Even if I won, Greece would never recover cleanly. An empire built on ashes collapses under its own weight.
They knew it.
So did I.
Their price for surrender was simple.
Marry their daughter.
I was a legend then—but fractured in ways no one could see.
The world knew my name, my strength, my reach. They whispered it with fear, awe, and respect.
But beneath the reputation, beneath the iron and muscle, there were cracks—deep, jagged, invisible cracks that carried the echo of every scream, every bone snapped, every second spent in that inferno of Al-Chapo’s making.
The man who walked out of Al-Chapo’s prison was not the man who’d walked in—he had psychotic edges, a hair-triggertemper buried under ice, nightmares that dragged my sister’s ghost into every corner of my sleep.
Marriage was absurd.
Domesticity—a cruel joke.
Men like me no longer understood the language of love, if it had ever existed for us, hearts scorched with the fire of betrayal, seared beyond repair.
Yet empires demand sacrifices. To secure the final family that had refused to bend—the Kouris syndicate, I had no choice. I gave in to their insistence. I married Maria Kouris, their only daughter, a union forged not of affection, but of power, obligation, and cold necessity.
No love. No illusions. No romance to poison the deal.
The ceremony was cold, efficient—vows spoken like legal clauses.
The bed afterward was colder still.
We consummated the marriage only enough times to produce what was required.
An heir.
Yannis was born nine months later with my eyes and her sharp cheekbones. Proof of alliance. Flesh-and-blood collateral.
The families were satisfied.
The ports fell quiet.
The war that would’ve burned Greece to the ground died in a hospital nursery.
After that, intimacy ended.
Maria hated me. I could see it in the way her mouth tightened whenever I entered a room, in the way she flinched when my shadow crossed hers.
I didn’t blame her. I couldn’t feel anything beyond duty anymore. The prison had burned it out of me. Whatever humanity I’d had left was locked behind doors I didn’t know how to open.
Divorce was impossible. The pact forbade it.
So she partied. She drank. Nights at the club, the scent of liquor clinging to her. Whispers of lovers—men who thought themselves clever—slithered to me through the grapevine of my men. Murmurs, rumors, poison disguised as gossip.
I ordered them to stop it. Not a word more.
“She’s my wife,”I told them. “Not my prisoner.”
She deserved whatever happiness she could steal from the arrangement. I had none left to give.
