Chapter 1
Chapter One — Before Us
POND
Pond was twenty years old.
To most people, he was simply the youngest son of one of Thailand's most powerful families.
To the people who knew what happened behind the closed doors of that family, he was something else entirely.
The mafia heir.
Pond had grown up surrounded by power, money and people who knew better than to cross his family. His father had built an empire that made their name feared in places where it shouldn't even have been spoken.
His mother was no longer a part of his life.
He had grown up without her, but he had never truly felt alone.
His father had made sure of that.
Pond was his father's favorite—his only weakness in a world where weakness could cost everything.
His family was small but powerful. His father was the head of the family, while his older brother, Joong, had chosen to build a life and business of his own. Despite their different personalities and paths, the brothers shared a strong bond.
Pond himself rarely showed emotion.
He was calm.
Nonchalant.
Difficult to read.
He didn't speak unless he had something to say, and he didn't waste his time explaining himself to people who didn't matter.
But there was another side of him.
The side only his family and closest friends knew.
With them, the cold expression disappeared.
He laughed.
He teased.
He could be ridiculously childish.
Almost like a golden retriever who had simply been placed inside the body of a mafia heir.
But that side of Pond was carefully protected.
Not everyone deserved to see it.
And Pond intended to keep it that way.
---
PHUWIN
Phuwin was twenty years old too.
And unlike Pond, his world had never been built on power.
His world smelled like coffee, freshly baked pastries and his mother's perfume.
Phuwin lived with his mother, Mrs. Risa, who had raised him alone after his father was no longer in their lives.
Risa owned a café in Bangkok that had grown from a small family business into one of the city's most popular cafés.
She was warm, hardworking and completely devoted to her son.
For her, Phuwin wasn't just her child.
He was her whole world.
And Phuwin loved her just as deeply.
Phuwin was charming without trying.
Beautiful without knowing it.
Goofy without even realizing how ridiculous he could be.
If someone had to describe him in one word, it would probably be—
Cat.
A very pretty, dramatic and slightly chaotic cat.
His greatest love, however, was photography.
He could spend hours behind a camera, capturing little moments that everyone else ignored.
Sunlight falling through a window.
Someone laughing when they thought nobody was watching.
A rainy street.
A pair of hands holding a coffee cup.
To Phuwin, every moment had a story.
And he wanted to capture all of them.
---
JOONG
Joong was Pond's older brother.
He came from the same powerful family, but he wanted to create something that belonged entirely to him.
His own company.
His own name.
His own success.
Joong was building a perfume company from the ground up.
He was ambitious, confident and stubborn enough to keep going even when things didn't work out the first time.
Despite coming from a powerful family, Joong wanted to prove that he could succeed through his own hard work.
And there was one person who had been beside him through almost everything.
Dunk.
---
DUNK
Dunk had known Phuwin since childhood.
Best friends didn't even feel like a strong enough word for them.
They had grown up together, fought over stupid things, shared secrets and watched each other change over the years.
Dunk studied art.
He saw the world differently from most people, always noticing shapes, colours and details that others overlooked.
Perhaps that was why he and Phuwin had always understood each other so easily.
One captured the world through a camera.
The other captured it through art.
And somewhere along the way, Dunk had become something much more important to Joong.
His fiancé.
Joong and Dunk's relationship was steady, warm and familiar—the kind of love that had grown slowly and stayed.
Four people.
Four different worlds.
And yet, somehow, their lives were already connected.
They just didn't know how important that connection would become.
