Opening Scene Summary:

Present day. A powerful mafia family welcomes its heir.

Everyone's celebrating—except the grandfather, who goes pale when the baby doesn’t cry.

A flash of understanding crosses his face. The curse lives on.

That’s when we fade into a memory—maybe a gritty, rain-soaked night in the 1950s where the curse was born.

Prologue — The Curse

1956, Brooklyn, New York.

Rain fell like judgment on the cracked pavement outside the Saint Elmo Social Club. Inside, the air reeked of cigar smoke, cheap bourbon, and blood. Don Salvatore De Luca wiped his knife on a silk handkerchief, the same one he'd used to propose to his wife. A cruel irony.

The man on the floor was already dead. His eyes stared at nothing, his chest still. His name was Elias Moreau—a quiet bookseller, no enemy of the family. But he'd married the wrong woman.

“She’s a witch,” Salvatore muttered, throwing the bloodied cloth into the fireplace. “She knew what he was. She knew what I’d do.”

He turned to his soldiers, still standing by, unsure. “Burn the shop. Burn the books. Send a message.”

But no fire could erase what came next.

That night, as the last of the flames devoured Elias Moreau’s little bookshop on 6th Street, his widow stepped into the alley behind it. The shadows seemed to part for her, wrapping her in smoke and sorrow. Her voice was calm. Too calm.

“You took my husband’s life, Don De Luca,” she said, speaking not to the men who watched her, but to the night itself. “Now I take your legacy.”

She cut her palm, drew a symbol on the brick wall, and whispered words older than God.

> “Every firstborn son of your bloodline… will be born in silence.

No voice. No cry.

And only love’s true death can lift it.

Willingly given. Never stolen.

If you try to take it by force—

The curse grows stronger.”

The flames behind her didn’t warm her. They listened.

---

Two years later, Don Salvatore held his newborn son in his arms. The room waited for the baby to cry. None came.

He didn’t speak of the curse—not then. Not even when the boy grew into a man with empty words on his lips.

He only whispered one thing to himself, over and over again:

> “She was telling the truth.”

He turns to one of his men “Find the witch and burn her alive. I want her dead tonight.”

Don Salvatore never believed in curses—until his firstborn son came into the world with silent lungs and haunted eyes.

Doctors called it congenital mutism. Specialists flew in from Rome, London, even Cairo. They left with fat checks and no answers.

But Salvatore knew.

He remembered the woman in the alley.

He remembered the blood. The words.

And now, silence lived inside his son like a ghost.

At first, he searched for a cure in reason—in medicine, in money. But when science failed him, he turned to darker roads.

By the time his son turned 15, Salvatore had become obsessed.

He remembered the curse clearly:

> “…Only love’s true death can lift it.

Willingly given. Never stolen.”

> “…Only love’s true death can lift it.

Willingly given. Never stolen.”

Willingly. That word mocked him.

The boy—Giovanni—was beautiful, like his mother. Quiet, of course, but charming in his way. Women adored him.

And every time one looked at him like he was her whole world, Salvatore saw possibility.

Hope.

Freedom.

But none of them ever died for him.

So Salvatore took matters into his own hands.

The first was a girl named Nina. Sweet. Seventeen. Left home one morning and never came back.

The police found her body floating in the East River.

The second was Angela. She almost said “I love you” in front of the family. Her death was made to look like an accident.

A gas leak. A fire. The neighbors never suspected a thing.

And the third… the third screamed Giovanni’s name as she died.

> That’s when Salvatore realized the curse couldn’t be tricked.

Love had to be given—not taken. But by then, he was too far gone.

He’d tasted the idea of freedom. And the curse—like a chained demon—kept pulling him deeper into madness.

Giovanni never knew why the women he loved always vanished.

But in the silence of his heart,

he suspected.

Still, he obeyed.

He smiled.

He kissed.

He mourned.

Because in this family, obedience was thicker than blood—and silence, far louder than truth.

Giovanni De Luca learned to speak without words.

By five, he had mastered the language of glances—how to warn a man across a room that death was coming.

By ten, he could command soldiers with a nod, scold servants with a raised brow, and make girls fall in love with a smile.

By fifteen, he had buried two of them.

But inside, Giovanni screamed.

He screamed when he saw their faces on missing posters.

He screamed when their perfume lingered in his room for weeks after their funerals.

He screamed when his father looked at him with cold hope and whispered, “We’re getting close.”

But his mouth would never let him.

Salvatore had given him everything—a name, a kingdom, power beyond imagination.

And stole everything in return.

Giovanni tried to rebel once.

Just once.

He ran away at nineteen. Fled to Milan with a girl named Emilia who could read his thoughts through his eyes.

They were happy—for a season.

He bought her a ring.

She bought them a dog.

They almost made it.

Until Salvatore sent him a picture.

Not of Emilia.

