The CEO's weakness

​The smell of burning rubber is a scent you never truly forget. It lingers in the back of your throat, a bitter reminder of the moment your life loses its brakes. ​I remember the rain that night,the kind of freezing, needle-like Flensburg drizzle that turns the asphalt into a mirror. I remember the white-hot rage in my chest, a fire fueled by the image of Alice's hand in Damien's. My "good friend."Concepts that felt like glass shards in my lungs. ​I didn't see the truck. I only saw the glare of headlights reflected in the tears I refused to shed. ​Then, there was the silence. ​The kind of silence that only exists in the split second between the impact and the scream. My car lay skewed against a guardrail. The Northern German cold began to seep into the cabin, mingling with the copper tang of my own blood. ​That was the night the cold moved in. Not just the weather, but a permanent winter in my marrow. The doctors called it a Cystic Agnosia, a neurological glitch triggered by the trauma. To me, it felt like my soul had simply frozen over to protect itself from ever feeling that heat again. ​I survived. But the boy who loved Alice died in that wreckage. ​When I finally stepped out of the hospital months later, I wasn't a grandson, a brother, or a friend. I was a weapon forged in the dark. I looked at the Elliott Empire, the vultures like Uncle Spencer and the fake smiles of Aunt Emily and I felt nothing. No fear. No love. Just a calculation. ​I would take the throne. I would crush anyone who stood in my way. And I would never, ever let another human being get close enough to see the cracks in the ice. ​Or so I told myself, until the night the ice finally started to melt.