Alessandro spent the week after his father's funeral reading documents.
He barely slept. Barely ate. Every hour was spent in his father's private study, the room Eduardo had guarded like a vault during his lifetime. Now the drawers stood open, their secrets spilling across the desk in stacks of contracts, ledgers, and encrypted files that Alessandro slowly forced himself to understand.
Contracts written in languages he didn't speak.
Financial statements that contradicted the books the board had seen for years.
Spreadsheets of international transfers routed through banks in Luxembourg, Cyprus, and Singapore.
A labyrinth of shell companies and offshore accounts his father had carefully constructed to hide how bad things really were.
At first Alessandro thought he was misunderstanding the numbers. That fatigue was making him see problems that weren't there.
But the more he read, the clearer the picture became.
And the worse it looked.
