The next morning, Luca woke up to chaos.
Not fire. Not gunshots. Something worse.
His phone was losing its mind—calls, texts, frantic pings from investors, board members who sounded lost, and, worst of all, his father. The device buzzed endlessly, a relentless alarm that made his heart thud with dread. Each notification layered over the last, a suffocating shroud of bad news.
Luca barely processed the flood of messages. Everything smeared together, an overwhelming blur of demands, accusations, and questions he didn’t have answers for.
“Why is your liquidity dropping?”
“Do we need to freeze accounts?”
“Why is Alessia trending?”
“Fix this NOW.”
He hurled the phone at the wall. It exploded into pieces, shards skittering across the floor, but the panic didn’t stop. The silence that fol
