"Blood remembers what the heart is forced to forget."
Lorenzo learned early that monsters never hid under the bed.
They wore pressed suits, smelled of expensive cologne, and kissed your cheeks while their men hid knives in their coats. They spoke softly, smiling with teeth too white, voices too calm for the things they ordered with a wave of their hand.
It was raining the night they came for his father. A storm that rolled over Milan like a living thing, thunder shaking the tall windows of the Moretti estate, lightning illuminating the marble floors and chandeliers like brief snapshots of a memory he could never forget.
He was eight. Barefoot, in soft cotton pajamas with a small rip on the sleeve, clutching the stuffed rabbit his mother had sewn for him. The scent of her perfume-jasmine and rain-still clinging to his hair from the goodnight kiss she gave him moments before the house erupted in shouting.
They were coming up the stairs.
Men with guns, black coats dripping water onto the marble, shouting about debts, about power, about how it was time for his father to pay for the lives he had taken. His mother pulled him close, pressing him against the wall behind her, her body a shield that smelled of warmth, of the lavender soap she always used.
"Don't move, tesoro," she whispered, her dark blue eyes-his eyes-meeting his with a calm that did not match the fear in her grip.
The door burst open. The thunder cracked. A man raised his gun.
His mother stepped forward.
The sound of the gunshot was louder than anything he had ever heard. It echoed in the hallway, silencing the world. Her body jerked once, warmth splattering across his face, and for a moment she was still standing, looking down at him with those soft, storm-colored eyes.
Then she fell.
She fell into his arms, small hands clutching at his pajamas, pulling him close even as the warmth poured from her and pooled around them, soaking into the marble, into his skin. Her breath was ragged, wet, her lips moving without sound as he pressed his small hands against her chest, trying to stop the bleeding.
"Stay," he whispered, his voice breaking, tears mixing with the blood on his cheeks. "Please, Mama, stay."
Her hand touched his face, trembling, leaving a streak of red across his skin.
"My brave boy," she managed to say, her voice softer than the rain.
Then she was gone. They said it was a miracle he survived that night.
The men fled when his father's guards finally arrived, guns blazing down the hallways, shouting in Italian that the rivals would pay for this in blood. But the only thing Lorenzo remembered was the cold weight of his mother in his arms, the softness of her hair tangled around his fingers as he screamed for her to wake up.
He remembered the way his father stood there in the aftermath, rain soaking the shoulders of his black coat as he stared at her body, his dark brown eyes like polished obsidian-cold, hard, unblinking.
He did not weep. He did not fall to his knees.
He simply turned to the boy covered in blood and whispered, "Get up."
From that day, the house grew silent.
All the music she played on the old piano in the sitting room stopped. The smell of jasmine disappeared, replaced by the sharp, sterile scent of cigars and whiskey. The laughter that once filled the halls was replaced by the clicking of dress shoes on marble, the quiet shuffle of men carrying guns, and the soft, precise orders his father gave with a glance.
His father never spoke of her again.
If Lorenzo cried at night, he did so quietly, burying his face into the pillow that still smelled faintly of her hair, biting down on the fabric to keep from making a sound.
His father taught him that the world was not kind to the weak.
He taught him how to shoot before he taught him how to tie a tie, how to stand still in the cold until his hands stopped shaking, how to look a man in the eyes as he begged for mercy before pulling the trigger.
"Do you know why she died?" his father asked him once, as they stood on the balcony overlooking Milan, the boy's hands still trembling around the small silver pistol he had just fired for the first time.
Lorenzo looked up, the cold wind biting at his cheeks, his dark blue eyes searching the sharp lines of the man beside him.
"Because she was weak," his father said, dark brown eyes flickering as he turned away. "Because she loved too much."
Lorenzo swore he would never be weak.
At ten, he learned how to dismantle a gun blindfolded. At twelve, he was fluent in the language of numbers, learning how to clean blood from ledgers as easily as he learned to clean it from his hands. At fourteen, he stood silently beside his father as a man was shot in the warehouse for betrayal, the warm splatter on his shoes reminding him of another night, another storm, another pool of red.
His father would look at him with those dark, unreadable eyes, nodding once in approval when Lorenzo did not flinch.
"Good," he would say. "Never look away."
Yet sometimes, when the world was quiet, when the city was asleep and the moonlight fell across the sheets in his room, Lorenzo would catch his reflection in the mirror. The same dark blue eyes that once glowed with innocence, with softness, with the unshakable belief that a mother's love was enough to keep the darkness away.
His father's darkness lived inside him now, shaping him, sharpening him. But her eyes remained, reminding him of who he once was, who he could never be again.
At seventeen, he took his first life.
A man who had stolen from the family, who had tried to sell information to the rivals that once stained their floors with her blood. Lorenzo held the gun steady, looking into the man's eyes as he begged, sobbing, swearing he would do anything, promising he had a family, a daughter.
His finger did not hesitate. The gunshot echoed, and for a brief, shattering second, he saw her eyes again.
But he did not flinch. He did not look away.
By twenty, Lorenzo Moretti was the man his father had raised him to be.
Cold. Precise. Unshakable. A name spoken in fear across Milan and beyond, the dark blue-eyed heir who cleaned the streets with quiet efficiency, who spoke softly but carried death in his wake.
When his father died-alone, slumped over a whiskey glass in his office, the cigar burning to ash between his fingers-Lorenzo stood over the body in silence.
The men in the house watched, waiting for him to break, waiting for something, anything, to crack the stillness on his face.
But he did not mourn.
He simply turned to them, nodded once, and took his place.
Five years later, the world feared Lorenzo Moretti, the man with the mother's eyes and the father's ruthlessness, the man who believed softness was weakness, that love was a lie that got you killed.
And yet-
Standing in that crumbling house in Lausanne, looking into a pair of quiet violet eyes, watching the way she held that chipped mug like it was the last piece of herself she could keep safe, something shifted in him.
For the first time in a long time, he felt that crack in the cold, a whisper of a memory of warmth, of jasmine, of rain.
Of what it felt like to be a boy holding his mother's hand, believing for a moment that love could protect you from the darkness.
He turned away before she could see it, before she could see that he was still human enough to remember.