BLOOD AND VOWS
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CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
THE VAULT BLEEDS
“Some places remember every sin ever committed inside them. And eventually, they spit the blood back out.”
It didn’t feel like a tremor. Tremors were brief, sharp, over before the body knew how to react. What happened beneath the Moretti estate was slower, deeper, and carried a hum like bone grinding against bone. The war room monitors blacked out in sections—first the security feeds, then the audio grid, then the heartbeat sensors attached to each heat signature in the vault. At first, Emilia thought the system had glitched again, another artifact of Vitale’s sabotage protocols, but then the emergency backup flickered to life in red, and she saw the