The Mute Prince

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.