The Capo's Devotion: Own by the Don

The mob’s shouts had faded into memory now, but their scars still lived in Alexei’s bones. Sometimes he still felt fire near his skin, as if the torch had touched him. But when he opened his eyes, it was never fire—it was a curtains and marble floorsLucien’s mansion.He had escaped death, but not danger.The first morning, Alexei rose to the smell of food. The tray on his table overflowed—eggs, fruit, bread, meat. Too much. His body still thought like a beggar’s. He stuffed half into his mouth, hid the rest under the bed. Old habits clung like scars.Later, walking the hall, he saw how the others looked at him. Lucien’s men—hard faces, inked arms, guns never far from their reach. Their smirks told him what they thought: the boy was too soft and unworthy, lucky. Only alive because Lucien had said so.But no one touched him. Not when Lucien had already said, He’s mine.The house itself was a kingdom. Long corridors, cold art on the walls, the silence of money and power. Every door Alex

The Lessons of the UnderworldThe next morning, the training Alexei's journey to the unknown begins.Alexei woke to the sound of a whip in the floor outside his room. He stumbled out, hair messy, still half-asleep, to find Lucien waiting in the hall, dressed in black, a sweet smile tugging his lips.“Good,” Lucien appreciated. “You move when you’re summoned. That’s step one.”Alexei rubbed his eyes. “Step one for what?”Lucien laughed. “For survival, Alexei.The yard behind the mansion had been transformed into a training ground. Targets stood in a line, painted silhouettes of men. On one side: climbing ropes, locked doors, walls too high for any ordinary boy. On the other: weapons glimmered in the light of morning sun.Lucien’s men stood watching, silent and curious. But none dared laugh. They knew better.Alexei swallowed hard. He was barefoot, his chest thin in his shirt Lucien had given him. He felt smaller than ever under their stares.Lucien handed him another knife. “Rule one,”

The Stone HeartFrom the night he killed Varmeer, Alexei felt something in him calcify. He woke the next morning not as the starving boy who once snatched bread crusts from garbage bins, but as someone new.A man.At least that was what Lucien wanted him to believe.When he looked in the mirror, he still saw the hollow cheeks of an orphan, the skin stretched over bones, the eyes that once begged strangers for coins. But in those eyes something else had taken a root.The memory of Varmeer choking on his own blood was etched into him like a scar. Instead of softening with horror, it hardened him. His hands no longer shook when he held the pistol. His steps no longer faltered in darkened corridors.And Lucien noticed it.Lucien wasted no time. The very next day, Alexei was sent on an errands—following rival gang members, planting listening devices, bribing clerks in government offices with stolen envelopes of cash. The work was dangerous, but Alexei carried it out with an expect mind.“I

The Capo’s CalculusLucien watched Brussels like a chessboard. From his mansion high above the river, the city’s lights were nothing more than moving pieces — ministers in black cabs, judges in late-night diners, businessmen slipping through private doors. He watched them not with the indulgence of a man satisfied, but with the patient hunger of someone risk and reward with each breath.Power, he had learned early, was never given. It was taken, folded like a blade into one’s palm, and kept warm by fear. The Delacroix line had taught him that lesson with blood and bone; his father had carved that rule upon his heart before the city buried him. Lucien’s fingers still remembered the weight of a blade the way other men remembered a childhood lullaby.That was why he had brought Alexei into his world. Not mercy. Not pity but investment.He had watched the boy for months — first as a stray, then as a scavenger, then as a survivor who had stared at death and found something like composure.

The Burden of SecretsDays bled into nights, and nights into days. For Alexei, time no longer marched in clean hours—it dragged like a chain in the stone. His body was sharper now and his instincts keener. On missions, he struck with precision, his knife and pistol leaving trails of silence behind him. To Lucien’s men, Alexei was a ghost in flesh. To the city, he was nothing but whispers in alleys, rumors of a boy too ruthless, to be real.But in the quiet corners of the mansion, when the missions were done, the whispers faded, and his uncle’s name lit up his hidden phone, Alexei felt like two men.One was Lucien’s blade, honed and lethal. The other was the boy from Russia, hungry and broken, who wanted to be held by family.And that boy did not know how to answer the questions Uncle Arjun Singh kept asking.“Alexei, how do you live now? Do you work? Do you study?”Alexei would press the phone to his ear, with a heart pounding, and reply in half-truths. “I… work. It’s not like what yo