Chapter 1 #2
“Figlio mio, listen—” he rushed, words tumbling over each other, tripping in their urgency. “I know... I know we’ve grown distant. Things—things were not handled as they should have been. But I—”
His voice faltered under my gaze.
“I know I failed you,” he pushed on, faster now, grasping for something—anything—that might still save him.
“When those bastards took you—when they—” His throat tightened.
“The torture... the scars... you think I don’t remember?
I fought for you. I pulled every string.
I burned half the world to bring you back. ”
A beat.
His eyes searched mine.
Looking for something.
Recognition. Gratitude. Weakness.
He found nothing.
“I kept you safe after,” he insisted, voice rising, desperation bleeding through the cracks in his control. “I sent you away because it was the only way to protect you. Everything I did—everything—was for you.”
I tilted my head slightly.
Studying him.
The lie wasn’t in the words. It was in the conviction.
Men like him always believed themselves.
“I deserve—” he began.
I moved.
The blade drove forward with brutal precision.
Not for his heart—that would have been mercy.
The dagger punched through his left cheek, steel slicing flesh with sickening ease, grinding against bone and teeth before bursting out through the other side.
A wet, choking sound exploded from him.
Blood sprayed.
Hot. Violent.
It painted the air between us in a fine red mist.
I stepped back smoothly, just enough to avoid it, my movements calm and controlled.
His body convulsed.
Violently. Uncontrollably.
His hands jerked behind him, useless, bound, his entire frame writhing as his mouth tried to form a scream that could no longer exist.
The blade remained lodged through his face.
A grotesque bar forced between his jaws.
Every attempt to move—every attempt to breathe—only tore the wound wider.
More blood. More pain.
He buckled forward, shoulders heaving, choking on his own breath, thick red spilling onto the stones beneath him.
Pooling. Spreading.
Staining the mountain like it had always belonged there.
I watched him.
Silently.
For a long moment.
This... was Ottavio Orsini.
The man who once ruled men with a glance. The man whose name had opened doors—or closed coffins.
Reduced to this.
Broken. Bleeding. Powerless.
He had never imagined this.
Not once.
Not even in his worst nightmares.
Getting him here had not been easy.
Nothing about Ottavio was ever easy.
For years, I had been hell-bent on revenge against my father—for what he did to my sister, for what he allowed to happen to me, for being the worst father.
But infiltrating his stronghold in Tuscany—the heart of his mafia empire—had been like trying to bleed stone.
Every assassin I sent disappeared without a trace. Every bribe I offered came back with a message—usually attached to a corpse.
He was always watching. Always calculating.
Paranoid enough to survive.
So I stopped playing his game.
Stopped chasing shadows.
Instead... I gave him something he couldn’t resist.
Family.
The rumor spread slowly at first.
Whispers in the right places. Carefully planted conversations. A name dropped here. A confirmation there.
Vincenzo Orsini is getting married.
A powerful alliance.
A return.
The prodigal son is stepping back into the light.
I made sure it reached him.
When my official invitation finally arrived at his table, I knew exactly what he would do.
He called me himself.
I remember the moment clearly.
The line had been quiet for a second too long before his voice came through.
Warm. Familiar. Fake.
“Vincenzo,” he said, like the years between us had never existed, like the blood and distance meant nothing. “We’ve been apart too long.”
I said nothing.
Let him speak.
“I know you blame me,” he continued, softer now, weaving his version of truth. “For what happened when you were nine. The kidnapping. The things they did to you.” A pause. Carefully measured. “But I never stopped looking for you. I never stopped fighting.”
Another pause.
“I saved you.”
The words sat there.
Ugly. Unwanted.
“I know I saved you too late... and that’s a regret I’ll carry for the rest of my life.”
His voice strained as he spoke, each word measured, as though even this cost him.
“It took me three years to find you... three years of your childhood that should never have been taken from you.”
His voice dropped, heavier now.
“Three years you spent trapped in that place... a trafficking den.”
He exhaled, steadying himself.
“I sent you abroad as soon as you were rescued. Not out of distance... not out of hatred—but because you needed it. You were vulnerable here. And I... I didn’t trust myself to help you heal the way you deserved.”
A pause.
“This place would have broken you all over again. Sending you away was the only way I knew how to keep you safe.”
