Anya
Institut Le Ciel Bleu.
The name suggests serenity, The Blue Sky Institute.
In reality, it is a thousand feet of polished marble, ancient castles, and glass carved into a citadel of ambition. A place where the world's most powerful families ship their teenagers to become the next generation of global predators. Not an institution for study, but a breeding ground for future oligarchs.
The motto carved into the archway reads: Inter Nos Fidem, Among Ourselves, Trust.
Ironically, the first lesson they teach here is how to violate trust so elegantly that the betrayal feels like a handshake.
My family, the Thakurs, built their legacy on technology. Code, architecture, security systems, digital pathways, my parents always claimed we are the skeleton beneath the body of the modern world. Students here treat us accordingly. Not with affection, but with wariness. Fear wrapped in politeness.
Seven years in this place have squeezed out whatever naïve idealism I once had. Back home, in the Indian culture I grew up with, humility wasn't weakness. Seva, service was something noble. A responsibility. Here, compassion is the fatal flaw that gets exploited, priced, and resold.
So I adapted. I learned to carry myself like a calculation.
I became Anya Thakur, the Shadow Cipher, the student who was courteous enough to be respected but distant enough to be unreadable. Too valuable to hate, too careful to trust.
Tonight marks the end of it all. Graduation day.
A ceremony of empty speeches and expensive smiles, followed by a party sprawling across a private estate perched above the Mediterranean. Expensive alcohol, lazy limbs in dim corridors, synthetic highs, secret alliances sealed between unwatched breaths.
I vowed never to touch any of it.
So I slipped away from the main hall and found a quiet corner beside the infinity pool. The water reflected the night sky with unsettling perfection, almost more sky than the real thing. I sat there, scrolling through my phone, grounding myself in realities that were not coated in greed.
Then a shadow fell across the water.
I looked up.
A boy stood beside me. Tall for his age. Dark hair slicked back like he was imitating someone older. His expensive suit hung on him with the unmistakable stiffness of youth trying to grow into power. His eyes, sharp, observant, too composed, did not match the awkwardness of his stance.
"Congratulations on graduating, Anya," he said.
The voice startled me. Deep for someone so young, carrying a thick, low Italian accent.
"Thank you," I replied, offering a polite smile but returning my gaze to my screen. A subtle dismissal. "I'm sorry, but do I know you?"
"No," he said, and instead of leaving, he lowered himself onto the edge of the chaise lounge next to mine. Not intrusively, respectfully. A rarity here. "But I was wondering if I could take you out for dinner."
I paused mid-scroll.
He was serious.
"Well," I said, amusement flickering across my expression. "I'm delighted, but, how old are you?"
"Thirteen," he answered without hesitation.
My facade cracked for a second. "Thirteen? What are you doing at this party? This really isn't the place for you." My tone was softer than the words. A slip.
I braced myself for the typical response, a brat's defensive sarcasm, a spoiled retort drenched in entitlement.
Instead, he surprised me.
"I know I shouldn't be," he said. "But this is my brother's house. I just came to see him."
His honesty disarmed me. No defensiveness. Only intensity.
"Well," I said, "I would love to grab dinner sometime—as friends, of course. You see, you're a bit too young for me."
To tease him, I reached out and lightly patted his slicked-back hair. A playful gesture.
I regretted it instantly.
A flash of pure, silent rage crossed his eyes.
Not childish anger, something colder. More contained. A spark of a temper that had been trained, not pampered.
But he swallowed it.
Controlled it.
"Then it can be as friends," he said. His voice steadied, but I didn't miss the flicker beneath.
"Sure," I said lightly. "Can't wait."
Someone called his name from the terrace, a man, older, tall, with the same aristocratic posture.
The boy rose.
"I will call you," he said.
"But you don't have my number."
He smiled. A small, dark curve of confidence far too mature for his age.
"Who says I don't?"
He turned to leave.
"Wait," I called. "What's your name?"
He paused. The pool light reflected in his irises, hardening their shape.
When he spoke, it was deliberate.
"Dante Rinaldi."
The name hit with the weight of a sentence, not an introduction.
I didn't know it then, but the boy whose hair I had tousled, the boy who forced his rage down instead of unleashing it, would soon shatter every expectation I had for my future.
And everything I believed about myself....
Dante
When you are the heir to the Santoro-Rinaldi empire, the quiet backbone of the Italian Mafia, people don't fear you.
They fear what your existence implies.
My father, Marco Santoro, is the Capo. He has ordered more executions than I've counted birthdays. My mother, Natali Rinaldi, is a celebrated actress, grace, charm, beauty, all wrapped around a steel spine. She made my father learn English, manners, and fashion just to court her, and he did. For her, he would've learned to kneel.
That contradiction, violence wrapped in elegance, is the legacy my brother and I were born into.
They enrolled me last year in Die Eiserne Brücke, the shadow institution hidden behind Le Ciel Bleu's public face. The real academy. The one where alliances are forged not through parties, but through calculation and inherited power.
I despise the students there.
Soft. Pretending to be dangerous.
Playing at schemes they don't have the discipline to execute.
I prefer simplicity. Brutality has clarity. Violence has truth.
My peers? They only have façade.
My brother, Alessandro, thrives in places like this graduation party, charming, laughing, dissolving into rooms filled with perfume and pretense.
I, on the other hand, prefer to observe. A predator learns more by watching than by speaking.
And tonight, I came to watch her.
Anya Thakur.
For months I had been studying her from a distance. She was not like the others. Her calm was not empty, it was strategic. Her kindness was not naïve, it was controlled. She carried her family name not like a crown, but like a mask.
She was a cipher.
Exactly the kind of person who becomes dangerous if ignored.
So I approached her with a plan:
Introduce myself.
Test her composure.
See if she flinches.
She didn't.
Instead, she smiled warmly, distant and asked my age.
Then she patted my head.
No one touches a Rinaldi like that.
No one looks down on the future Capo.
For a heartbeat, the instinct to teach her a lesson surged inside me, a hot, clean instinct shaped by generations of blood and power.
But I buried it.
Because she saw me as young.
And underestimation is the sharpest weapon in the world.
She wanted friendship.
So I would be her friend.
She wanted distance.
So I would give her space.
But Anya Thakur would learn slowly, inevitably that patience in a predator is not mercy.
When she asked my name, I gave it to her the way one gives someone a promise.
Dante Rinaldi.
And whether she knew it or not, she had just stepped willingly, politely into the gravity of my future.....