But what they didn't say, what no one dared to acknowledge, was that gentleness like his was a weapon, a precision-cut blade honed through agony so absolute it had rewritten the very fabric of who he was.
Valentino did not learn tenderness through love. No, he learned it through pain. Through the slow and merciless dismantling of everything he once was, until all that remained was a man sculpted from ruin and taught to wield his own destruction with grace. He was not born to be ruthless; he was engineered to be.
But his softness was also not weakness, rather a calculated restraint; an art perfected by a man who knew what it was to be shattered and yet refused to bleed.
His fingers, so deceptively gentle when they traced against my skin, had once clenched so tightly into fists they had split open from the force. His voice, so smooth, so warm, had once been raw from screaming, from orders spat through gritted teeth, from begging a God who never listened. His kindness did not stem from mercy. It came from knowing how it felt to be stripped of it, to be beaten into something lesser, something unrecognizable, and to still rise.
Each whispered reassurance, every slow, careful touch, was a ghost of the violence he had endured. It was a language of power disguised as tenderness, a way to remind the world that he could break them if he wanted to but chose not to.
I had always known that Valentino ascended to power at the fragile age of eighteen, stepping into his father's blood-soaked throne with little choice but to adapt, or be consumed. The death of the Rossi patriarch had been both tragic and unexpected, a violent punctuation mark at the end of an era.
