The Beginning of the Curse

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.”

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