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.
And so, when I rose—when I became one of the most powerful mafia bosses in Lombardy—word eventually reached him.
My father heard.
He tried to reach me. Calls. Messages. Back channels through men who once bowed to him.
I ignored every single one.
To speak to him now felt like an insult—to everything I had survived, to everything my sister was still enduring. So I let his calls ring into silence... while I planned his downfall.
And when everything finally aligned three months ago—maps drawn, blind spots identified, every backdoor and exit memorized, every guard accounted for and assigned to a post—I stormed his estate with my men.
Ottavio trusted his system.
That was his first mistake.
