DAMIEN

The summer sun was blazing the day his life turned to ash. He had been nine years old, kicking a ball across the sprawling garden of their estate, his laughter ringing out as his father leaned against the tall iron gates, talking in hushed tones with a visitor. The visitor's face was a blur, but the flash of silver that caught the sunlight was etched into his memory forever. A blade.

He'd dropped the ball then, frozen, watching as the knife drove into his father's side. Panic had gripped him, but he couldn't move. Couldn't scream. Not even when the visitor—so calm, so deliberate—stepped over his father's crumpled body, pulled a sealed envelope from his jacket, and tossed it onto the bloodstained grass.

It wasn't until his mother's screams pierced the air that he realized the visitor was gone. That letter had destroyed them. Inside were the details of his father's so-called betrayal—evidence of debts owed, secrets exposed, all tied back to the Morano crime family.

The Moranos were notorious, their name synonymous with power and ruthlessness. They had tentacles everywhere, and their reach was long. His father had thought he was above their games, but he was wrong.

It wasn't long before the whispers started: his father was a traitor, their family disgraced. He and his mother lost everything. What once had been a life of privilege became a nightmare of pitying stares, hushed gossip, and locked doors.

They buried his father in a plot too small, in a cemetery too modest for a man who had once commanded entire rooms with his presence. The service had been quick, quiet, and lonely—no friends, no colleagues, only him and his mother, dressed in black that had already begun to fray at the edges.

Even at nine, he could feel the weight of the betrayal. The pitying glances from the priest, the whispers from the few onlookers bold enough to attend. His father had died a disgraced man.

It wasn't until weeks later, when the lawyers arrived at their crumbling apartment, that he understood just how deep the betrayal ran. His father's empire had been carved up and swallowed whole by the Moranos. The debt was staggering, the evidence irrefutable.

But his mother refused to believe it. "Your father was loyal to the end," she would whisper late at night, when she thought he was asleep. "This was their doing. All of it."

It was then, sitting on the cold floor of their kitchen, that he made his vow. His father's name would be restored. The Moranos would pay. No matter how long it took, no matter the cost.

Love and trust were nothing but weaknesses. Strength came from power, and power came from vengeance. He would bury the Moranos the same way they had buried his father's reputation.

As the years passed, the boy grew into a man, his resolve hardening with every closed door, every pitying stare, every memory of what they had lost. His mother had clung to hope, a faint belief that someone would come forward to clear his father's name. But he had stopped believing in hope long ago.

The world wasn't fair. Justice didn't come to those who waited—it was taken by those ruthless enough to seize it. He taught himself to be ruthless.

His days were spent studying—law, finance, strategy. Nights were consumed by boxing gyms and underground fighting rings, where he learned how to wield his fists as well as he wielded his mind.

He didn't care about wealth for its own sake, but power—that was something different. Power meant control, and control meant the ability to destroy the people who had destroyed him.

By twenty-three, he had built an empire in the shadows. It started small—investments in dying businesses, partnerships with desperate men—but his instincts were sharp, and his methods were unforgiving.

It wasn't long before his name, spoken in hushed tones, began to carry weight in the right circles. He became a man people feared to cross, the kind of man who could ruin reputations with a phone call.

And yet, the hollow ache of revenge gnawed at him. None of it mattered until he could strike at the Moranos. When he learned of the arranged marriage proposal, it felt almost poetic. The daughter of the Morano family, delivered to him on a silver platter.

The pawn in his game.

She would be the key to their downfall.

But as he stared at the photograph of her—a woman with striking eyes and a defiant tilt to her chin—something twisted in his chest.

He ignored it. Sympathy, guilt, attraction—whatever it was, he would kill it before it grew.

He wasn't the boy mourning his father anymore. He was the villain now.

And villains didn't falter.

He is Damien Black, the man who would reign terror.