Twenty years later,

The Colombo villa was more fortress than home now — a vast, high-walled estate nestled in the Sicilian hills, surrounded by olive trees and guards with machine guns. Inside, the scent of sandalwood and leather lingered in the grand hallway, the chandeliers casting long, deceptive shadows across marble floors stained with secrets.

And at the heart of it sat Gabriele Colombo. The boy who once whispered to flowers had long been buried.

He wasn't the kind of man you noticed — he was the kind you felt. The air around him shifted, thickened, as if it recognized something dangerous had entered the room. The sharp lines of his black tailored suit only made the darkness in him look more deliberate, more controlled — like sin wrapped in silk.

His eyes, though... those were the real undoing. Devilish, gleaming with a kind of quiet madness that could charm or destroy, depending on what he chose that day. They held no mercy, no apology — just the smolder of a man who'd long made peace with his own demons and now wore them like a crown.

The faint shadow of stubble framed a jaw too sharp to belong to anyone good, and when he moved, there was grace — the kind born of danger, like a predator that never needs to prove its power.

And over his heart, the ink whispered his creed: sangue sopra tutto — blood above all. It wasn't just a tattoo. It was a promise. And Gabriele Columbo was a man who never broke those.

He leaned back on his leather throne of a chair in the private study, his boots resting on the antique desk like he owned not just the room, but the world beyond its walls. The room smelled of cigars, cologne, and fresh blood.

"Who begged this time?" he asked lazily, scrolling through his phone.

His younger brother, Luca, leaned against the wall, his jaw tight. "That banker from Naples. He was crying."

Gabriele chuckled darkly. "Did he offer his daughter or his wife this time?"

"Wife."

"Send them both back. Let him bleed."

There was no hesitation. No empathy. No humanity in his voice. He had become everything his father once was — and worse. Colder. Sharper. Untouchable.

Luca looked down. "Gab, the men are scared of you."

"They should be."

His cousin, Riccardo, strolled in, the ghost of a smirk playing on his lips as he tossed a bloodied tie onto the table.

"He wouldn't talk," Riccardo said, voice casual, almost bored. "So I made sure he never would."

Gabriele's gaze dropped to the crimson-stained silk — a quiet, gleaming testament to yet another secret silenced. He didn't flinch. Didn't frown. Just a slow, deliberate nod.

"Good," he murmured, reaching for his glass of whiskey. "Clean it up before dinner. I don't want blood on the floor when Mother walks in."

His tone was calm, but the edge beneath it was cold — the kind that made even Riccardo's grin falter for a second.

The chandelier threw fractured light across the dining room, scattering gold over polished wood and the dark smear of the carpet. The smell of whiskey and old money hung in the air, undercut by the metallic tang that clung to the edges of the room — honest, unavoidable.

Just then Isabella Colombo entered — tall, elegant, and tired. The years had lined her face in small, precise places, but they hadn't stolen the way she occupied a room. Her shoulders were squared as if habit had taught her to hold herself against storms; her eyes, however, were different now — darker, harder, as if carved by choices she'd long since stopped arguing with. She looked at Gabriele not with surprise but with the steady resignation of someone who'd finally learned to live with a monster in the house.

"Enough," she said, voice low and level. "No more blood today."

Gabriele turned a slow circuit of the glass in his hand, watching the whiskey breathe. "Why?" he drawled, amused. "The carpet's red anyway." The words were casual, but there was a blade behind the smile.

Isabella crossed the room like a ship changing course — deliberate, unhurried — her heels counting the beats between them. She stood between the men and the doorway, hands folded in the quiet way of women who'd spent years keeping storms from spilling into the family rooms. 

"Gabriele. We need to talk." Her voice had steel beneath the softness.

He arched an eyebrow. "About?"

"Marriage."

The syllable landed like a thrown coin. For a second the talking stopped: Luca, who'd been hovering in the shadows of the doorway, dissolved into the hallway; Riccardo muttered about gun orders and followed, the scrape of his footsteps a private retreat. They all knew better than to test the line between family matters and family business.

Isabella planted herself in front of him. "You're thirty-four. The world fears you, but there's no heir. No family." There was no pleading in it — only a ledger of necessities. The house wanted a future, not another story of violence.

Gabriele exhaled through his nose, slow and almost bored. "I am the family." The claim was not defensive; it was a fact he'd spent a lifetime cultivating.

"You know what I mean." isabella's gaze didn't waver. "It needs a future. A son."

For the first time his smile thinned. Something dark flickered in those devilish eyes, a quick animal thing that could not be softened by titles or bloodlines. "I'm not the kind of man who makes love, Madre. I fuck. I destroy. I ruin."

The confession hung in the air, crude and honest. Isabella did not flinch. "I didn't ask you to fall in love. I asked you to marry. For the Colombo legacy."

He studied her — the fine lines at her mouth, the small tremor he almost missed in her fingers — for a long moment, as though weighing whether any part of her plea was sentimental and could be discarded. Then he shrugged, the motion casual enough to look like indifference. "Choose someone, then. I don't care what she looks like. What she does. As long as her womb works, and she can keep her mouth shut."

"Gabriele—" Isabella began, but she stopped herself. The name carried too much history to be wasted on an argument that had been rehearsed and discarded on both sides a thousand times.

"Choose a woman who won't cry when she sees blood on my hands. Or my bed. And make sure she knows she's not marrying a man — she's marrying a monster." He set the glass down with a soft click and leaned back, as if the conversation were entertainment rather than consequence.

For a heartbeat Isabella's composure faltered; grief blossomed at the corner of her eyes, quick and controlled. She swallowed it like medicine. "You were not always like this."

