Chapter 12 - THE SHATTERED ILLUSION
Stripped of his tailored Brioni suits and leased sports cars, Luca was forced to wear an ill-fitting polyester blazer for his job as a used car salesman on a desolate highway lot. The reality of working eighty-hour weeks for commission-only pay, while watching his former life broadcasted on financial news networks with my face front and center, was a psychological torture far worse than any prison sentence.
Chloe, true to her transactional nature, had long vanished from his orbit. When Luca drove past her upscale apartment complex one rainy evening, hoping for a shred of sympathy, he saw a sleek, unfamiliar sports car parked in her assigned stall. A strange man in a designer trench coat was carrying her designer luggage into the lobby. Chloe didn't even look out the window when Luca honked his horn in quiet desperation. She was already onto her next extraction target.
Sitting alone in his sputtering, ten-year-old sedan with the heater broken, Luca finally wept. He wept not out of remorse for the family he had destroyed, but out of pure, unadulterated self-pity. He had traded an empire for an illusion, and the bill had finally come due.
