Page 3 of Broken Mafia Prince (His to Break #1)

RAFFAELE

They say life is beautiful through a child’s eyes, but I don’t think those people have ever seen what I’ve seen.

If they did, they’d know that hell doesn’t always come with fire.

Sometimes, it’s just the quiet, ugly things that sit with you every day.

And trust me, I’ve lived in it long enough to know.

My house is big, bigger than the cathedral church down the road, with gardens that stretch so far you’d think they were trying to escape too.

But it’s not a home—it’s a cage wrapped in gold.

To the world, we are the picture of success: an empire of an estate, a thriving legacy, and respect that borders on fear. But behind those gilded doors, life is anything but beautiful.

Father demands perfection. In everything. From everyone.

Especially from me.

When he looks at me, it’s like he’s measuring something I can’t see.

We’ll sit at the long dining table, just the three of us, but it feels crowded with his silence.

If my fork scrapes the plate too loudly or my napkin isn’t folded just right, I see it.

The twitch in his jaw, the way his fingers tap the table like he’s keeping time until I fix it.

“Straighten your back, Raffaele,” he says without even looking up. His voice is calm, but it’s the kind of calm that makes my stomach twist. I do as he says, but it’s never enough. Nothing ever is.

Mama never speaks at dinner. She keeps her eyes on her plate, quiet and small, like if she shrinks enough, he’ll forget she’s there.

Father’s favorite words? “La famiglia è tutto.” Family is everything.

But to him, “family” just means people who don’t say no. He’s like the sun; you can’t look at him for too long, or you’ll burn.

Mama always used to smile. She had this laugh that felt like spring. But Father doesn’t like spring; he likes winter.

“A woman’s job is to be seen, not heard.”

“A woman doesn’t giggle like a fool,” he’d sneer.

So Mama stopped laughing. She stopped being seen, too.

He doesn’t hit Mama—he doesn’t need to. His cold indifference breaks her in ways a fist never could. He treats her like a prop, a doll meant to smile for the cameras, host his perfect parties, and raise his perfect son.

Over time, her laughter faded. She stopped smiling, stopped meeting his eyes, stopped trying altogether.

I hate him for it. But hating my father was dangerous, even as a child. He had this way of making you feel small without even raising his voice. “Don’t embarrass me,” he’d say.

His words are like knives, leaving cuts no one can see.Father always asks why I use words and expressions I don’t even know the meaning of. But he’s wrong. I learned everything from books—from those worlds far, far away from here.

When I was little, I thought he was a king. Now I think he’s a wolf. Wolves don’t love. They hunt.

Sometimes, when Father’s not home, Mama takes me to the garden. She says the flowers are her little secrets. “They grow because I love them, bambino ,” she’ll say with her hands dirty with soil. “Even in the shadows, things can bloom.”

I think she meant herself, because the flowers look just as sad—alive only because she refuses to let them die.

I love the garden. It’s the only place that feels alive. But even there, you can feel Father’s rules. Everything’s in rows, perfect and straight, like soldiers waiting for orders. If something grows wrong, it gets cut away.

“There’s no room for weakness,” Father says.

Failure wasn’t an option in our household. Perfection was the only acceptable standard. Whether it was school, sports, or the way I carried myself at those endless dinner parties he forced me to attend, everything had to be flawless.

My father’s world was cold and calculated, and his view of women reflected that.

To him, they were objects—tools to be used, admired, and discarded when they outlived their usefulness.

I saw it in the way he spoke to my mother, the way he flirted openly with the women who attended his parties, the way he dismissed anyone who didn’t fit into his vision of perfection.

It was a world of power plays and manipulation, where loyalty was demanded but rarely given. Everyone who stepped foot onto the Gagliardi estate had a role to play, and my father made sure they played it well.

The only light in that dark, twisted world was my mother.

In the gardens, she’d tell me stories about her life before she met him. She’d laugh softly, her voice warm and full of longing, as she talked about simpler times—times when love wasn’t measured by power or wealth.

Those moments were the only thing I looked forward to.

Her kneeling in the dirt, her perfectly manicured hands covered in soil, tending to the flowers my father couldn’t have cared less about.

