His To Break

Chapter two: The Message

Her phone buzzed again.

Unknown Number.

She hesitated. Her instincts screamed at her not to touch it. But curiosity was louder.

She picked up the phone. One message.

“You stood out without trying.”

Elena stared.

Another message followed seconds later.

“You didn’t smile for attention. You didn’t fake laughter. That’s rare in this city.”

Her heartbeat quickened.

“I don’t expect a reply. I just want you to know—you’ve been seen.”

Then a final message.

“And when a man like me sees something he wants… he doesn’t look away.”

She sat on the edge of the bed, hands tight around the phone. Her heart thudded. This wasn’t just any man.

It was him.

The one in the black Rolls Royce.

The man who sent someone to fetch her like she was some package.

She had refused. Ran.

And yet here he was. Still watching. Still waiting.

There was no insult in the texts. No aggression. No promise of punishment.

But somehow… it felt more dangerous than if he had threatened her outright.

Because charm, in the hands of a man like that, could unravel a woman faster than fear.

And Elena was already fraying.

DOMINIC MORETTI – POV

He stood in the shadows of his penthouse, the skyline of Lagos glittering beneath him like scattered diamonds. The lights meant nothing. The power meant little. The money? He’d long stopped counting it.

But that girl…

That girl had changed something.

Elena…..

She didn’t know it yet, but she’d started a war inside him—a hunger he hadn’t felt in years. The kind that didn’t want to be fed once and forgotten. The kind that wanted to consume.

Dominic’s jaw tensed as he lit a cigarette, the end glowing red in the dark room. Smoke curled around his face, but his eyes remained sharp, focused, alive.

He had seen hundreds of women.

Models. Daughters of diplomats. Desperate ones. Reckless ones. Gold-diggers dressed in innocence.

But she…

She had stared at the ground like she carried the weight of the sky.

She had said no and meant it. Not because she was playing hard to get, but because she was tired. Real. Wounded.

And that fascinated him.

“Find out everything,” Dominic had ordered earlier that day, his voice a blade slicing through the room.

His men were already at work tracking, listening, peeling her life open like pages of a book.

But it wasn’t enough.

He needed to see her again. Needed to know how someone so invisible to the world had managed to shine so brightly in his.

He leaned back into his leather chair and opened the screen in front of him. A CCTV feed flickered to life.

A boutique. Quiet. Elena was inside, folding clothes, unaware that every blink, every movement, was being watched.

Her lips moved as she spoke to a colleague. She smiled—tiredly, faintly. And something twisted in his chest.

He wanted to own that smile.

Not force it. Not fake it.

Earn it.

Or maybe not even that.

Dominic wasn’t a good man. He didn’t pretend to be.

But with Elena… he didn’t want to hurt her. Not like he hurt others.

He wanted to protect her. To give her peace. To put her in a world where her only burden was him.

And maybe that was the most dangerous thing of all.

Because men like Dominic didn’t protect.

They possessed.

And Elena Nwoko had just become his most precious obsession.

FLASHBACK

Before he became Dominic Moretti, the name that curled on tongues like fear, he was just Nico—a kid who knew two things:No one would save him and, Love was a weakness the streets couldn’t afford.

He had grown up in the back alleys of Palermo, Sicily, where blood dried quicker than tears, and hunger made boys into beasts. His father had been a hitman for the Famiglia Moretti—cold, brutal, and forgettable. His mother? A soft whisper in a world that had no use for softness.

One day, she didn’t come home.

Nico was ten.

He waited for her for three days in a freezing apartment, too afraid to cry because he knew if he did, the neighbors would hear. And they’d come. Not with food. But fists.

By the fourth day, he stopped waiting.

At twelve, he stole his first gun.

At fourteen, he took his first life.

By sixteen, the bosses began to notice him. He never flinched, never hesitated. He didn’t speak unless spoken to. And when he looked at you, it was as if he could see right through your soul.

That was what made him dangerous.

Not the bullets.

Not the blade.

But the silence. The stillness.

He learned to make people listen without raising his voice. And when he walked into a room, even men twice his age stopped talking.

The Moretti name became his when he proved himself in blood. When the old Don died, Dominic didn’t wait for permission. He took the empire. Quietly. Violently.

And with that came everything—power, wealth, fear.

But not peace.

Never peace.

He had built walls so high even he couldn’t see over them.

Until her.

Until Elena.

The girl with eyes full of storms and sadness.

The girl who reminded him of everything he buried and everything he wanted.

SCENE SHIFT – ELENA AT WORK

The boutique was unusually tense.

Elena folded clothes in perfect silence, her hands moving on autopilot, her thoughts still wrapped around the strange, expensive car that had stopped by the sidewalk the other day.

The man inside.

Those eyes.

She didn’t even know his name, yet she could still feel the heat of his gaze on her skin.

“You good?” one of the girls whispered beside her.

Elena nodded. “Yeah. Just tired.”

But she wasn’t tired. She was unsettled.

And things were only getting worse.

Julian, the manager, kept finding reasons to circle her like a vulture.

“Elena,” he called from the back office.

She tensed.

With a glance at the clock, she wiped her palms on her skirt and walked toward him.

He didn’t bother hiding the way his eyes trailed down her body.

“You’re five minutes late today,” he said.

“It’s traffic. I—”

“You know I like you, Elena.” He leaned against the table, voice suddenly lower. “But if you keep testing my patience, I might start thinking you don’t appreciate this job.”

She felt the threat under his words. She’d heard it before.

