Vowed To The Devil©

Zafrina's POV

I’m running.

I’m fucking running, even though every part of me is falling apart, even though blood is streaming down my skin in hot, stinging trails, even though my lungs are shredding themselves with every desperate gasp they refuse to hold.

The darkness around me isn’t just darkness....it feels sentient, suffocating, like a living creature clawing at my body, wrapping itself around me like a burial shroud as I stumble blindly through the endless, merciless forest.

Every branch that whips across my arms feels like punishment. The thorns don’t just slice open my skin; they tear into me like they want to peel me alive. My feet… God, my fucking feet… they’re nothing but raw, ruined meat scraping against the cold, unforgiving ground.

Every step sends a new wave of agony up my legs. Every breath feels like a final prayer I already know won’t be answered. I am running on fear, on adrenaline, on the last fragile thread of something that died inside me a long time ago.

And behind me....behind me, I can hear them.

Their laughter. Savage, sharp and inhuman. It ricochets between the trees, bouncing off the tangled shadows, chasing me, mocking me. It’s getting closer. So close I swear I can feel their hands already, phantom touches brushing the back of my neck, reaching for me, ready to drag me straight back into the nightmare I’ve been clawing my way out of.

No.

No. No. No.

I throw myself behind the nearest tree, slamming my battered body into the rough bark so hard it knocks the air from my chest. I press myself against it, trying to disappear into the wood, trying to make myself smaller.

My heart is pounding so violently, I’m convinced they’ll hear it thundering through the night. I slap a shaking, blood-smeared hand over my mouth to strangle the sob that claws its way up my throat like poison.

I squeeze my eyes shut until bright sparks burst behind my eyelids, and I pray, not because I believe in God or because I believe anyone gives a damn about me. But because prayer is the only thing left, the last pathetic, trembling shred of desperation clinging to what’s left of my soul.

Please. Please. Please. Don’t let them find me.

Please.

But mercy? Mercy is just another lie I stopped believing in a lifetime ago.

Fingers like iron clamp around my arm, snapping me out of the shadows with brutal force.

A strangled cry rips out of me as I’m yanked forward, stumbling helplessly. Their laughter explodes across the night, ugly, cruel and triumphant as if my suffering is the punchline they’ve been waiting for. I thrash against them, pathetic and broken, every movement useless. Their hands tighten, bruising my skin, squeezing the last bits of breath out of my chest.

A harsh, calloused palm slams over my mouth, cutting off my scream. I shriek into it anyway, the sound swallowed whole by the night, devoured by the darkness that has been chasing me since the moment I ran.

No.

No.

No.

No.

I wake with the scream still lodged in my throat. I jerk upright, gasping, dripping in cold sweat that clings to my skin like another layer of terror. The sheets are twisted around my legs, tight, suffocating and binding like the nightmare followed me here and wrapped itself around me just to remind me I’ll never outrun it.

My hands claw at the fabric, frantic and shaking so violently I can hardly control them. My vision swims, blurring at the edges as my heart slams, over and over, against my ribs with the force of something trying to escape my chest entirely. When I finally tear myself loose, I scramble backwards, slamming into the headboard so hard the entire thing rattles.

I bury my face in my hands, but it's useless. The sobs tear out of me anyway, ripping free in jagged, broken bursts that scrape the inside of my throat raw. The ugly sound fills the room, bouncing off the walls, making the space feel too small, too tight, too full of everything I can’t handle.

The door creaks open. I barely hear it over the roar of my pulse pounding through my skull, but the shift in the air tells me someone’s there. The mattress dips beside me under someone’s weight, and through the blur of tears, I identify her shape before I fully see her face.

Sandra.

Sandra, with her eyes lined with exhaustion and worry, with sorrow carved into the lines around her mouth, with hands trembling like she’s terrified to touch me. She reaches for me like she still believes she can save me.

“Oh, sweet girl.” Her voice is soft, cracked at the edges, and for a moment, just a moment, it slices through the chaos inside me.

I collapse into her arms without hesitation, without thought, without strength left to resist the one thing in this house that still feels remotely like safety. I grip her tightly, clinging with whatever scraps of energy I have left. I press my face into her chest, breathing in the faint scent of lavender and soap and something gentle I don’t have a name for. Something I only ever find in her presence.

