Chapter Text
Milk's POV:
I was born during a thunderstorm.
They say my mother died before the lightning even stopped. They say she bled out on the floor of a darkened hospital room, screaming my name before anyone even told her what it would be. The nurses cried. The doctors panicked. My father did neither.
He just looked at me. And said, “She died for that thing?”
Yeah, my own father referred me as 'that thing' the time I was born, not 'my daughter' or anything affectionate, or at least something less cruel.
I was four years old the first time he hit me.
I was five when I learned not to cry.
The Vosbein syndicate had been running the underworld long before I took my first breath. My father was its king—untouchable, cunning, and cruel. And I was his heir. Not by choice. Not by merit. Only by blood.
He never let me forget that.
“I lost your mother,” he said once, wiping blood off his ring after slamming my face into the marble floor. “You better be worth it.”
Yeah, he thought I was the reason why the woman he loved the most died. That's why he never let me know what love is or how it was to be loved.
I wasn’t allowed to have toys. Dolls were for weak children. I wasn’t allowed to laugh—it made me sound soft. I wasn’t allowed to scream, because in our world, pain was supposed to be quiet. Hidden. Controlled.
So I stopped making noise.
My lessons were brutal. Guns. Knives. Poison. Politics. At nine, I could disarm a man twice my size. At ten, I slit a traitor’s throat in front of his family because my father said “loyalty must be taught young.” I didn’t even flinch.
I killed someone for the first time at thirteen.
I remember the man’s name. I remember the way he looked at me. Like he was asking for mercy I didn’t know how to give. My father was standing behind me, his eyes were hard, devoid of any warmth. My hands were shaking, as fingers rested in the trigger, only a step away from blowing his head. He noticed my hesitation. "Stop being coward", his cold voice still rang in my ears. "A Vosvein never fear to kill. Be a real Vosbein."
He always gave me that 'Vosvein' excuse.
That man screamed his lungs out, begging for mercy, "PLEASE DON'T KILL ME! YOU ARE JUST A CHILD! HAVE MERCY ON ME!" But I wish I could. I wish I could say I cried for him later. I didn’t.
I still don’t.
I turned eighteen with blood under my fingernails and fire in my lungs.
By then, my father had grown tired. The world was changing. Old kings were falling, and even the mafia had to evolve. I told him I would take the Pansa syndicate to new heights. That I’d make sure no one could ever touch us again.
He handed me a glass of whiskey, raised it, and said, “Make sure you never love anything. Especially not a woman. Especially not a weak one.”
I drank, even though I hated the taste. And then I buried him a year later.
Heart attack, they said.
But I knew better.
The heart doesn’t attack unless it’s already broken.
Love. The word meant nothing to me.
I didn’t know how to receive it. I didn’t know how to give it. I watched the way couples held each other on the street like they weren’t afraid of being seen. I watched girls smile at me and waited for the price tag behind it.
They always wanted something. A favor. A name. A secret.
So I gave them nothing.
My body, sometimes. But never my heart.
My heart had long since been carved into pieces. I gave a slice to my dead mother, a slice to every soldier I buried before they hit twenty.
What’s left isn’t enough to love anyone.
But power? Power was easy.
It didn’t betray. It didn’t die. It didn’t ask you to be soft. Power filled in all the places where love failed. It made the world obey you.
And I had power. Plenty of it.
But there was still one crown left. One golden cage of corruption I hadn’t touched.
The Royal Kingdom of Limpatiyakorn.
Ruled by bloodlines. Bound by laws older than dirt. A throne passed down to girls who never had to earn it, never had to bleed for it. Girls who were protected, worshipped, and waited on.
Girls like Love Pattaranite Limpatiyakorn.
She was everything I wasn’t. Everything I was taught to hate. An omega born to rule, with silk on her skin and flowers in her hair. The kind of girl who would have sobbed over a dead bird, or begged me not to kill that man. The kind of girl I could break in a heartbeat.
"We need that Princess to blackmail the Limpatiyakorns for their throne", View, my best friend and my partner since my birth, says as she hands me over the file, filled with everything I need to know about Love Pattaranite Limpatiyakorn.
"They are still richest and most powerful family in Thailand", I scoff as I flip through the pages. "Impressive."
'Yeah, old money. That's what we exactly need."
"So, they offered me a job—her bodyguard. A perfect position. I’d live by her side. Watch her routines. Learn her weaknesses. Whisper safety into her ear until she fell asleep, too trusting, too blind. And then I’d take her. And with her, the throne", my tone dripping with satisfaction.
"Yup, but it's not as easy it seems", she reminds me.
"I never failed."
"That's why, I have faith in you, boss."
I looked in the mirror the night before I left. Pulled back my hair. Buttoned up the black suit they said made me look like a soldier. But I wasn’t going to war. I was becoming a ghost. And, I am going to expand the Vosvein's power all over the country, just like my father and my dead mother wanted me to.