“Please, I need this job,” she said quietly, staring at the floor. “I’ll be early tomorrow.”

He smiled.

That fake, smug smile.

“See? That wasn’t so hard.”

She left the office feeling like she needed to peel off her skin.

Her chest tightened as she reached the clothing racks again. Her phone vibrated slightly in her apron pocket. She ignored it.

Until it buzzed again.

This time, longer.

The rag slipped from Elena’s hand and hit the tiled floor with a soft thud. She stared down at it, breathing heavily as her phone buzzed again inside her apron pocket.

She picked it up slowly, the screen lighting up with a text from an unknown number.

“You don’t have to suffer through this life, Elena.”

Her throat dried.

She blinked again. The message was still there.

“You deserve better. A life without hunger. A life without fear. Let me give that to you.”

Her eyes darted around the boutique, but nothing seemed off. Her manager was inside the stockroom. The other staff were folding clothes or dealing with customers.

Still… she felt it.

That presence.

Like eyes were crawling over her skin, undressing her struggles, peeling back the layers she had fought so hard to protect.

She walked toward a corner by the back dressing mirror and slipped behind one of the displays, heart thudding. Her thumb hovered over the reply button.

But she didn’t type anything.

Not yet.

She looked up, and that’s when she saw it—a small black dome tucked into the ceiling. A CCTV camera.

Had it always been there?

Her chest tightened.

⸻

DOMINIC POV – Inside His World

Dominic leaned back in the leather chair, one hand swirling the dark whiskey in his glass, the other resting on the remote that flicked between CCTV feeds.

His private security firm had installed surveillance in over two hundred stores across Lagos—most of them owned or connected to his business partners. And when he had tracked down where Elena worked, he made a single call.

The camera in that store had been redirected.

To her.

There she was now—hunched near a rack of jeans, biting her lower lip, eyes wide with uncertainty. She clutched her phone like it was the only thing tethering her to reality.

“She’s scared,” Leo, his assistant, said quietly from behind him.

Dominic didn’t respond immediately. He kept watching her.

The way her hands trembled. The way she checked her surroundings. The way she refused to fall apart in public.

She reminded him of someone.

Himself.

Once upon a time.

“She’s not scared of me,” Dominic murmured, eyes narrowing. “She’s scared of life. Of everything it’s taken from her.”

“And you want to give it back to her?” Leo asked, skeptical.

Dominic didn’t answer. Instead, he tapped out another message on the encrypted device connected to a cloaked number.

“I’m not here to harm you, Elena. I want to help. You can work for me. Easy, clean work. Triple what you make now. No tricks. No expectations.”

He paused. Then added:

“Just dinner. Let me explain. One night. One chance to change your life.”

He hit send.

And waited.

⸻

Elena’s breath hitched as another message came in. The phone nearly slipped from her fingers.

“You can work for me. Easy, clean work. Triple what you make now.”

She backed into the wall, gripping her phone like a lifeline. This couldn’t be real. Was this some elaborate prank?

Or worse…

She thought of the black car. The man in the shadows. The message at dawn. Now this—CCTV cameras and encrypted texts.

She didn’t know him.

But he knew everything about her.

She closed her eyes.

And just like that, memories rushed in—unwelcome and sharp.

The months after, when relatives stopped calling.

The jobs she lost one after another because she was always late—always tired, always hungry, always catching the last danfo home.

The nights she cried while pressing her uniform, knowing she couldn’t afford to eat and still pay rent. Moving from one face-me-I-face-you apartment to another, because Lagos had no mercy and neither did her landlords.

And still… she fought.

She had fought every single day.

But now…

Now a stranger wanted to fix it all?

She looked at her cracked screen again.

The messages stared back.

And a dangerous thought crept into her mind.

What if this is my only way out?

⸻

BACK TO DOMINIC – A FLASH OF HIS PAST

Dominic stood from his chair and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window of his penthouse.

Rain tapped the glass like soft drumbeats. His mind wandered—back to Naples.

Back to the days when he was just a boy with blood on his hands and fire in his heart.

Power wasn’t given to him.

He stole it. Bled for it.

And when he looked at Elena, he saw the same raw hunger. The same pain. The same iron under pressure.

She didn’t know it yet.

But she would become his greatest masterpiece.

⸻

“Elena!” a voice barked.

She startled, dropping her phone.

Her manager stood by the doorway, glaring. “Come and attend to this customer.”

Elena mumbled an apology and tucked her phone away. Her hands still shook as she approached the man browsing leather belts.

But she barely registered his questions.

Because her thoughts were louder than everything else.

The messages.

The eyes watching her.

The choice she was about to make.

⸻

Just as she was about to return to the counter, the door chimed again.

A different man walked in.

Clean-cut. Dressed like someone important but not loud. He didn’t look at anyone else—just walked straight to her.

“Elena Nwoko?” he asked softly.

Her blood ran cold.

“Yes?”

He handed her a card. “My boss hopes you’ll join him for dinner. You can bring a friend if you want. He’ll pick you up. 8pm. No pressure.”

And then he was gone.

She felt eyes from her coworkers. Whispers. Curiosity. But she couldn’t hear them. Not over the pounding in her head.

She stared at the card.

It wasn’t flashy. Just a simple black rectangle with a single word printed in gold.

Dominic.

Elena stood behind the counter as the store buzzed with customers, music, and life.

But in her head, all she heard was silence.

She looked down at the card again, then at her phone.

A new message had arrived.

“If you come tonight, you’ll never have to struggle again.”

And for the first time in years… she considered what it would feel like to say yes.