyone should make me feel safer. It doesn’t.

I take two steps and put myself between my father and the man who says family like a threat.

Up close, Dad looks old in a way he never has to me. There’s sweat shining on his top lip, a tremor in his mouth he’s trying to clamp down. I want to press my forehead to his and make a childish wish.

Dante watches the way a hawk watches a field mouse. Nothing about me is lost on him. Not the tremor in my hand. Not the way my body angles, protective and useless.

“You’re brave,” he says like it’s data. “Or foolish.”

“Those are cousins,” I say. My voice still shakes. I use it anyway.

His attention lingers on my face another beat. On my eyes, my mouth, the pulse banging in my throat like it wants out. Then he looks at my father, and if the cold in those eyes was a lake before, now it freezes over.

Every line of him slots into place, decisions assembling in silence. “There were consequences to be paid,” he says, voice so soft I have to lean in to catch it. “And there still are.”

Dad makes a broken little sound. “Please,” he whispers.

Dante’s gaze slides back to me. Something new enters it. “For theft,” he says, “The consequence is death.”

He lets that hang, like a bell whose sound you feel more than hear. “But I find myself inclined,” his eyes hold mine, steady and unblinking, “To negotiate.”

My skin prickles. Every nerve stands at attention. I have the sudden, absurd, body-deep certainty that my life is about to fork.

My mouth is dry. “What do you want?” I ask, and the question is threadbare with fear.

He doesn’t answer immediately. He steps closer, into my space, until I can see the thread in his collar and smell his expensive cologne.

When he speaks, it’s quiet enough that it belongs to just us, and somehow that’s worse.

“Everything that’s mine,” he says, “Stays mine. Now you and I have something to discuss in private.”