Of Blood and Loyalty

Prologue

Xanders' pov:

I remember the day Alesandra was born as if it had happened just yesterday. That tiny, delicate baby girl, barely the size of my forearm, cradled in my mother's arms. As she gazed down at her, something indescribable seemed to fill the room, like light filtering through stained glass, soft and warm. We all stood there, staring at her in awe. She was beautiful-of course, she was-but it was more than that. There was something unexplainable about her, even then. It was as if she carried with her a kind of magic, a gift, something none of us could quite define. For the first time, we felt like a family blessed beyond words. At that moment, I thought we must be one of the luckiest people in all of Italy.

Growing up as the sons of Lucas Leonardo Moretti-Rossi was no ordinary feat as we were introduced into the underworld business at an early age and were taught to balance both lives. My father was a titan, a man whose influence stretched across the country. Our family lived in the shadow of both of the Empires, that our grandfather Mr Giovanni Moretti-Rossi built and was raised to greater height by our father. We were raised in wealth and privilege. People respected us and maybe even feared us. But after Allesandea came into our world, our influence in both worlds skyrocketed, and people began to look at us differently. What was once admiration quickly turned to jealousy, and I could sense the shift in our Friends, neighbors, our business partners, and even some little gangs who couldn't hide their envy and hatred. Whispers began to spread like wildfire that Amy had somehow brought us more fortune and was our good luck charm, saying that our family's growing success was tied to her in ways they didn't understand, fathom and tolerate-and for some reason, that angered them.

From the start, my brothers, cousins, parents, and our extended family members, and I adored Allessandra like she was a precious gem. She was our little miracle, our one and only sister. We couldn't help but protect her fiercely, to love her with everything in us. But the devotion we gave to her, the shield of love, only served to fuel others' resentment. I observed it in the way our friends would talk about her and talk to her with so much hatred when they thought no one was watching them, and I noticed the jealousy in the eyes of the girls we dated. They didn't understand that Amy's sweetness, her pure heart, mind, and soul is like a gravitational force and a magnet that captivates and pulls people towards her. She pulled us in without even trying, filling a place we didn't know had been empty until she was there.

As Allesandra grew, it became clear she was different in every way. Her beauty blossomed, and so did her intelligence. She had a kind of focus, a spark, that made her exceptional. At the age of five, she was already in the third grade. She was brilliant,creative, resourceful, and had a knack for technology that I, a grown man, could barely grasp without being taught.

I'd sometimes catch her with the family computer, learning and experimenting with new skills she had learnt, and her eyes shone bright with determination and curiosity. My parents were proud, but I saw the worry in their faces, too. My dad knew the world would never see her the way we did; he knew that the strength and pure aura she carried could just as easily make her a target.

I'll never forget one particular evening when my father came home, looking weary and broken in a way I'd never seen. His company had been attacked by a hacker who was hired by our business rival to destroy and steal everything he'd built. I didn't know the details then, but I knew enough to see that my father was struggling, powerless to protect what he loved.
But Allesandra, who was barely seven years at the time, wasn't willing to stand by and do nothing. So, She went to our grandmother, Valentina, and quietly asked what was wrong. The next thing I knew was that she had slipped into our father's study, his laptop opened before her, her tiny fingers moving across the keys. And somehow, she was actually able to do it-she solved a crisis none of us knew how to face at that very moment, restoring my father's accounts and outwitting the hacker who had tried his possible best to ruin us.

We were all in awe of her, but with that awe came a sickening realization: the more extraordinary she became, the more danger she was being put in. People had already started seeing Allesandra as the heart of our family and our weakness, not knowing she was the embodiment of our strength, and those who envied us now saw her as a threat. It wasn't long before our father's enemies began to devise malicious plans, convinced that hurting her would be the final blow that would render our family helpless and to our knees.

And on one eventful day, they had finally struck. They took her from us during our weakend state, thinking they'd been finally successful by capturing our weakness, and that they'd finally broken and destroyed the Moretti-Rossi family at last, but little did they know that wasn't the case at all, if anything that day brought us closer and stronger as a family and forever changed our lives. They thought that with our sister, who is our Achilles' heel, the glue that held us together, and that without her, we wouldn't be able to function .

But they made a grave mistake of not understanding and underestimating who Amy is, or the strength that flows through her veins afterall she is the only daughter and the youngest member of one of the most feared and respected family in the whole of italy and the entire world. They didn't know she wasn't no ordinary girl. And if they thought we would ever let her go without retaliating and them facing the repercussions, then they were sorely mistaken.

This was only the beginning of her journey. And if there's one thing I know and understand now, while looking back, is that no matter what it may cost and whatever mean we would use, we would go to the ends of the earth and go through hell and back to always protect her.