The assassin's vow

Thenessa Pierce has two lives.

By day, she is the perfect med student-elite, untouchable, brilliant enough to make professors forget her last name comes with power.

By night, she is something else entirely.

A weapon.

Raised in a world built on silence, blood, and obedience, Thenessa was never meant to choose her own path. Especially not when her family signs her away in an arranged marriage to a man the underworld calls the devil himself.

Giovanni De Luca.

Cold. Calculated. Feared by men who don't survive long enough to regret knowing him.

He doesn't ask for loyalty.
He takes it.

And Thenessa was never good at giving anything freely.

But Giovanni doesn't fear her fire.

He recognizes it.

Because beneath the control, beneath the discipline, beneath the carefully built mask of a perfect daughter and brilliant student...

He sees the thing she buried years ago.

A girl who learned too young that love and violence often wear the same face.

In a world where blood seals contracts and marriage is just another form of power, one truth remains:

Some bonds are not chosen.

They are survived.

And theirs was written in blood long before either of them had a say.