xOcRiMsOn
"The Price of Power"
Adriano Knight was a name whispered with both reverence and dread. The head of the Knight family empire, he had built his kingdom not on love or loyalty, but on fear, silence, and strategy. Every decision he made served one purpose: legacy. And in his world, legacy often came at the price of blood-and heart.
His daughter, Alvara, was his only softness, though he never showed it. She was raised in silk sheets but slept under shadows. She danced through golden halls with a silent ache behind her eyes, the kind only a caged bird understands. She had her mother's fire and her father's eyes-haunted, sharp, unspoken.
When Adriano told her she was to marry Lucifer De Angelis, heir to a rival family with blood-stained hands and a smile like a wolf, he didn't ask. He simply said:
"This is how we survive."
Alvara didn't cry. She didn't scream. She just stared. A silence that chilled even him.
But in the privacy of her room, behind locked doors and guarded walls, she clung to memory like breath. The laughter of her childhood. Her mother's lullabies. The way her father used to lift her up on his shoulders, before the weight of the world bent his back and turned his heart to ice. She remembered the man he used to be-before the mafia, before the blood, before he traded tenderness for control.
These memories weren't weakness. They were her strength.
Alvara knew what Lucifer represented. Power. Safety. An alliance forged not in love, but in desperation. And yet, she also knew something her father had forgotten in his war for survival:
Power fades. Fear dies. But memories-memories stay.
And in the dark, when vows are made and lives are bound in silence, it is memory that whispers who we truly are. She would play the game. Wear the dress. Walk the aisle. But Alvara Knight would never forget. And she would never forgive.
Because even in a world of kings, killers, and devils in suits-
a daughter's heart remembers everything.