She rocks me slowly, her arms wrapping around me in a way that feels both protective and heartbreakingly helpless. Her fingers stroke through my hair, her voice whispering promises, soft, soothing lies we both understand mean nothing against what lives inside me now.

The nightmare never ends. It’s not a memory. It’s not a dream I wake up from. It’s tattooed into my bones, stitched into the underside of my skin, carved so deep I can feel it pulsing there. It happened, and it keeps happening...every night, every time my eyes close, every inhale, every exhale. I’m not living. I’m not even close.

I’m just surviving. Barely. By threads.

My breathing eventually slows, though my body still trembles in violent, uncontrollable waves. I force myself to pull away, wiping my face with the back of a shaking hand. The tears leave cold streaks across my cheeks, and I feel smaller, weaker, more hollow than ever.

“Thank you,” I whisper, though the sound is so broken it barely resembles a voice at all.

Sandra gives me that soft, aching smile she always saves for me when she doesn’t know how to fix what’s spilling out of me. Her fingers trace gentle circles into my arm, grounding me in the smallest, most fragile way.

“You don’t have to thank me, sweetheart. I just worry about you,” she murmurs, her voice trembling beneath the kindness.

I nod, pulling my knees to my chest, curling in on myself like I’m trying to shrink into nothing, trying to vanish into the mattress, into the shadows, into anywhere but here.

“I’ll be okay.”

Another lie. One, we both hear crack as soon as it leaves my mouth.

“I have you,” I add softly.

For a moment, silence hangs between us, heavy and suffocating. The kind of silence that presses down on my shoulders until I can hardly breathe. And then I feel the shift.

The dread crawls up my spine, slow and cold, like some unseen hand dragging its fingers along each vertebra. Sandra’s hand stills. Her breath stutters. Something inside her folds in on itself.

“You won’t have me much longer, sweet girl.” Her voice breaks; no, shatters.

My head snaps up as my heart drops straight into my stomach.

“What do you mean?” I manage, though the question scrapes out of me like splintered glass, thin and trembling and terrified.

Sandra hesitates as her gaze drops to her wrinkled hands. She twists them together, over and over, as if she’s trying to wring the truth out but can’t bear to let it fall between us.

Sandra finally speaks, so quiet I almost think I imagined her voice at first.

“I heard Silas talking.” The words tremble in the air, barely strong enough to exist.

“He’s arranging your marriage.”

I stare at her without blinking. The world begins to tilt, slow at first, then violently, as if the ground beneath me has decided to collapse. A cold wave pours through me.

No. No. No.

I shake my head in a frantic, useless attempt to push the words away before they settle inside me, but they sink in anyway, thick and poisonous.

He cannot do this. He cannot decide this. Not after everything. Not after what they did to me. Not after what he allowed to happen, not after what he himself destroyed inside me.

No man, especially no mafia boss, would ever want something as broken as me. I am damaged beyond recognition. I am the kind of broken that cannot be fixed, no matter how hard I try to hold my pieces together. There are cracks in me that run too deep, ugly shadows that will always show through no matter how tightly I wrap myself in silence.

Silas knows exactly how ruined I am. He knows every fractured part. He owns those parts. Yet now he is preparing to hand me off as if I am something valuable, as if my shattered edges are not the kind of scars that make men look away. He is trading me like I am still worth something, but I know the truth he refuses to see.

I am nothing but damaged goods in a world that kills anything less than perfect.

“I cannot...” My voice crumbles as it leaves my lips, breaking apart like wet ash.

Fresh tears spill down my face and burn hot against my already tender skin. I shake my head, unable to breathe, unable to steady anything inside me.

Sandra pulls me against her again. She holds me so tightly it almost hurts, as if she is trying to keep my body from splitting open entirely. My entire frame trembles in her arms, violent and uncontrollable, while something inside me splinters even further.

Why does life keep reaching for me only to crush me all over again? Why am I still here? Why can I not simply fade out of this world, slip away into nothingness, vanish in a quiet moment that no one would notice? Die quietly and be done with it?

