Porcelain & Fire

Matteo The photo clipped to the file makes me pause. Alessia Lombardi. Twenty-one. Porcelain features. Wide eyes. Fragile, like something meant to be displayed, not touched. The kind of daughter a man like Emilio hides away—kept under lock and key, wrapped in silk and silence. A fragile doll the world isn’t supposed to see. But I’ve learned that masks always crack. And hers already has. Her eyes tell the truth. They aren’t soft, not even close. They cut—sharp, deliberate, practiced. Eyes like that don’t belong to someone sheltered. They belong to someone hungry. Someone who’s been denied something for too long and is willing to carve her own path to get it. Freedom. Power. Maybe even revenge. The file lays out the pattern. Vanishing acts, defiance, rebellion. Most guards read that as carelessness—some spoiled mafia princess too reckless to know better. But I don’t see recklessness. I see calculation. Precision. A girl who knows exactly how to disappear, and how to leave the world chasing shadows in her wake. That doesn’t make her careless. That makes her dangerous. And in a world like Emilio Lombardi’s, dangerous daughters become vulnerabilities. A liability. A weakness. A crack in the armor that men with sharper knives would kill to exploit. And Lombardi wants me to patch that crack. Most bodyguards would refuse. Protecting someone who doesn’t want protecting is a nightmare. A job that ends in failure—or in blood. But I’m not most bodyguards. I don’t take the easy assignments. I don’t stand in front of danger like a wall and hope it holds. I take control of it. Channel it. Break it down until it falls in line. Chaos is only chaos until someone with the right hands cages it. And Alessia Lombardi? She isn’t chaos in disguise—she’s chaos in its rawest form. Fire with a mind of its own. She burns rules, boundaries, and chains. That’s exactly why I was called. Her father thinks I’m here to protect her. That’s only part of the truth. I’m here to control her. To stop the pattern of escape before it ends with her in a grave, or worse—in someone else’s pocket. To prove that the crack in Lombardi’s empire can be sealed, and that no amount of rebellion will change the fact. She’ll resist me. I expect nothing less. She’ll test me, push back, smirk when she thinks she’s won. But I’ve spent years breaking harder opponents than her, enemies who didn’t just fight—they hunted. And every one of them learned the same lesson in the end: I don’t lose. The file closes, but her face lingers. Porcelain beauty. Sharp eyes. A liability wrapped in silk. This isn’t about possession. It isn’t about power for its own sake. It’s about control. And Alessia Lombardi is about to learn what real control looks like.