At twenty-two, Alessandro De Rossi wears his bloodline like a bespoke suit that's tailored, precise and stitched with centuries of quiet violence.
He is the second-born son of Italy’s most feared crime dynasty, but the world doesn’t know that behind the polished throne of Giancarlo, it is Alessandro who’s being sculpted in silence, shaped in smoke, carved into legacy. The true heir sharpened not in ceremony but in the shadows.
He walks like he owns the hush between heartbeats. Like silence bends to him. Every movement is measured, laced with the kind of restraint that only men forged in fire can master. He speaks sparingly and when he does, his words are like blades dipped in silk. Controlled. Precise. Unflinching.
Alessandro is a paradox full of marble and murmur. He wears charm like a sheath, concealing the arsenal beneath. Eyes that never just look but calculate. A smile that doesn’t warm, only warns. He’s a man raised on whispered secrets and inherited sins. Born to lead but never taught to love. He has known loyalty like a blade to the throat that's sharp, exacting, and always conditional.
The world calls him privileged.
But privilege, to Alessandro, tastes like prison wine.
He has been raised to be a weapon that's sleek, merciless and beautifully designed but beneath the tailored suits and unshakeable calm, lies a boy who never got to be one. A boy who wanted to be soft but was told softness was a liability. Who wanted to feel but was told feelings were threats. So he built his skin into steel and called it survival.
Control is his god. Precision, his prayer.
Until her.
Riva arrived like a storm dressed in sun. She was wild, unpredictable and hauntingly composed. She didn’t just challenge him, she undid him, the him that he'd buried five feet under somewhere in the closed doors of his own heart. She became the first thing in his life that wasn’t planned, wasn’t inherited, wasn’t strategic and the first thing that feels like something tender and warm.
And when she disappeared, she left not silence but a howl inside him like a rupture in his heart that was seasoned into steel.
He told himself it’s betrayal that drives him. That it’s about revenge. About answers for being left behind and power.
But the truth?
It was a heartbreak.
Because Alessandro De Rossi didn't know how to grieve what he never learned to name and in losing her, he lost the only mirror that ever showed him who he might have been—if someone had ever let him be human.
Now, he moves not like a man in control but like one unraveling beautifully, thread by golden thread.
He doesn’t know if he’s chasing her because she ruined him or because without her, he no longer remembers who he is beneath the ruin.
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RIVA SINGH DEORA
At twenty-nine, Riva Singh Deora is not just royalty, she’s a refined ruin.
The last flame of a fallen throne, the dethroned princess of Prayagadh, she wears her grace like armor and her past like a whisper no one dares to speak aloud. A woman born in palaces and raised in the wreckage, Riva is elegance honed into a weapon. A rose with thorns forged in fire.
In public, she is all silk and serenity. She's charismatic and courteous, the perfect portrait of cultivated nobility. A philanthropist, a darling of the tabloids, beloved for her quiet strength and untouchable poise but beneath that polished facade, Riva burns with purpose. Restless, ruthless in calculation, a strategist cloaked in softness. She is not the woman she seems. She is the storm behind the still lake.
Raised in drawing rooms and warzones of diplomacy, she learned early how easily power lies and how deeply it corrupts. She doesn’t trust it. She learned to wield it instead. With a smile, in silence, with precision. Her mind is a chessboard of a thousand moves, her heart a locked vault. She moves through the elite with the ease of royalty and the silence of a shadow. Always observed. Rarely seen.
A woman made of contrasts. Tea-stained traditions and red-lipped rebellion. Composed yet combustible. Lonely but never alone. The kind of woman who has already burned her escape plan into the blueprints of any room she enters and isn’t afraid to light the match.
Riva’s life has always been choreographed by legacy and scarred by loss. The fall of her family wasn’t just an event, it was the beginning of her rebirth. Betrayal didn’t break her. It shaped her. Molded her into something sharp enough to survive and soft enough to still feel but only in secret.
She never meant to fall in love. Certainly not with him.
Alessandro De Rossi was a complication. A boy in a man’s suit. Too young, too dangerous and too close. A flame she wasn’t supposed to touch. But he saw her not as a crown or a pawn and definitely not as a legacy to be leveraged but as a woman. And that changed everything.
Falling for him was never the plan.
Leaving him was necessary but it tore through her like a blade laced in memory.
Now, as the past barrels toward its reckoning, Riva stands on a precipice of her own design. She has no idea if she can complete her revenge without burying the only man who ever made her feel seen or if loving him means losing herself in the fire she lit long ago.
For her, in this war of empires, love was never the endgame but it might just be the sacrifice.
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