The thought curls through me like smoke. I do not want to feel anymore. I am too weak to save myself, too afraid to finish the thoughts that haunt me.

“SANDRA!” The voice explodes through the silence with the force of a gunshot. My entire body goes rigid, every muscle locking until I feel like my bones might crack.

Silas.

Uncle Silas.

Sandra does not flinch. She only tightens her arms around me and breathes out a soft sigh against my hair.

“Yes?” She answers, her voice steady, collected, untouched by the terror ripping through mine.

“Is Zafrina awake?” His voice is right outside the door now, low and sharp, heavy with expectation and the kind of danger that coils around the throat.

My breathing stops completely. My heart is thundering so loudly, I swear he can hear it. I look up at Sandra with panic burning my throat raw. She gives me a small smile, soft and devastating, a smile that tries to protect me even though protection here is a lie.

“Yes, she is in the shower.” She answers with practised ease, her hand moving across my back in slow circles, trying to calm the storm tearing through me.

There is a pause. A long, thick moment where the air itself holds its breath. Then the sound of his footsteps fades down the hallway. Only then do I allow myself to breathe again.

Sandra releases a slow breath, a long exhale that seems to pull the tension out of her shoulders piece by piece. She pulls back just enough to reach up with gentle, trembling fingers and tuck a strand of my damp hair behind my ear. The smile she forces onto her face is thin and fragile, and I can see immediately that it does not reach her eyes. It is the kind of smile built only for my sake.

“Come on,” she murmurs softly.

“Get in the shower. I will make you some pancakes.”

I do not move. I cannot move. I just stare at her like my body has forgotten how to respond to anything. Even breathing feels like a chore that demands too much strength. The idea of standing, walking, and existing seems impossible.

How am I supposed to keep going when the only person who has loved me like I am something worth holding on to is about to be taken from me as easily as everything else that has ever mattered?

“I... I do not want to...” The words crumble out of me, scattered pieces of a voice buried under the weight of panic and grief that keeps building and building inside me.

“I know, baby. I know.” Sandra’s own voice cracks, and it only makes the ache inside me worse. It is proof that she is hurting, too.

She brings her hands to my face, her palms warm against my cold skin, her thumbs brushing away tears that fall faster than she can chase them away.

Her forehead presses to mine. A quiet, trembling breath leaves her lips.

“I swear to you. If there is a way out of this, any way at all, I will find it. I will get you out.” Her voice softens further, heavy with a promise that feels sacred, almost holy in its desperation.

“I promise.”

She holds the moment for a breath longer before she pulls away. Her movements are slow, reluctant, like letting go of me hurts her just as much as it hurts me to watch her leave. I follow her with my eyes, watching the way she walks to the door with steps that seem heavier than usual, as if she is carrying something she knows she cannot fix.

When she finally steps out of the room, the silence rushes in. The loneliness hits me so hard it feels like the air is crushed out of my lungs. It wraps around me like a tidal wave, dragging me under.

My hands rise to my face, rubbing hard, trying to wipe away the tears and the despair and the dread that refuses to loosen its grip. I whisper a prayer under my breath, the same prayer I have whispered more times than I can count.

I pray that my parents, wherever they ended up, might hear me somehow. I pray for them to take me away, to pull me out of this life, to offer me some kind of escape. The room stays silent. It always stays silent. The prayer dissolves into the same hollow emptiness that answers me every time.

Standing up feels like reopening wounds that never healed. My body aches, my chest feels too heavy, my legs feel like they belong to someone else. But I force myself to move, because the alternative is worse. If I make Silas wait, if I defy the smallest expectation, the consequences will be far more brutal than anything my mind can conjure during the darkest nightmares.

With a heart that feels too swollen with dread to fit inside my ribs, I drag myself toward the bathroom. Each step feels like it takes a year. The moment I step into the shower, the cold water hits my skin like a slap. I let it run over me, numbing me, preparing me, hardening me for the hell that waits downstairs.

Facing him feels unbearable. Facing whatever plans he has crafted for me feels even worse.

The thought settles in my chest, cold and absolute. The thought of surviving another day in his world feels far more terrifying than dying ever could.

