POV: Calvin –I always wondered what Torreto was planning to do to my Father, cyber sabotage?, blacklisting across their contacts?, or maybe worse… but I didn't have the patience to wait, I promised to make Damon pay for all the times he had fiddled with my life and all the times he ever tried to touch Silvia's.And I'd be damned if I had to wait for her father to fight my battles.It started with just a flicker.Just a flicker in Grand Villa’s internal system that made their Friday morning reports two hours late.That was enough.Enough for their board to panic. Enough for a dozen major investors to start texting questions no one had answers to. Enough for someone - some poor intern, probably - to realize their payroll database had been erased from the inside out.By noon, the emails started flying. By two, so did the accusations.Insider trading.Fake stock valuations.Unregistered offshore accounts suddenly blinking red on regulatory radar.And through it all, Damon Riego stood at
POV: Calvin I’d never seen the internet implode in real time before.But that morning? It imploded.At 6:03 a.m., the first wave hit. A small post - mildly phrased, with a simple caption - just a thread of PDFs labeled “Something Rotten in Marquis.”Then Twitter got it.Then TikTok.Then every single group chat in the fashion and finance worlds.By 7:00 a.m., Kai Deveraux’s name was trending worldwide.By 8:15, news anchors were tripping over themselves trying to report it fast enough.Illegal money laundering. Offshore accounts. Shell companies tied to youth trafficking networks masquerading as “talent programs.” Fake charities. Bribes. A literal trail of signed documents, routed transactions, and one disturbingly tone-deaf internal memo that read, “Nobody cares where the money comes from if the dress is pretty.”We’d only leaked the first stack.There was more. So much more.
POV: Silvia – It started over espresso.Not with yelling. Not with slamming doors or flying plates or anything dramatic enough to make headlines.No. Just a perfectly brewed cup of espresso. And Mariam Moretti’s voice slicing through the morning like it was born to ruin peace.“You were supposed to be a Moretti,” she said, crossing one leg over the other, “not a tabloid star.”I stared at my coffee. Stirred the spoon once. Twice.Didn’t look up.“You don’t have anything to say to that?” she added, her tone impossibly smooth.“I haven’t had caffeine yet,” I muttered. “I’m trying not to throw it at anyone.”Her lips curled into what she probably thought was a smile. “Charming.”I stood, walked to the window.The carefully groomed rows of floral stared back at me, smug as ever. Everything about this house screamed success - polished floors, custom lighting, curated silence. But somehow, Mariam’s voice managed to echo louder than any of it.“You know,” she continued behind me, “when yo
POV: SilviaThey called it a Home.But it felt like a cage.A beautiful one, sure. The walls were white marble, the art was priceless, and the windows offered a view of Manhattan that looked like something from a movie trailer. But under all the glass and gold... it was still a fortress.Sentinel guards roamed the hallways. Subtle, dressed in dark tailored suits, the kind of men who blended in with luxury. They never said much. Never made direct eye contact. But I could feel them.Watching. Calculating. Measuring me against threats that didn’t even exist.My father’s version of care.Every morning started the same. Breakfast arranged neatly in the formal dining room. Juice already poured. Eggs not too soft. Silence stretching like static between Torreto and me. He didn’t say good morning. He didn’t ask how I slept.He just watched me eat, like I was a business metric he couldn’t quite control.And when he did speak?It was always sharp and loaded, like every sentence had been cleared
POV: CalvinIt started with a ping.One single, innocent ping. 3:09 a.m. I was mid-dream - something vague involving coffee and snow - and then the red light blinked on Arya’s server wall like a firefly in a blackout.“Talib signature,” Arya called out from across the room. “Type C breach. Very polite of them to be on schedule.”I could never understand half of what she was saying but I still pushed myself out of the chair, I hadn’t meant to fall asleep in and rubbed my eyes. “That’s the outer firewall?”She nodded without looking up. “Just like we predicted.”Thomas stood near the main monitor, arms crossed, face unreadable. The way he looked at the screen, you’d think it just insulted his mother.“Reroute the traffic,” he said calmly. “Dummy server’s ready?”Arya typed something fast enough to melt the keyboard. “Redirecting now. Malware’s quarantined. They’re sniffing through noise and glitter.”Noise and glitter being a carefully curated web of fake data: Deva’s “hidden” expansion
POV: Calvin If anyone had told me six months ago that I’d be leading a counterattack against a black-market fashion tycoon and a global underground syndicate... I probably would’ve said something snarky and gone back to my overpriced espresso.But now?Now I was in a boardroom, facing some of the most competent and trusted people I had in Deva.It wasn’t a board meeting.It was a war room.We were three floors beneath the main building, below the server rooms that even the CFO didn’t know existed. The lights were low. The air was cold. The walls were lined with screens that glowed with surveillance footage, code lines, and heat maps that looked like they belonged in a spy thriller.Thomas stood at the front of the room, arms crossed, looking exactly like the man who'd trained me to see danger everywhere and take betrayal in a smile. Beside him was Arya, our cybersecurity lead - petite, sharp-eyed, caffeine-fueled genius. She was already chewing gum like she was solving a murder with