I never told her, but I didn’t care about the flowers. I just liked hearing her voice and seeing her smile. In those moments, she wasn’t the sad, silent woman my father had turned her into. She was alive.

But those moments never lasted. My father would return, and the walls would close in again.

Looking back, I think that’s when I started to understand what it meant to live in a gilded cage. Everything looked perfect from the outside, but inside, it was cold, empty, and suffocating.

“You’ll inherit this empire one day,” he says. “Act like it.”

Empire. That’s what he calls it. To me, it’s just a shadow that swallows everything good.

I don’t want it. I don’t want the rules, the fear, the power that makes people bow their heads when Father walks by. I don’t want to be like him.

But Father says boys are destined to become their fathers. I think that’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever said to me.

Mama says the flowers are proof that love can grow anywhere. But I don’t think love grows in this house.

Sometimes, at night, I sit in the dark and wonder if things will ever change. If Mama will laugh again. If I’ll ever be free of Father’s shadow. But deep down, I know the truth.

Wolves don’t let you go. They keep you until there’s nothing left to fight with.

“Checkmate,” I tell Mama. We are in the living room, playing chess. I always look forward to games with her, especially today.

Her dark eyes go wide as she glances from the board to me and back again. “Impossible. You must have cheated. We have to play again.”

I smile at her, amused. “That’s what you said the last two times, and I still beat you again and again. When are you going to admit that I’m the king of chess?”

The corners of her mouth press into a smile, and it feels like a win to me.

I like it when my mother smiles, but her smiles are becoming even more rare, and they only happen when it’s just me and her. When Father is around, she becomes a robot, emotionless and with no life, and it makes my stomach feel uneasy to see her like that.

“I know you’re cheating, and I’m going to prove it,” she mocks and glares at me. “On your feet, soldier. It’s time for a compulsory search.”

I dissolve into laughter and end up knocking the board over, chess pieces scattering all over the floor. Since she taught me how to play a few months ago, I realized I have an uncanny knack for the game. I love nothing more than seeing the pieces in my head and strategizing five moves ahead.

“Where’s your search warrant?” I ask, smiling.

“It’s right?—”

She’s interrupted by a knock at the door, and we exchange glances, our earlier smiles wiped away, replaced by a tension that snaps tight in the room.

“Master Raffaele, the Don wants to see you in his study,” says the voice outside the door, causing my body to tense further.

Judgment day—the day I dread the most.

I don’t go to school like all the other kids. I’m homeschooled now, but it wasn’t always like this.

When I failed one course in middle school, it wasn’t just a slip-up—it was a catastrophe.

Not because I got an F, but because a B was just as bad. In my father’s world, even the slightest imperfection is an unforgivable sin.

It was the start of all things sad for me. I had aced the midterms, but the exam… I don’t even remember what went wrong. Maybe I misread a question, maybe I got cocky. Whatever it was, I came home with a grade that wasn’t “good enough.”

Father’s expression had frozen, his jaw tightening like he’d been personally insulted. He didn’t yell—he never really did—but his silence cut deeper than any reprimand.

The next morning, he announced I would no longer attend school. “I cannot afford more public embarrassment,” he had said, his voice devoid of any emotion. “You’ll be homeschooled from now on. No distractions. No room for failure.”

I’d tried to argue. “It wasn’t that bad?—”

“It was bad enough,” he interrupted, his eyes boring into mine. “This family is built on perfection. If you can’t meet the standard, you won’t represent this name outside these walls.”

And just like that, my world shrank.

At first, I thought it might be a blessing in disguise.

No more waking up at early hours, no more teachers who seemed more interested in tormenting students than educating them, no more fake friends who only cared about my family name.

But now, as I sit in this cavernous house, I realize what a mistake I made thinking this could be better.

Being trapped here with my father is far from the escape I imagined.

I glance over at Mama, and I see that her expression has shuttered. The corners of her mouth are white with the tension of keeping her lips pressed into a thin line.

”I’ll clear the board, my son,” she tells me softly. She’s kneeling by the chess set, her delicate hands gathering the pieces one by one. She doesn’t look at me as she speaks, and somehow, that makes it worse. “Go. You’ll be fine.”

It’s the same thing she always says—those empty words meant to soothe, but they don’t. They never do.