I stand inside the closet with nothing but a thin towel clinging weakly to my trembling body. The fabric barely covers me, and the cold air raises goosebumps along my arms. My eyes settle on the rows of clothes hanging in front of me, lifeless and motionless, like they belong to someone who actually has a future. My hand moves along the fabrics in a slow, distracted glide, but my gaze betrays me and shifts toward the mirror to the right.

That is when I see them.

The bruises.

They bloom across the inside of my thighs in sick, decaying shades of purple and yellow, spreading over my skin like rotting petals of a flower that should never have existed. My fingers lose their grip on the towel, and it slips from my hand, falling soundlessly around my feet. The cold air hits me all at once, and I stand there completely exposed, completely vulnerable, with the bright light pouring over every piece of evidence I have tried so hard to ignore.

Bite marks litter my stomach like someone wanted to claim ownership over every inch of me. Old scratches have faded into thin scars while newer ones crisscross them in angry red lines, a map of everything I survived and everything that still lives inside my nightmares. It spreads across me like an infection I cannot cure, no matter how hard I try.

My eyes burn. Tears gather at the corners, a bitter sting I know all too well, threatening to spill, but I squeeze them back, shaking my head slowly, desperate to keep the memories buried somewhere far beneath the surface. I refuse to let them climb back into the light.

I force myself to move. I reach for a simple shirt and a pair of jeans, choosing them without any thought, dressing myself with stiff, mechanical motions, like maybe if I move fast enough, I can outrun the shame clinging to my skin. The clothes feel wrong on my skin, too heavy, too tight, like they are trying to hide something that refuses to be hidden.

With a shaky breath that trembles deep in my chest, I leave the closet. Each step toward the hallway feels heavier than the last. The air inside the house feels colder than usual, thick and suffocating, almost as if the walls themselves are aware of something approaching that I have not yet been told.

When I walk into the living room, my stomach twists sharply, so violently that I nearly double over.

Uncle Silas is seated comfortably at the table, legs relaxed, posture casual. Another man sits across from him, his back to me, a broad, muscular silhouette that radiates danger before I even see his face.

Silas notices me instantly. His chair scrapes across the floor as he stands, the harsh sound slicing through the air. He approaches me with a predatory calm that sends a shiver straight down my spine. Every muscle in my body reacts, tightening instinctively, prepared for something I cannot avoid.

The stranger still has not turned around, but his presence fills the room in a way that makes my skin crawl. Something about him feels wrong, heavy, like the air bends around him.

I flinch when Silas drapes an arm over my shoulders. It is only a slight movement, barely noticeable, but he catches it immediately. His grip tightens. The affectionate look he pretends to wear fools no one. His fingers dig into my shoulder and the soft skin beneath my shirt, pressing a silent threat into my flesh. It hurts. He knows it hurts.

He pulls me toward the table as if dragging an object rather than guiding a person. When we reach the stranger, Silas’s voice shifts. It changes into something sweet and polished, dripping with the same poison he uses whenever he wants to manipulate, intimidate, or pretend he is something other than the monster he is.

“This is my niece, Zafrina.” His smile stretches fully now, the kind of smile he uses right before something terrible happens, the kind of smile he gives right before he forces himself on me at night when he thinks no one will ever know.

Nausea swirls violently up my throat. I swallow it back, focusing on my breathing, willing my body not to collapse.

I lift my gaze slowly, prepared for anything and terrified of everything.

The stranger is watching me. His eyes are a deep, dark emerald green. They sweep over my face with a slowness that feels deliberate, intimate, invasive, and my heart lunges painfully against my ribs. His hair is pulled into a neat ponytail that exposes the severe angles of his face, making every sharp line even more defined. He is handsome, but in a way that feels dangerous, in a way that promises destruction rather than safety.

He is older. Much older. The kind of man who has seen violence, used violence, and became violence.

He rises from his chair in a single smooth motion. He keeps rising until I realise just how tall he is. His size dwarfs me. He seems carved out of steel, his shoulders stretching the fabric of his dark suit, his body built like someone who has spent years fighting and winning.

My breath stutters. I feel impossibly small beneath his gaze, like prey caught in the shadow of a predator. And then the memories strike me, uninvited and merciless. The faces of the men who pinned me down. The sound of their laughter. The smell of sweat and blood. The pain. The humiliation. The terror that never leaves.

