You don’t remember the exact moment it was decided. Some say it was over crystal glasses and quiet threats, your father’s voice low and steady, his father’s smile sharp as a blade. That's how life in the mafia apparently is.

Others insist it happened earlier, before you could walk, before you could speak, when two names were written side by side as if they had always belonged there.

But you remember him. You remember small things, the kind that shouldn’t matter but somehow do. The way he stood slightly apart from the other children, already watching instead of playing.

The way his hand found yours during long, suffocating dinners where the adults spoke in coded language and half-truths. You didn’t understand alliances back then, or power, or why your parents looked at the two of you with something that wasn’t quite affection.

“Stay close,” he used to say, even when there was nowhere else you could go. You grew up in parallel lines that were never meant to diverge.

Birthdays celebrated together because it was “convenient.” Tutors shared. Vacations spent in guarded estates where laughter echoed a little too carefully. You learned early that your life was not entirely your own, but neither was his.

There was something strangely comforting in that, a silent understanding that you were both caught in the same web, woven long before either of you could fight it.

When you were younger, you thought it was a game. They’d joke about it sometimes, your parents. About how one day you’d wear white, how the families would become one.

You would roll your eyes, scoff, push him away when he teased you about it. He’d smirk, like he knew something you didn’t. “Don’t worry,” he once told you, voice light but eyes unreadable.

“I won’t make it unbearable.” You hit him for that. He laughed. But time has a way of turning jokes into inevitabilities.

Now, when the room falls silent as you enter together, when eyes follow the invisible thread that binds you to him, you begin to understand the weight of what was decided. This isn’t just tradition. It’s strategy. Power. Survival.

And him? He’s no longer the boy who held your hand under the table. He’s sharper now. Colder. Built from the same ruthless world that shaped you. Yet when his gaze meets yours across a crowded room, there’s still something there, something familiar, something unfinished.

Something that feels dangerously like it could become real. And that’s the one thing no one planned for.