Chapter 2- Ashes of an Empire

  Ashes of an Empire

Milan hadn't slept in two days.

By the time Valentina's car turned onto the street outside her father's estate, the road was already lined three deep with photographers and strangers who had come only to watch.

Cameras hit the windows before the car fully stopped.

"Valentina! Over here!"

"Miss De Luca, is it true the company is bankrupt?"

"Do you have a statement for the family?"

A microphone struck the glass an inch from her face before the driver finally cleared the last of them.

     She kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes forward, the way she had learned to sit in a hundred boardrooms before any of them mattered this much.

     Somewhere underneath that stillness, a version of her was screaming.

     Nobody outside the car would ever know it.

The gates opened.

      The noise fell away behind her, replaced by a silence that felt almost worse.

Inside, the estate looked wrong dressed for mourning.

       Black cloth hung over the same windows that used to glow gold during her father's dinner parties. Waiters in black moved through crowds of men in tailored suits, men Valentina recognized from magazine covers and men she had never seen in her life, all of them speaking in low voices that stopped whenever she walked past.

She counted three government ministers near the fountain.

A shipping billionaire from Athens stood by the door with two men who were clearly not bodyguards, not in the way normal bodyguards stood, their eyes moving over every exit instead of every guest.

Somewhere in the crowd, a senator laughed at something, too loud for a funeral, and nobody around him seemed to think that was strange.

She recognized maybe half the room from her father's world, the legitimate one, the one with press releases and shareholder dinners.

The other half looked at her the way buyers looked at livestock, polite enough on the surface, already pricing something underneath it.

Her father had spent his whole life building cars. Looking at this room, Valentina understood, for the first time, that he had built something else too.

"Vale."

Isabella found her near the staircase, her eyes already swollen from crying, her dark hair falling loose from whatever she had tried to do with it that morning.

She looked younger than twenty-five right now.

She looked like she had when their mother died, twelve years old and terrified of a house that had gone suddenly quiet.

Valentina pulled her into a hug before she could stop herself.

"I can't do this," Isabella whispered against her shoulder. "I can't stand in that room and shake hands with people who probably wanted him dead."

"You don't have to shake anyone's hand."

"What happens now?" Isabella pulled back just enough to look at her.

"To the company.

To us.

Papà never explained any of it to me, he always said I didn't need to worry."

Valentina held her sister's face in both hands, the way their father used to hold hers.

"I'll save Dad's company," she said.

"I promise you."

She had absolutely no idea how.

Isabella nodded and let herself be held again, and for a moment neither of them said anything, because there was nothing left that needed saying between them, only the weight of a house that had lost the one person who used to fill it.

The moment didn't last.

"Valentina."

A man's voice, smooth and unhurried, arrived a second before the man himself did. Alessandro Conti, chairman of the board, still wore his condolences like part of the suit.

"A terrible day...

Truly terrible."

"Alessandro."

"I won't keep you long."

He glanced once at Isabella, a silent request for privacy that Isabella ignored, staying exactly where she was.

"But the board needs an answer, and we need it soon.

The banks froze the corporate accounts this morning...

 every one of them."

"He's not even buried yet, Alessandro." Isabella's voice cracked halfway through his name.

"Can this really not wait one day?"

"I wish it could, cara..." Conti didn't look at her when he said it.

His attention stayed fixed on Valentina, the way a man's attention stays fixed on whoever actually signs the papers.

"The market doesn't wait for grief."

"My father isn't in the ground yet."

"I understand this is difficult."

"Do you?"

Her voice stayed level, Only the faint sharpening of her vowels gave her away, the accent pulling tighter the way it always did when she was holding something back with both hands.

Conti didn't seem to notice, or didn't care.

"Investors are already withdrawing_ If word gets out there's no clear leadership, we lose everything by the end of the week.

Thousands of jobs, Valentina, Not just yours."

He lowered his voice like that made it kinder.

"Selling now, quietly, while the company still has a name worth buying, might be the only responsible thing left to do."

"No."

"You haven't even seen the numbers."

"I don't need to see them to know my answer." She stepped past him before he could say anything else, Isabella's hand still folded in hers.

"We'll speak after the funeral, Alessandro, Not before."

He didn't follow.

He watched her go instead, the way men like him always watched, quietly recalculating.

Valentina stepped out onto the terrace for air she didn't know she needed, leaving Isabella with an aunt near the door. The gardens below were empty, or should have been.

A black limousine sat parked just beyond the estate's outer wall, engine running, windows tinted too dark to see through. It hadn't been there when she arrived. She was almost certain of that.

It didn't move. Nobody got out. It simply sat there, facing the house, like it was waiting for something, or someone.

Valentina's skin prickled in a way she couldn't explain. She had spent her whole life around powerful men who liked to be seen, who wanted their cars noticed and their names printed. Whoever sat behind that glass wanted the opposite.

That, somehow, felt worse.

She watched it for a long moment before one of the estate's guards called her back inside for the procession, and by the time she looked again, it was gone, as if it had never been there at all.

The burial itself passed in pieces she would only half remember later.

The priest's voice, Isabella's hand gripping hers too tight, The sound of dirt somewhere she refused to look toward.

She kept her composure through all of it, because that was what De Luca women did, and because falling apart in front of a hundred strangers who wanted something from her felt like handing them one more thing to take.

It was one of the funeral staff who found the envelope.

A young man in black, pale and unsettled, approached her quietly as the last of the guests began drifting toward their cars.

"Signorina De Luca.

This was left on your father's casket.

Nobody saw who placed it."

He held out a plain black envelope, no name written on either side.

"Security checked the footage twice," he added, quieter still.

"There's nothing.

No one on camera goes near it. It's just there, suddenly, between one frame and the next."

Valentina took it from him with hands that had gone completely steady, the way they always did right before something broke.

She waited until she was alone in the car, Isabella asleep against the window beside her, before she opened it.

Inside was a single card.

On it, embossed in silver, sat the outline of a wolf's head, teeth bared, eyes empty.

Beneath the emblem, four words.

THIRTY DAYS