It hits me so hard my vision wavers. I drop my eyes to the floor, unable to hold his stare even a second longer. Shame burns through me, and panic coils tight in my stomach until I feel sick. My hands curl into fists at my sides, a pathetic attempt to protect myself from a threat I cannot see clearly yet cannot escape.

Silas speaks again, and his words cut through the room with a casual cruelty that tilts the entire world around me.

“Zafrina, this is Dante Moretti.” His tone holds a dark satisfaction, almost gleeful.

“Your fiancé.”

Dante's POV

There are countless ways I could have wasted my morning. I could have drowned myself in bourbon until the world blurred. I could have woken up with Felicia’s legs wrapped around my waist, her voice still hoarse from a night spent screaming my name in the back room of my club. I could have opened my eyes to the familiar cold emptiness of my bed and gone downstairs to break the ribs of whichever unlucky bastard happened to irritate me first. I could have chosen violence, indulgence, anything that would have satisfied the darkness gnawing at my insides.

Instead, I find myself trapped inside the suffocating, gaudy living room of the Vitale mansion, surrounded by decorations that reek of desperation and old money. And across from me sits Silas Vitale. The man I consider a plague upon this earth. The man whose very breath contaminates the air around us. The man who once laid his filthy hands on my sister Sophie, the only person whose existence kept me from becoming an unrestrained monster.

Every breath I inhale feels contaminated by the act of sharing this space with him. His presence spreads like a toxin. He watches me with that smug, self-satisfied smirk that only men who believe themselves untouchable ever wear. He has the look of someone who has no idea he is already living on borrowed time, someone who has not yet understood what it means to lose everything to a force far more merciless than fate.

A force like me.

My fists clench beneath the table where he cannot see. My nails bite into my palms, a reminder that I am still choosing restraint, that I am still giving patience the chance to work its slow, deadly magic. It takes every ounce of control in me not to launch across the room and crush his throat beneath my fingers until I feel cartilage snap.

I imagine the colour draining from his face, the way his eyes would bulge, the way his attempts at gasping would fail him. It would be so easy, so satisfying.

But vengeance only works when you feed it carefully. I learned that long ago. Sophie needs me alive. She needs me calculating. She needs me to be cruel in a way Silas has not yet earned the right to fear.

So I sit here and sip the overpriced whiskey he poured with that fake salesman smile.

I listen to him drone on and on about alliances and bloodlines and power, like any of it matters to me. I pretend to give a fuck. I pretend to care about the words spilling out of his mouth when all I want to do is slice out his tongue and make him choke on it.

Recently, the Capo has been breathing down my neck, has been all over my case about appearances. He keeps reminding me that I am thirty-three, unmarried, and creating tension simply by refusing to participate in the archaic traditions. Normally, I do not care in the slightest about his and Cosa Nostra's obsession with legacy or stability or the pathetic rituals they cling to.

But his nagging planted a thought in my mind. A dangerous one. A brilliant one.

If they want me married, then fine. I will marry. But the chain they try to clasp around my throat will become the noose I use to strangle them.

I offered Silas a marriage arrangement, knowing exactly what kind of man he is. Knowing the only bargaining chip he would ever consider handing over is his treasured niece, the girl he locks away and protects with a possessive fervour that defies logic. The moment he agreed, I felt the shift inside myself. I knew I had him. I knew I had finally found the way to peel him apart from the inside.

Once she carries my name, once she sleeps under my roof, once she stands inside the walls of my home, she will belong to me. And when she belongs to me, it means every secret Silas ever buried, every vulnerability he has ever tried to hide, every weak point in his already crumbling empire will belong to me as well.

I hear footsteps behind me, and I know it's her. Zafrina Vitale. They are light, hesitant and dragging across the polished floors like she is being pulled toward a fate she cannot escape.

I do not turn. I do not acknowledge her arrival. I do not offer her so much as a glance. She is a pawn before she is anything else. A tool. A weapon meant to bleed the man who would have let my sister rot in her grave. And the moment she becomes mine, Silas Vitale’s downfall will begin.

