Shattered Vows

Liam's story

The hospital doors closed behind me.
I kept walking.
I didn't look back.
Because if I did, I knew I would see her standing there.
Isabella.
The first person in years who looked at me and didn't just see my name.
She saw something else.
She saw the anger.
The obsession.
The reason behind everything.
"What did Marco do to you?"
That question followed me long after I left.
I hated it.
Not because I didn't know the answer.
Because I remembered every single part of it.
I got into the car and closed the door.
The city moved outside the window, but I wasn't seeing any of it.
I was somewhere else.
Somewhere I spent years trying to forget.
People know me as Liam Alessi.
The oldest son of the Alessi family.
The son of Adrian and Elena Alessi.
They know my name.
They know my family's reputation.
They know my rivalry with Marco.
But they don't know why it became personal.
They don't know what he took from me.
Marco didn't just become my enemy.
He became the reason I became the person I am today.
I was ten years old when Marco took my mother.
Ten years old when I learned that some people weren't satisfied with winning.
They needed to destroy.
My mother, Elena, was the heart of our family.
She was the only person who could bring peace into our home.
My father was a powerful man, but my mother was the reason he still had a heart.
Marco knew that.
He knew exactly where to hurt us.
And he took her from us.
I remember the silence afterward.
The empty chair at the table.
The way my father stopped smiling.
The way my brothers looked at me because they needed someone to tell them everything would be okay.
But I couldn't.
Because I was only ten years old too.
I was the oldest.
I was supposed to protect them.
Lorenzo was eight.
Matteo was six.
Alessio was four.
And Nico was only two.
Four younger brothers who looked at me like I had all the answers.
I didn't.
But I learned how to pretend.
After my mother died, I changed.
I became angry.
Not just angry for a moment.
Angry in a way that became part of me.
I became strict because I had to.
I became protective because nobody else was going to protect us.
I watched every person who came near my family.
I questioned every decision.
I trained until my body couldn't take anymore.
My brothers still had pieces of their childhood left.
I didn't.
I became the wall between them and the world.
But Marco wasn't finished.
Years later, when I was seventeen, he took my father too.
My father spent his entire life fighting to keep us safe.
And Marco destroyed everything he built.
He didn't just kill a man.
He killed the last piece of the family we used to be.
That was the day something inside me disappeared.
At ten years old, I lost my mother.
At seventeen, I lost my father.
And between those two moments, I became someone who only knew one thing.
Protect my brothers.
Destroy Marco.
Those were the only promises I had left.
The car stopped.
My phone rang.
I answered without looking at the screen.
"Find Marco."
My voice was calm.
Controlled.
The kind of calm that came after years of anger.
"Tonight."