The Heir Who Chose Poverty

The cathedral smelled like money.

Not the crisp, inky scent of freshly printed bills, but the old kind-the kind that clung to leather seats of private jets and whispered through vaulted halls where deals were sealed over single-malt scotch. Damian Westwood's funeral was a masterclass in theatrics.

The hall dripped with orchids-white, pristine, expensive-just the way his mother would've wanted. A hundred mourners in black silk and tailored suits pretended to weep. A hundred more watched from the shadows, calculating what his death meant for their shares.

His mother's glacial profile silhouetted against stained glass, her gloved hands folded over a pearl rosary. She hadn't cried once.

And at the center of it all, the polished oak casket sat empty.

Damian watched from the back, disguised in a chauffeur's uniform, his face shadowed under a cap. He'd spent twenty-three years as the Westwood heir. Today, he became no one.

The WestWood Empire

The Westwood name was worth $4.3 billion.

Damian's childhood had been a gilded script: private jets, boarding schools where the teachers bowed, summers on yachts with oligarchs' sons, and a father who measured love in stock dividends. His father's favorite quote was "Empires aren't built on kindness, boy. They're built on leverage."

His mother, elegant and ice-cold, once told him, "Darling, emotion is a currency. Never spend it on the poor."

He'd tried to be the perfect heir

Sharp suits. Sharper smiles. He spoke four languages and could disarm a hostile takeover with a handshake.

Until the night he found the files.

The Breaking Point

It started with a misplaced Jewelry.

He'd searched the entire penthouse-every room but one- his father's study. He remembered having a meeting with his father earlier that morning in the study room.

Although he expected the study room to be locked because his father always locked it. But that night, the door stood ajar. Inside, Damian found the black ledger.

Not the sanitized version shown to shareholders.

This one listed the real transactions:

$12 million to a judge to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit.

"Site accident" scrawled next to a collapsed factory in Jakarta.

A memo ordering a "liquidation" of a union leader.

The last page froze his blood:

"Terminate the whistleblower. Make it clean."

The Escape Plan

For five nights, Damian vomited into his penthouse toilet, unable to stomach the truth.

He couldn't confront his father, not without ending up like the "accidents" in the ledger. But he refused to be complicit.

So he chose disappearance.

Damian staged his death

At midnight, he drove his Porsche toward the cliff's edge, bailing out seconds before impact, and rolling into the ravine as the electric battery exploded into an unforgiving fire.

The investigators found only melted steel, a fire resistant titanium ring (engraved "DW") that survived the inferno, and security footage of him drunkenly leaving the penthouse earlier.

Since the ashes are unidentifiable, they concluded that he had gotten burnt in the fire.

Back at the funeral, Damian lingered as the crowd thinned. His father shook hands with senators, already spinning the tragedy into a PR campaign.

Once the final prayers ended, the coffin was lowered into the earth with his alleged ashes. The perfect cover.

He changed into a comfortable hoodie and pant ready to run.

Under the cloak of dusk, Damian slipped away through a hidden servant's exit, the cool desert air biting at his skin. The vast expanse of the city stretched out before him-an endless maze of twisting alleys, crumbling buildings, and flickering lanterns.

He walked with no destination, every step taking him deeper into a world he had never dared to enter before.

Damian Westwood was now dead. In his place stood a man no one would recognize. A man with nothing left to lose.

"Kai Velez."