Of her mother. Bound. Beaten. Bleeding.

The message was clear: Come home, or she dies.

He came back. Alone.

Emilia vanished the next week. Her body was never found.

Giovanni never ran again.

He learned to survive the only way he could: by turning off the parts of him that felt.

He stopped getting close to women. He let his father believe he was numb to love.

He wore suits of stone.

He built walls inside his silence.

He marry Isabella Romano-De Luca. Giovanni chose her not for politics or alliances, but because she never flinched in a room full of killers.

But the curse never stopped whispering. And he knew—deep in the marrow of his bones—that it would pass to the next in line.

And when that child came, Giovanni swore one thing:

> “I will not become my father.”

Even if he couldn’t say it out loud.

------

The day the boy was born, the rain returned.

Not a storm—just that slow, relentless drizzle that had haunted the De Luca family for generations. Giovanni held his newborn son like glass. His hands trembled.

The doctors smiled politely. The mother wept with joy. But Giovanni only stared.

Because once again, there was no cry.

The child’s chest rose and fell. He moved, he blinked, he yawned—but made no sound. The silence hit Giovanni like a curse cast anew.

Salvatore, now old but sharp-eyed, stood in the doorway of the hospital room. He didn’t step inside. He didn’t need to.

He looked at the child, then at his son, and gave a slow, knowing nod.

> “It skips no one,” he muttered, almost proudly.

But Giovanni didn’t nod back. He simply turned away, shielding the baby from that gaze like a man holding a flame in the wind.

They named the child Luca.

He grew up in a house of wealth, marble floors and golden mirrors, but none of it softened the silence. His younger brothers—Marco and Enzo—came quickly after. Both cried at birth. Both spoke their first words early.

And they never let Luca forget it.

> “What’s wrong with you, freak?”

“Why don’t you say something, dummy?”

“Bet you don’t even have a voice.”

“Try talking again. Go on. Entertain us, silent prince.”

Even in the presence of maids and guards, they teased him. Sometimes cruelly. Sometimes physically. Luca learned to take the blows in silence—his pain, invisible like the curse itself.

At school, it was worse.

Girls laughed behind his back. Teachers pitied him but never protected him. Boys dared him to speak, bet candy and cash on whether they could make him snap.

But Luca never made a sound.

He kept journals.

Hundreds of them.

Tucked in drawers, closets, the space under his bed.

Not of his feelings—those were locked away.

But of names. Faces. Details.

Everyone who ever mocked him.

Everyone who looked at him with pity, disgust, or false kindness.

He remembered them all.

Even at seven, Luca De Luca knew:

> A voice isn’t the only way to make yourself heard.

One day, they will listen.

One way or another.

Luca was thirteen when he broke a boy’s nose for calling him “the mute mistake.”

It happened in the schoolyard behind the elite private academy his family paid millions to control. A boy—some rich politician’s son—shoved him too hard during soccer and said it loud enough for everyone to hear:

> “Why don’t you go cry to your mommy, silent freak?”

Luca didn’t cry. He didn’t run.

He just looked at the boy, calm. Walked up to him.

And headbutted him so hard that the kid hit the ground screaming—screaming—while Luca stood over him, bloodied and silent, not blinking once.

From that day forward, they stopped teasing him in public.

Luca didn’t speak, but he listened.

He noticed everything. How the bodyguards whispered about rival families. How Enzo bragged about a shipment no one else should have known about. How Marco snuck away at night with a girl who wasn’t his fiancée.

And slowly, without anyone realizing it, Luca started to collect favors. Secrets. Leverage.

By fifteen, he had dirt on nearly every person in the house.

He used notes at first. Slipped under doors. Left in lockers.

“If you don’t want your wife to know, stay silent.”

“If you want your debt to disappear, bring me the blueprints.”

“If you want to walk tomorrow, say nothing today.”

They began to fear him—not because of what he said, but because of what he knew.

Giovanni watched it happen quietly.

He said nothing.

But one night, Luca came home to find a new desk in his room. Mahogany. Heavy. With a drawer lined in velvet.

Inside was a small, hand-carved knife. Family crest engraved on the hilt.

> “You're ready,” Giovanni wrote on a slip of paper, tucked beneath it.

At sixteen, Luca went on his first job.

Not to kill. Not yet.

To watch. To see how deals were made in blood and how loyalty was bought with silence.

And when a traitor tried to run mid-deal, Luca was the one who caught him—calmly, methodically, without making a sound.

He slit the man’s Achilles tendon and watched him fall.

No words. No emotion. Just an icy stare that spoke louder than any threat.

From then on, the crew started calling him:

> “Il Principe Muto.”

The Mute Prince.

By seventeen, Luca was feared.

By eighteen, he was obeyed.

Not because of the legacy. Not because of his name.

But because in a world of men who shouted and screamed to prove power—

He proved his without ever needing a voice.