Unmaksing my Mafia Groom

Chapter 2 – The Scarred Shadow

They call him a monster.

A name that snakes through the city’s veins like poison, whispered in bars, muttered in alleys, hissed by those too afraid to speak too loudly. Mafia Bruno.

I first hear about him in the marketplace. A cluster of men huddle near a stall, voices sharp and nervous.

“Bruno doesn’t forgive debts.”

“Better to vanish than to cross him.”

“I heard he slit a man’s throat just for stuttering in front of him.”

Their words carve him into a demon, and for a second I almost laugh. How can a single man hold that much power? But then I see how their hands tremble even as they speak, how their eyes dart around as if saying his name too often will summon him.

That’s when I realize—this isn’t gossip. It’s fear.

Days later, fate drags me into his shadow.

It’s late evening; the streets sag under tired lamps. As I drop my dad in the morgue, a thought slips in: I have to stop all my plans for college and go to work to survive.

Dad is my everything, and now he’s gone.

Walking down the same pathway that took him, I sit down on the pavement; my chest tightens again. I sit there for what feels like God knows how long, when I hear movement.

A man approaches—his hair colour is the same Auburn brown just like my dad’s.

Like what man has Auburn hair colour and looks beautiful in it? I would say that to my dad when he was alive.

He walks. Slow. Certain. Not in some dramatic flash of lightning or hail of gunfire. Like the earth itself makes way for him.

He’s tall, broad-shouldered, his suit dark as midnight and fitted as if stitched to his skin. A scar slashes his jaw, jagged and raw the kind of mark that doesn’t just mar skin but tells history. His face isn’t gentle; it’s carved from stone, cold and merciless. His presence doesn’t ask for attention; it seizes it.

I freeze at the corner as his men flank him—four of them, shadows stretched too long. People clear the path without a word. Shopkeepers lower their heads. Mothers tug their children close.

And me?

I can’t breathe.

For a moment his gaze sweeps the street. Just a flicker. Just a glance. But when his eyes pass over me, my stomach tightens like a fist. They are dark, endless, but not empty. Worse—haunted.

He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He just walks on, the weight of his silence heavier than any words.

But something inside me stirs.

He is power. Raw, terrifying power. Yet beneath it, I swear I see something else—an affinity?

A strange affinity binds my thoughts to him, unbidden and unwanted, as if I could understand him—work with him, even. The notion is absurd, almost grotesque: to feel such closeness toward one who is, in truth, a monster

“He wears his brutality like armor,” I whisper to the ceiling of my tiny room that night, “but inside… the wound never healed.”

I don’t know what that wound is. I don’t want to know. But the look in his eyes—the way they shutter whenever a woman passes, the way his jaw clenches like he’s holding back storms, tells me enough.

Bruno isn’t untouched by pain. He’s built from it.

And that makes him dangerous in a different way.

Because men like that?

They don’t just break others. They break themselves, over and over, and dare the world to try and stop them.

I should push his image from my mind cos why do I even know or think these?

I have my own vow, my own battle to fight. The CEO who killed my father still walks free, untouchable in his glass towers. My life is a mess and my next meal is not guaranteed.

My nights belong to vengeance; my mornings belong to survival. I have no space for shifting hadows that aren’t mine.

But he lingers.

In the whispers at the diner.

In the butcher’s hollowed look when Bruno’s car slices by.

In the hush that settles over the city whenever his name is spoken.

I keep telling myself: Stay away. Stay far away.

And yet, part of me—the lethal part still bleeding from my father’s death wonders if a man like him could be a weapon or an ally.

I don’t know his story. Only fragments drift on the wind from lips of people who fear him.

They say he never touches women.

They say he can kill a man without blinking but won’t meet a woman’s eyes.

They say once just once a rival Mafia group tried to tempt him with a woman, and the rage he unleashed nearly burned the city down.

At first I thought it’s arrogance. Or maybe disgust. But the night I see him, if only for a heartbeat …the vibe I get from him feels different.

It’s not arrogance.

It’s an unsettling feeling I sense.

Not the kind that makes you run.

The kind that roots you, chains you, convinces you your past is a ghost you’ll never shake off.

For me it's my fathers just death and the desire to get him justice that cages me down.

For him its …. Well what is it?

I don’t understand why it unsettles me. Maybe because I recognize it. That kind of unsettling lives in me too. Different story, same feeling.

That night I dream of my father again his smile, his warmth, the way his hand fits in mine— and then the screech of tires, the thud, the blood. I wake gasping, tears stinging my eyes.

And for reasons I can’t explain, Bruno’s scarred face flashes in my head.

Maybe we are both scarred in ways the world can’t see.

Maybe that’s why fate nudges our paths together.

I press my palms to my eyes and whisper into the dark, “I don’t need a person like him to complicate things further for me.”

But a voice inside me—the same voice that swore vengeance , whispers back:

What if he’s the key?

And I hate that it makes sense.

Because to fight power, sometimes you have to borrow it.

Even if it comes from a scarred shadow who terrifies the entire city.