Safe?
My grip on the phone had tightened then.
Not enough for him to hear.
Just enough for me to remember.
“I know you may never return to Tuscany. Some people even call you the prodigal son now—though you’ve built a life far beyond it. I’ve heard what you’ve built from nothing, one of the strongest mafias in Lombardy.”
His voice tightened, just slightly.
“You don’t need me anymore. I understand that.”
A pause.
“But I’m glad you sent me your wedding invitation.”
The edge in his tone softened into something quieter—almost fragile.
“It would be my honor to stand at your wedding... to offer my blessing. To see you happy again... and to know that, for a moment, you’ve found peace.”
Silence stretched between us—long, heavy, deliberate—until I finally spoke.
“I’ll be expecting you,” I said. Nothing more. Nothing less. A quiet invitation to his end.
Then I added, cold and certain:
“Just don’t expect forgiveness.”
He had laughed.
Soft. Confident.
Certain of himself.
“Ah, Vincenzo...” he said, like I was still a boy he could mold, still something unfinished. “One day, you’ll understand.”
A pause.
Then the final lie. “Family forgives.”
The memory faded.
The mountain returned. Cold the way it had always been, and just as indifferent.
I stepped forward again, stopping just in front of him as he choked and bled at my feet.
Family.
My gaze hardened.
No.
Family remembers.
The fool never understood.
Not really.
Not even now, kneeling in his own blood, choking on the consequences of a life built on rot.
He thought the reason I had distanced myself from him after my studies abroad—the reason for the rift between us—came from the cellar.
From the chains.
From the scars carved into my back and memory.
He was wrong.
Those things... they had broken me.
But they hadn’t turned me into this.
No.
That had come later.
The reasons came in ink—written in trembling handwriting across thin sheets of paper that carried the faint scent of fear and desperation.
Loretta’s letters.
They reached me during my time abroad, in fragments—smuggled by one of Ottavio’s soldiers who still had a heart.
After I was rescued at twelve, I was brought back to my father’s estate. But he never seemed happy to see me—if anything, it felt as though he wished I had never returned.
I remember running to him, my body still aching, desperate for comfort. But he turned away, instructing his men to take care of me instead.
And barely two days later, he sent me abroad—to “school,” as he called it.
I was in my second year at university when my sister’s first letter finally arrived.
All that time, every attempt I made to speak to her had failed. No matter how much I begged the bastard kneeling before me to let me speak to her, he refused—always telling me not to worry about her... that she was fine.
She wrote of the nights she could not escape, of a father who treated his own daughter as something to possess and break.
She spoke of feeling trapped like a prisoner in her own home, of learning to disappear inside her mind just to survive another day.
She begged me to come for her before the darkness swallowed her completely.
I remember my hand stilled on the page, the ink blurring beneath my fingers—smudged by tears, or by my trembling, I couldn’t tell.
Something inside me shattered that day, like glass dropped on marble—sharp, sudden, and impossible to piece back together.
Yet the truth was, I was powerless then. Just eighteen. An innocent second-year university student, still trying to stitch myself back together after everything I’d survived in that trafficking den.
I tried—desperately—to reach my sister after that.
She was in Italy, and I was stuck in London, worlds apart in more ways than distance.
My father made sure of it. He had legal guardianship over my movements and financial control over my education, binding me to the terms he set.
Until I completed my final year, I wasn’t allowed to return home. No exceptions. No negotiations.
I was trapped—watching from afar, unable to reach her when she needed me most.
And that was when it finally dawned on me—my father hadn’t sent me abroad to heal. That had never been the reason.
He sent me away to keep me out of the way... to put distance between me and my sister, knowing exactly how helpless she would be without me.
From the moment that letter reached my hands, everything changed. School stopped being my goal. Survival stopped being enough.
All I wanted—needed—was power. Enough power to return, to tear my father down, and to pull my sister out of the hell he had built around her.
It wasn’t easy. Nothing about it was.
Every step was a fight, every gain painfully earned.
It took years—years of grinding, of learning, of becoming someone I barely recognized.
And with every passing second, the thought of her still trapped under that roof... still suffering in silence... it tore at me.
I ached for her. I broke for her. And beneath it all, something darker kept growing—anger, sharp and relentless, refusing to fade.