Silas rises from his chair with that grotesque self-satisfied grin that stretches across his face like a mask made of rotting flesh. He puffs up his chest, proud and preening like a fucking rooster, and when he drags her toward me by the shoulder as if she is livestock being paraded for inspection, I finally let myself look at the girl he thinks is a worthy offering.

The sight of her does not shock me. I expected something small, something fragile, something shaped by years of fear. But there is something else too, something sharp and unsettling that flickers inside my chest like a blade catching the light for a brief moment.

She is young, painfully so, barely more than a trembling slip of a girl. She looks like she could be snapped in half by a harsh wind. Her skin is pale in a way that speaks of long nights spent hiding rather than resting, and her eyes look hollowed out, empty, like she has been forced to swallow horrors she was never meant to witness.

She reminds me of a dove, some trembling, broken-winged thing that flutters uselessly against the bars of its gilded cage, too innocent to understand that mercy is just another word for suffering. A little dove, trapped among vultures.

For a split second, she lifts her head, and our eyes meet. Wide, black eyes lock with mine, and the collision is almost violent. Everything inside her flashes outward, raw terror mixed with a disgust she cannot hide. It is unfiltered, naked and honest. And then she drops her gaze so quickly it is as if someone blew out a candle, leaving the room colder.

The reaction offends me. Not because she fears me. She should fear me. What grates under my skin is the fact that she still cannot see where the real monster stands. She recoils from the wolf while the serpent lovingly keeps its coil around her throat.

My fury thickens inside my gut, a dense thing that threatens to spill over, but I force it down, swallowing its heat and turning it into something far more useful. A cruel smile pulls slowly at the corner of my mouth as I rise, letting my full height tower over her.

I study the way she folds into herself, shrinking as if she can melt into the air. She trembles as if she could become invisible if she tries hard enough, but hiding will not save her from me. Nothing will.

Silas tightens his grip on her shoulder. The touch is possessive, and it is revolting. His voice oozes warmth that does not belong anywhere near her.

“This is my niece, Zafrina.” He says, smiling as though offering me some precious, untouchable gift, and I wonder if he realises that in that moment, he has sealed both their fates.

Hers, because she now stands in the crosshairs of a war she does not understand. His, because giving her to me is the final mistake he will ever make.

I do not smile. I do not greet her. I do not pretend to be civilised. I simply observe her the way a butcher observes a calf, looking for the parts that will break first.

Her trembling breaths. The faint flicker of resistance buried beneath her lowered gaze. The tension in her small hands as she clenches them in an effort to keep herself upright.

Then Silas introduces me with that nauseating pride he wears like a second skin.

“This is Dante Moretti. Your fiancé.”

The effect is immediate.

She sways where she stands. Her knees buckle in a way that makes me wonder if she will crumple to the ground at my feet. For one brief heartbeat, I think she might fall, collapse into a heap of terror and shock.

The idea pleases me far more than it should. If she is already this breakable before I even touch her life, then the task ahead of me will be effortless. Or perhaps not effortless. Perhaps something closer to art.

I lean toward her, lowering my head until my breath brushes over her hair. I savour the violent shudder that rolls through her body. It is raw fear. Pure and unfiltered. And when I speak, I do so in a voice low, velvety and cruel, a voice that promises damnation and suffering and a mercy she will never know again.

“Smile, little dove.” My lips graze her ear, a mockery of gentleness, while my hand lifts to trail a single knuckle along the soft curve of her jaw. She jerks away as if my touch burns her.

“Doves do not fly from monsters, now do they?” I murmur, letting the cruelty sharpen every word.

“You will understand soon enough. Doves don't choose their cages, and you were always meant for mine. And believe me, little one, I don't let go of the things I claim. I hold them. I keep them. I own them. Forever.”

I straighten and take a step back, watching her attempt to gather herself and watching her fail. She stands there shaking, unable to hide the terror pouring out of her. And in that moment, I make a promise to myself, a vow carved in stone.

Zafrina Vitale will learn that there are fates far worse than death.

And by the time I am finished, Silas Vitale will kneel at my feet and beg for the bullet he once believed I was too weak to fire.

This is not a marriage. This is a war.

And I do not fucking lose. Ever.