Chapter 1 Blood For A Bride

• The mansion still smelled of gunpowder and blood.
• I could taste the fear in the air, bitter and sharp, as if it had soaked into the walls. Servants whispered in the corners, dragging bloody rags across the floor, but the stains would not go away. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.
• I stood at the edge of the grand hall, my body trembling inside the thin silk of my dress. My family had been ambushed barely an hour ago—black cars, masked men, the shriek of tires and the deafening sounds of bullets. I had not been hit, but something inside me had already been destroyed.
• Now there was only silence.
• Too much silence.
• My father sat slumped in his leather chair, his hands shaking as he gripped a glass of whiskey. He looked older than I had ever seen him, his skin pale, his jaw slack. Across from him, Dominic Kane sat like a king surveying his kingdom.
• I had seen Dominic once before, years ago at an event I can barely remember. Back then he was just a shadow on the edge of the room—a tall, broad man with eyes so cold they had frozen me in place for a moment. Tonight, he was no shadow. He was the darkness itself.
• His suit was untouched by the chaos. Not a speck of blood on him. His tie was straight, his posture perfect. If I had not seen the bodies being dragged out only minutes earlier, I would have thought he had stepped out of a boardroom, not a battlefield.
• And then he looked at me. Just for a second.
• My lungs refused to work. I felt pinned in place, as if those dark-brown eyes had nailed me to the marble floor. He didn’t need to speak to make me feel trapped.
• My father’s rough voice broke the silence.
• “We can’t survive another hit like that, Dominic. The Romano family is already circling. My businesses… my name… I’m finished.”
• Dominic swirled the amber whiskey in his glass, calm and deliberate. He didn’t even bother to look at my father. He didn’t need to. His presence filled the room with a kind of power that didn’t require words.
• “You owe me a debt,” he said finally, his voice smooth and sharp. “I cleaned up your mess tonight. That comes at a price.”
• My father’s fingers tightened around his glass. His voice cracked with desperation. “Name it. Money. Property. Anything.”
• That was when Dominic finally lifted his gaze again. And he looked straight at me.
• My stomach dropped so fast I thought I might throw up.
• No. No, he couldn’t mean—
• “Your daughter,” he said.
• The words landed like a death sentence.
• The glass slipped from my father’s hand, shattering across the floor. But he didn’t argue. He didn’t shout. He didn’t even hesitate.
• “Then she’s yours.”
• I think my heart stopped.
• “No!” The word ripped out of me before I could hold it back. My father didn’t even look at me. My mother was crying silently in the corner, her face buried in her hands.
• Dominic’s gaze never wavered. “It’s not a request. It’s the only deal that saves your family. I take her, or I let the Romanos finish what they started.”
• My father groaned, pressing his hand to his temples. “Sophia, you’ll be safe. With Kane, no one will touch you. This is protection.”
• “Protection?” My laugh was jagged and ugly. “You’re selling me like I’m property!”
• My father looked at me. But his eyes weren’t filled with love. They were hollow. “It’s the only way, Sophia. Please… don’t make this harder.”
• I wanted to scream, to claw my way out of the suffocating air, but then Dominic stood.
• The room’s atmosphere shifted.
• He was taller than I remembered, his presence swallowing everything around him. His shoes clicked against the floor as he approached, each step echoing inside my chest. My instincts screamed at me to step back, but my pride wouldn’t let me move.
• He stopped a foot away, and I had to tilt my chin up to meet his eyes. He studied me like I was an object he was about to buy. My cheeks burned with humiliation.
• “You will marry me,” he said. Not a question. A command.
• I shook my head, my voice trembling. “Why?”
• His dark-brown eyes cut straight through me. “Your father betrayed me once. This is my revenge. His bloodline will kneel under mine.”
• The ground tilted beneath my feet. So this wasn’t about me at all. It never was. I was nothing more than a weapon in a war between men.
• My hands curled into fists at my sides. For years, I had been invisible in this family—the quiet daughter, the one nobody paid much attention to. Tonight, that invisibility had become my curse. I was easy to sacrifice.
• Dominic tilted his head, his face unreadable. “I’ll send for the paperwork. Tomorrow you’ll be my wife.”
• The word wife scraped across my skin like broken glass.
• Tears burned in my eyes. “You can’t just—”
• He leaned closer until his breath brushed my ear. His voice was a whisper of steel.
• “I can. And I will. The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be.”
• I flinched as if the words themselves had cut me.
• He straightened and turned away, already walking toward the door. His men opened it for him without a word. Before stepping out, he glanced back once, his gaze locking on me with a finality that stole my breath.
• “You belong to me now.”
• The heavy doors shut behind him, sealing my fate.
• For a moment, I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. The walls of the mansion pressed in on me, suffocating, gilded bars of a cage I hadn’t chosen.
• My father buried his face in his hands. My mother’s sobs filled the corners of the room.
• And me? I stayed standing, even as my knees shook. My heart was broken, my freedom gone, my future stolen. But beneath all that pain, something else sparked to life.
• Rage.
• Rage at my father. Rage at Dominic Kane. Rage at the gilded prison I had been forced into.
• I didn’t know how, or when, but I swore to myself in that moment: One day, I would break free of this cage.