It all began when he was just a boy. A child whose wide eyes were filled with wonder, despite the grim world around him.
His name was Luca, and he grew up on the streets where hunger was a constant companion corner held the promise of violence. The place where he was born-an unforgiving city-was a breeding ground for misery.
People withered away in forgotten alleyways, their hopes abandoned, their souls sold for whatever scraps they could get.
His earliest memories were of hunger-aching, gnawing hunger.
He remembered the way his stomach growled in the night, desperate, the pain so sharp it seemed to crack his ribs.
His mother would try her best to feed him, but there were only so many coins in her pocket. She would give him the last morsel, the last scrap, and smile at him as if it would make him forget the world outside. But it never did.
He would watch as she grew weaker, as the light in her eyes dimmed day by day.
She died when he was seven, her body nothing more than skin and bones.
Luca was left to fend for himself.
The world showed him nothing but cruelty.
At the age of ten, he had already seen things no child should ever witness. People selling their bodies for a meal, others stealing from their own families just to get by. He'd watched as people turned to violence to survive, as desperate souls reached the end of their rope and chose to take what they could, regardless of who they hurt.
But Luca had always sworn one thing to himself-he would never become like them. He swore that he would not be the monster that the city had made others.
He promised that he would escape the cycle of hunger, of violence, of despair. He promised that one day, he would have enough-that he would never make others feel small, or helpless, or hungry.
He would never be cruel.
But life had a way of wearing down promises.
He grew up, as all children do, but not in the way he imagined. He found a job at a factory when he was fifteen, working long hours for a pittance. The cycle of poverty never ended. Each paycheck was barely enough to buy a meal and pay rent for the crumbling room he lived in. Every night, he lay awake, wishing he could escape. Wishing he could stop being hungry, stop being cold, and stop feeling the endless ache of emptiness in his heart.
But there was no escape. No one cared. The rich lived their lives, untouched by the suffering that surrounded him.
As the years passed, Luca became bitter, cynical, and cruel. He couldn't escape his reality. Rats lived better lives.
The kindness he had once tried to hold onto slipped through his fingers like sand. And in the dark, when no one was watching, Luca would pick fights with the weak. He would take what little they had to fill his own.
Every time he hurt someone, every time he watched them crumble, a part of him died. But he couldn't stop. It was the only way he knew how to live. The only way he knew how to survive.
As Luca grew older, he climbed higher, taking on more powerful roles.
He had become one of them. He became the very monster he had once hated-the ones who trampled over the weak, who sold out their souls for a moment of comfort, who fed off the misery of others. He wore his suits, his power, like armor, pretending that it was enough. Pretending that the ache in his chest, the guilt that gnawed at him every night, would go away. But it never did. It only grew stronger.
Now, adult Luca sat at the top of the very system that had broken him. He had money. He had power. He had control. But none of it made him feel alive. Every day, he looked in the mirror and saw the face of a man he didn't recognize.
He had become everything he had hated. He had become the villain in the story he thought he could rewrite. He had become a predator. A cold, heartless monster who used the weak for his own gain. And every day, the weight of his choices grew heavier.
He was a coward. A coward who only knew how to hurt because hurting was the only thing that ever made him feel something. He couldn't fix the world. He couldn't fix himself. He was trapped in a cage of his own making, surrounded by the walls of his own guilt and shame.
And one day, as he sat alone in his office, staring out at the city below, Luca hated how easy it had been to slip into the very darkness he had sworn to avoid. He could only watch as the world he had once dreamed of disappeared into the fog of his own mistakes. As the years passed, he realized that the only thing he had truly achieved was the destruction of his own soul.
He wasn't a man anymore. He was a hollow shell. A reflection of all the broken promises of all the dreams he had abandoned.
The boy who once swore he would never be like the others had become the thing he feared the most.
He wanted to die. He wanted the pain to end, but he couldn't escape the man he had become.