"No." He said it softly, almost fondly — the memory of a different life like a photograph he kept in a drawer. "Once, I was a boy who loved plants. Who cried when a butterfly died. Now look at me." He spread his arms as if to show the scale of the change. "This is what your love turned me into."

The words struck her like a hand. She flinched, not because she disagreed but because she heard the truth of a thousand small failures in them. She rose, the movement precise. "I'll choose someone strong. Beautiful. perfect. Someone who will survive you."

Gabriele's smirk was slow and satisfied. "Good. Let's see if such a woman even exists." Behind the bravado there was a challenge, an almost hungry curiosity: to watch his mother hunt for a successor, to see whether the world could produce a match for the violence he'd become. Outside, in the marble halls, the house settled; in the room, the family's future was being negotiated like any other commodity — assessed, priced, and traded

Midnight in Palermo,

The Colombo estate shimmered under a cold moon, every cornice and balustrade silvered into a stage. What by day was a fortress of marble and manners had, by night, become a den: velvet and smoke, laughter and knives hidden behind smiles. From deep below, the bass rolled up through the floors like an animal — slow, hungry — and the underground lounge answered with a hurricane of heat, perfume, and cheap whiskey. Here shadows moved like people and people moved like shadows; morals were a currency long spent.

Velvet curtains parted as if in salute when Gabriele Colombo entered. He filled the doorway: tall, in a black suit cut to a predator's silhouette, the silk of his shirt open at the throat to reveal the edge of a crucifix tattoo that mocked any hope of redemption. His jaw was rough with a day's stubble; his eyes held the flat, dull glitter of someone who had traded mercy for advantage. The crowd felt the shift — a soft hush, the brief animal stillness before a strike. The bass picked back up, but it was a background heartbeat now; none of the music's bravado dared interrupt him.

Women clustered toward him in practiced waves — models with wilted mascara, actresses who kept their smiles lubricated by obligation, wives of men who owed Colombo their fortunes and their silence. They drifted like moths, but he was not warmth. He moved through the room the way a storm moves through a city: taking, flattening, leaving ruin disguised as order.

He inspected his domain with a sovereign's indifference. A slight nod for the bartender who kept his bottle chilled; a dismissive glance toward lieutenants who kissed his ring with teeth showing. He flicked cigar ash onto the marble as if to remind the room that even the floor belonged to him. In the far corner, his private booth waited like a throne: lush red velvet, low lights, black leather and crystal ashtrays scattered like talismans. It smelled of old sex and newer secrets.

Allegra, his latest mistress sat there as if she'd always been there to complete the picture: a trained commodity. A sultry brunette with cheekbones sharp enough to cut and a serpent tattoo that coiled around her thigh like a promise and a threat. Her eyes were polished to the look of one who had learned to please without protest. She was beautiful and practiced and, to him, utterly replaceable.

He slid into the booth with economy — legs splayed, one arm looping possessively around her waist as if she were a leash. She leaned forward, fingers tracing the line of his chest, voice silk and rehearsed. "You're late," she purred.

He didn't meet her gaze. He drew smoke from his cigar, let it bloom, then blew it straight into her face — a small, deliberate act of humiliation. "You speak only when I ask you to," he said, voice low and precise.

Her smile trembled and held. "Yes, Don Colombo." The title was habit; it tasted of fear.

He gripped her jaw with a hand that suggested both ownership and impatience, the pressure exact and without cruelty's theatrics. "Don't call me that when you're naked in my bed," he snapped. "You're not one of my soldiers. You're a hole I sleep in to forget the war."

Her breath hitched. Shame kissed her cheeks. He leaned in so his words were meant only for her. "You're not mine. You're a placeholder. A filthy little distraction until I find something more useful to fuck." Then, as if she were a garment, he shoved her off his lap.

She landed beside him, hands instinctively flattening at her sides. No tears. The rules left no room for them. She had heard — everyone had heard — the stories about the girl who'd tried to slap him once and vanished. The lesson was the same every time: survival required silence and good bookkeeping.

"Hungry?" he asked without looking.

She nodded. He snapped his fingers; a waiter materialized like an obedient shadow. "Feed her. She looks thin. I don't like bones in my bed. I'm not fucking a skeleton." Laughter followed from the men at the table — brittle, cruel — and the sound tasted of complicity.

Around them, the club devoured itself: bodies tangled on leather couches, small white lines of powder on glass, whispered deals punctuated by the clink of ice. Sweat and perfume braided into a tangible fog. But the spectacle left him untouched. Nothing in that room could stake a claim on him or dent the hard lacquer that protected whatever, if anything, remained of his soul.

His gaze slid to the empty chair across from him — a seat habitually left vacant like a shrine for a future he scorned but could not ignore. His future wife, the child-bearer the family demanded. He pictured the woman Isabella might bring: dull-eyed, obedient, bred for endurance. He pictured her two steps behind, lips sealed, womb functioning like a well-oiled ledger entry.

He scoffed under his breath. Love had been a lesson taught to him in bruises. He had watched it die in his mother's face, strangled beneath his father's hands. He had buried the softness that once let him cry at a butterfly's death along with the boy who, at fourteen, pulled a trigger and never looked back.

Now, the calculus of his life left no space for tenderness. What mattered was power, lineage, control. "When she comes," he murmured to nobody, "she better know what kingdom she's stepping into."

He lifted his glass and took a measured sip. Around him the night continued its orgy of excess. To most it was everything. To Gabriele, it was merely light and noise that might, from time to time, warm his skin before he turned it to ash. He did not need a wife. He needed a vessel. And if she ever pretended to be anything other than that — he would break her, methodically, the same way he had broken everything else that had posed a threat to the order he had bled to build.